Can you rebrand with the same logo?

Rebranding can be a big process, especially for an established business with a physical presence (or 2, 5 or 20!). So, when rebranding, it’s important to make sure each decision is made with solid data and strategy behind it.

When you realise it’s time for a rebrand, think about the clear reasons why. Is it because your audience has changed? Has the current branding dated and is no longer engaging the right customers? Has your product or service improved over the years and you need your branding to be lifted to reflect this?

Once you can tell your brand designer why you want to rebrand, they should first do due diligence to make sure they stick to the number one branding rule:

Do no harm!

So, they should check if your logo actually needs changing, or just a minor update. Some businesses I’ve worked with have kept the existing logo because it was working.

4 reasons why you may need to keep your current logo:

1. It is well recognised among your existing and potential customers. This can be determined by a customer survey, interviewing customers and talking to stakeholders.
2. Your key audience and offer hasn’t changed much since you started
3. The expense of changing all the physical touchpoints (signage, print, uniforms etc) is too much to actually implement.
4. The marketing power required to make the rebrand launch successful isn’t available to you right now, but the brand still needs an injection of energy and freshness.

All these are valid reasons to keep the existing logo and change things like the colour palette, typography, photography styles or messaging instead.

A successful rebrand requires careful research, strategy and planning along with brand design that is spot on. 

One past client has had great success rebranding with their existing logo. Radar Landscapes has a clear, recognisable and memorable logo that their customers and staff love. Over the 10+ years in the business, the landscape quality improved consistently and clients kept referring work. But they also got a large volume of low budget enquiries that were costing hours a week to deal with in admin time.

Rather than change the logo, we updated the font slightly, changed the brand colour palette and added a complementary subheading font.

When combined with custom illustrations, fresh photography and copywriting, the first impression now wows their ideal clients, looks too expensive for the low-budget enquiries and has people lining up for up to a year in advance waiting for their bespoke Radar landscaping.

Check out the before and after website homepage

Keep in mind this is the same business, with the same quality of work and commitment to doing things the right way first.

Did Radar need to replace all the uniforms immediately? No. Signage? No. These were all updated gradually as needed. Has the impact continued? Absolutely, if you count being invited to landscape The Block 2022! 

So don’t give up on rebranding when you add up how expensive implementing it will be. Because consistent branding has been shown to increase revenue by 23%*. That’s consistency alone!

So book a free consult to see if there are other ways to update your brand while keeping the costs down. 

*(Forbes, 2020)

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