You’ve been shaving every other day since you were 18. You followed the conventional wisdom and kept the clean-shaven face so you could keep your job. Well, times have changed. Beards are no longer bastions of the lazy, but advocates for the modern businessman.
Your significant other has given you the green light to grow the facial garden, but you are unsure of how your children will react.
The times have also surely changed in your business. Maybe your business has grown stagnant. Maybe your company is changing names or has come under new ownership. Companies rebrand for various reasons. Most likely, you want to update your brand because it doesn’t match your brand voice anymore.
How do you update your brand without losing your established, loyal customer base?
There are, of course, many visual elements to a brand but honing in on the most basic elements is a great place to start.
Determine what elements of your visual brand have stood the test of time or are so intertwined in your brand’s culture that they must be kept. Keep those few elements and know that everything else can be cut.
Thoma has been reimagining established brands for over 25 years. We’ve recently rebranded Little Rock Athletic Club, FNBC and our own brand by invoking new life into the brand and keeping the visual identity familiar.
Color Palette
The colors used in your brand say so much about your product, culture and voice. There are many ways to update your brand’s color palette.
For Little Rock Athletic Club, we kept the primary color from their previous look and slightly changed it to make it more modern and cooling. We kept the rest of their color palette simple, knowing the blue would be the star of the show.
When Thoma Thoma rebranded itself a few years ago, we looked at the large color palette and knew it was rooted in great color theory principles but was simply out of date. The solution was to eliminate some colors and tweak a small selection of colors individually to modernize the system as a whole.
Another way is to completely blow up your old colors and create a whole new palette, like we did for FNBC.
Icon
If one of the elements of your brand that has stood the test of time is an icon, you’re in great shape. A good way to update your brand is to take an icon or another key element of your logo and carry it over to your new look.
For Little Rock Athletic Club we took Riley, their running man icon, and made small touchups and enclosed it inside of a circle to help contain the shape.
When Thoma rebranded a few years back, we kept the ‘T’ inside of a circle but updated the font and added small graphic elements to update the look.
Type
Another great opportunity to elevate your brand is to update the typeface used in the logo and across brand materials.
For Little Rock Athletic Club, we wanted to find a typeface that matched the friendliness and close-knit aspects of the LRAC community.
It was important to FNBC to keep the blocky FNBC element in their logo so we focused on updating the peripheral font and the fonts to be used in brand expressions.
Keeping the customers familiar while sending new messages is the goal of your rebranding efforts. Using the principles and directions detailed above should provide a smooth transition into your new visual brand and keep your company from losing coveted customers.
While we mostly discussed logos here, there are many ways to share your new brand with your customer base. Running a traditional ad campaign gives your new brand the opportunity to make lasting impressions. Holding a brand launch event or being more active on social media are ways to talk face-to-face with your customers. The more often you talk to your customer base via old and new media channels, the better impression your new brand can make.
If you’re looking to invoke new life into your beard, I mean, brand, email Martin Thoma atmartin@thomathoma.com. We’d love to make your beard/brand grow.