Is Changing Your Logo Enough for Rebranding Your Business?

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Thinking about rebranding your business?

Before you overhaul your entire branding strategy, take a pause. Rebranding requires a lot of work and an investment of time and resources. Your company will need to set aside other tasks to focus on rebranding, and you’ll need to get customers to accept and embrace the new brand.

If you’re simply not satisfied with your company name, a complete rebrand probably won’t be worthwhile. But if you want to reflect your company’s evolution over time, reposition your business, or update an outdated brand image, rebranding could be your ticket to success.

If you think rebranding is the right choice for your business, go for it!

How to rebrand your business with a new logo

A logo is the face of your brand. If you’re doing a rebrand, you’ll want to update your logo to reflect your new brand image.

Designing a logo is not what it used to be, creating a logo is easier than ever, but before you rush out and do a redesign there are few things to keep in mind. There are a few ways a logo can help rebrand your business. Maybe you’ve found that your current logo design is outdated and no longer relevant in the modern market. Maybe you’ve repositioned your brand and need a logo that will better resonate with your new target audience. Or perhaps your business has evolved over the years, and your logo needs a refresh to reflect your brand’s new mission and services.

Whatever your reason for a logo redesign, be sure to keep these strategies in mind:

Learn lessons from the past

Maybe your original logo included shapes, typography, or white space that didn’t quite work across all your business channels. If certain features of that logo were problematic, improve upon those features to make your new design more versatile.

Keep what works

There’s no need to change every aspect of your logo. If your former logo’s font and color palette were a success, find new ways to use those same elements in your updated design. When features of your old logo carry through into your new one, your new brand image will resonate better with your audience.

Pick something timeless

Think about the long-term, rather than jumping onto a passing trend. Make your logo modern and relevant, but stick to a design that will still speak to your audience 20 years from now.

Know your customers

Your logo needs to not only reflect your updated business strategy, but it also needs to resonate with your customers. You don’t want customers scratching their heads over your new logo, so choose a design they can intuitively associate with your brand.

Now that you’ve got the wheels turning on your new logo, remember that you still need to take care of other aspects of your branding strategy. While your logo is the ambassador of your brand, rebranding your business goes beyond a logo update. Here are some other rebranding tips:

Reevaluate the market

Do market research to ensure you’re up-to-date on your audience and the market. Analyze the data to determine who your target demographic is and to evaluate your competitors. As you rebrand your company, you should focus on how to build your new brand image in a way that stands out from the competition and speaks to your audience.

Set clear objectives

Create a list of your specific objectives in rebranding your business. Every decision you make in your rebranding strategy should directly meet one or more of those objectives. You might, for instance, want to update your brand to better reflect your company’s values. In that case, your logo redesign shouldn’t just look pretty; the new design should also communicate the principles that your company was founded on.

Redefine your mission and values

With the above in mind, in many cases of rebranding, the mission and values your company started with just aren’t relevant anymore. Perhaps your business has expanded to offer new services or target a new demographic—or maybe you’ve taken on a new cause to support—and an updated mission statement would more accurately represent your new approach.

Taking a closer look at your mission and values is a good jumping-off point for redesigning your brand image, choosing a new name or slogan, or refining your brand language. If you’re stuck redefining your brand, going back to your current mission and values—why your company exists and what it stands for—can help guide your rebranding strategy.

Choose your new look

By now you already know how an updated logo can boost your rebranding strategy. In addition to redesigning your logo, you might want to rethink your brand’s other visual elements, too. Consider your brand’s color palette, typography, and use of images, and how they can be updated to represent your new brand.

As with your logo, you’ll want some of your brand’s original visual features to carry over into your redesign so that your audience will recognize your new brand image. For example, you might choose a new font that’s in the same typographic family as your previous font, or use the same set of colors in bolder shades.

Build new brand guidelines

With any branding initiative, consistency is key. Consistency in the way your business looks, feels, and talks is the secret sauce for turning your company into a brand.

You can achieve consistency by building a new brand style guide. Your guidelines should explicitly establish:

How your name and logo will appear on different colored backgrounds
Whether any stand-alone icons can be used to represent your brand
The amount of white space that should surround your name and logo
Your primary and secondary typefaces

A consistent presentation of your new brand will help customers come to recognize and remember your revamped brand image and logo.

Conclusion

Remember: There isn’t just a single element that goes into rebranding your business. Changing your logo is a key feature of rebranding, but a successful rebranding strategy requires going even further. Every interaction you have with your customers—whether on your platform, on website pages, or in marketing emails—must reflect the way your brand has evolved.