4 Ways to Protect Brand Equity During a Redesign

If you have a brand that’s been around for a few years, one of your biggest challenges from a design perspective is maintaining your current equity while making sure your brand is relevant enough for modern consumers. It’s a delicate balance!

If you’re not familiar with the term “brand equity,” let me give you an example.

My favorite breakfast cereal is Special K. You’d recognize it; it’s the one with the giant red “K” on the package. My favorite flavor is Red Berries, which is easy to spot on the shelf because of its vibrant red color.

Imagine that Kellogg’s decided to refresh the brand. Maybe they want to follow the minimalist design trend, so they shrink the size of the K. Maybe their research indicated that Millennials favor the color blue. So they launch a new, blue package with a tiny “K.”

There’s no way I would be able to find that cereal on the shelf. I might not even recognize it as my favorite cereal when I saw it.

Instead, Kellogg’s has been very intentional in how they’ve evolved their brands over time. The giant “K” of Special K cereal is so integrated in how their customers recognize the product, it has hardly changed in decades even while the overall aesthetic has been modernized.

We like to call brands that have done this well “heritage brands.” They are able to maintain their brand equity over years and years by carefully updating their designs without losing the essence of their brand.

What lessons can we learn from these successful heritage brands?

1.     Be Authentically You

Your brand has a unique DNA that is truly one-of-a-kind. You have your origin story, your values, and your mission. If you haven’t already, take the time to define your brand values clearly and concisely. What does your brand stand for?

If you have a clear sense of your brand identity, that can serve as a guiding light as you go through any change. If you have a brand that’s all about serenity, mindfulness and the environment, it probably doesn’t make sense for you to use intense colors and wacky fonts, even if that’s what your competitors are doing.

2.     Maintain Your Individuality

It’s very tempting to chase design trends whenever the next new thing becomes popular. However, by saying “me too!” to those trends, you can become lost in the sea of sameness. While you want to look appropriate for your category and your target audience, don’t hesitate to be a little different from everyone else.

Look at Pepsi, for example. Their biggest competitor, Coca Cola, has indisputably owned the color red for almost a century. Pepsi, on the other hand, was the All-American brand that always had a red, white and blue can. Then, one day in the 90s, they suddenly owned the color blue.

By owning the color blue in their product category, Pepsi is now able to receive instant recognition on shelf. Being different from their main competitor was a brand imperative.

3.     Strive for Timelessness

Your branding needs to stand the test of time so that your products will be recognizable for a long time to come. Especially in the CPG world, it’s very important that your brand doesn’t completely change overnight. In addition to your customers, you may deal with complications from your printers or your retailers if you change things too suddenly or too drastically.

This is another pitfall of chasing design trends. If you choose a very trendy design, you run the risk of looking very dated in a few years when the popular aesthetic shifts to something else. What will people think of “Millennial Pink” in a few years?

4.     Build a Cohesive Brand

Above all else, you want your brand to look undeniably like itself. This seems obvious, but disjointed branding is all too common and can lead to a lot of consumer confusion.

Perhaps your brand has been around for 10 or 20 years and now you want to launch a new, organic line. You may be tempted to use an all-new color palette, with all-new claims on the package. You may even take the opportunity to update your logo, since you’re going through a new design phase anyway. The result will be a package that looks so different from what your customers are used to seeing that it will be like you started the company completely from zero.

Instead, take the time to ensure that all of your branding and marketing looks cohesive. This can include your logo, your packaging, your website, your social media posts, your print ads, and more.

Have you ever heard the fable of the boiling frog?

If you put a frog into boiling water, he will immediately jump out because he knows it’s too hot. But if you put that same frog into cool water and then slowly, over time, bring the water to a boil, he won’t realize the danger until it’s too late.

It may be a morbid analogy, but I often think of that frog when dealing with a long-term brand strategy. You want to make changes so carefully that your customers don’t even realize the difference, and yet you’re always perceived as a modern, relevant brand.

Good brand building takes planning and forethought.

This starts with building a strong, solid foundation for your brand.

Fill out the form below to download your copy of our Brand Experience Worksheet. This four-page, easy-to-follow worksheet includes questions that will help you clearly articulate the vision for your brand, consider how you want customers to perceive your brand, and craft an experience around your ideal customer.

7 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Working with Design Firm

At Strategia Design, we work with a lot of clients who are launching their first product. This is an incredibly exciting process, especially for a designer, because we have the privilege of helping to define the brand and bring it to life.

Whether you simply need a logo or a complete package design, however, there are a few key questions that you should consider before any designer puts pencil to paper.

1.    What makes your brand special?

Understanding what makes your product or service special can be very illuminating for both you and a design team. You’d be surprised at how many companies have not focused enough on their point of difference and cannot articulate it. A brand’s unique point of difference, the benefits or traits you might want to emphasize, or what kinds of feelings you want the design to evoke will ultimately determine your brand identity and who you connect with.

This can be a tricky question, but it’s well worth the effort. Consider the answer carefully. Defining your unique value can help guide all of your branding and marketing efforts, and even your business development decisions, for years to come.

2.    Who is your target audience?

Many entrepreneurs feel compelled to say: “My product will be useful to anyone!” But let’s face it, that just isn’t true. Identifying your target audience, as well as their likes and dislikes, is crucial to connecting with them through design and marketing.

For example, the look and feel of a product for kids will be very different than one intended for adults. Some designs or color schemes may make a consumer think of it as a woman’s product or as a man’s product. If it’s a product for high-income families, we may want to aim for a more premium look. Even knowing your customer’s hobbies or interests can help inspire a more custom look for your brand.

3.    What are your style preferences?

Brands must connect with your consumers but they also have to feel right for you, the owners of the brand. If your brand is already established, you may have a style guide, color palette, and fonts that we can use in our designs. If not, it can be very useful for us to have some sense of what you like and what you don’t like from a visual perspective.

Often an audit is helpful in helping you define what you like or don’t like. What do your competitors look like? What other brands or products do you feel drawn toward? What websites do you think are striking? Using Pinterest can be an easy way to collect images that designers can draw inspiration from.

From there, we can understand how you see your brand and marry that with how your target customer sees the brand and create the right look and feel.

4.    What is the scope of what you need accomplished?

Start-up budgets are small, and we understand that. Perhaps all you need right now is a logo, and that’s OK. It is still helpful for us to know specifically what you need done now, what you might need done next, and your long-term goals.

You want to be able to grow into your brand and not have to retro fit as you grow.

We also ask a lot of questions. If we know that your new logo needs to work well on a 1-color print package, or if it needs to fit within a horizontal website header, we can design logo options with that in mind. Our team has experience in all aspects of branding, design, and marketing, and we’re happy to discuss big picture challenges with you.

5.    What are the limits that a design team needs to keep in mind?

To stand out, you have to know who you are standing out from. Perhaps your competitors all use the color blue and you want to stand out, so we’ll eliminate blue from our designs. Perhaps you’ve had past challenges with coming across as too feminine, so we need to stick to a gender-neutral style. Perhaps we need to incorporate certain elements from legacy designs in the updated work.

Limitations or parameters can go beyond the visual and be very much a part of the brand mission, point of difference, and the benefit you offer. Whatever your limitations are, it’s important for us to know about them from Day 1. This helps to reduce revisions, so we can create a design you love faster.

6.    Who are the decision-makers for your brand?

Even if you’re the CEO, there may be other people that you want to include on final design decisions. Identifying who those people are at the start of a project can help keep everyone on the same page throughout the whole process. Don’t forget that customers are also decision makers for your brand. What they say about it, tweet about it or how they react to it will shape its meaning over time. Be sure your team is on board, but make sure your customer is included in that research.

Keep the internal list of VIPs to only 1-3 individuals. Limiting this group will lead to less confusion and quicker decisions, making the design process easier for everyone. And remember that survey sites like Survey Monkey are your friend for customer research.

7.    What is your timeline?

Everything takes longer than you think. Have you ever made a 4-course meal and served it 2 hours late? Well that can happen in design as well, but we don’t want it to.

Share your timeline early in the project and back into it. Make sure your design firm asks questions like, “Do we need to meet a deadline for a tradeshow or a retailer presentation?” Some activities, like printing or shipping, can add time constraints that will be important for a design team to consider.

Even if you don’t have a hard deadline, we recommend that you decide on an estimated timeline. This will result in a more focused project that will help you achieve your goals.

Don’t know the answers yet? Don’t worry. We can help!

Some of these questions can benefit from an expert’s eye. If you don’t yet know the answers to any of these questions, our team would be happy to schedule an introductory call, a brand consulting session, or conduct a brand audit that will guide you to a clear and actionable plan.

Ready to chat? Click here to get in touch.