A Brand Refresh Without Losing Recognition

A new look for the new year

January is when a lot of businesses launch a new look. The logo feels dated, the website is due for a rebuild, and a designer has been asked for something fresh.

The first draft often changes everything together: a new colour, a new symbol, new lettering. Beside the old version on a screen, it looks like progress.

Then it meets customers. The van they have watched for in the driveway for fifteen years is a different colour, and the listing they search for shows a logo they have never seen.

Some of them assume the business has been sold.

What people actually recognise

Customers do not remember a logo the way its designer does. They remember a few things about it, picked up over years of vans, signs and invoices.

• The name, said aloud, typed into searches and passed on by neighbours.
• The main colour, seen from across a street before anything can be read.
• The outline of the mark, a shield or a circle, known without its detail.
• The layout on the van and the sign, seen the same way for years.
• The lettering, which customers notice far less than designers do.
• The tagline, which hardly anybody can quote.

The second is the one most refreshes throw away. Colour is taken in first and from furthest off: a van at the end of the street, a sign from a moving car, a profile picture in a feed.

To find your own core, ask a few long-standing customers to describe your van or sign from memory. Whatever they mention is what has to stay.

What can change without cost

The last two items on that list are where a refresh earns its keep.

Lettering from the 1990s, gradients, drop shadows and bevels date a logo fastest. Clean lettering and flat colour make the same mark look current.

Detail inside the mark can be simplified, thin lines thickened, and a busy illustration reduced to its essential shape. Secondary colours, photography, the tagline and the website's layout can all change freely.

Customers will notice that the business looks sharper. They will not have to work out who it is.

Why changing everything costs recognition

Recognition is built by repetition. Every time a customer sees the green van, the green sign and the green invoice, the link between that colour and your business gets a little stronger.

Change one cue and the others carry the customer across. Change them all at once and the customer has to learn the business again, as if it had just opened.

A complete change also sends a message nobody intended. Customers who see an entirely new identity reasonably wonder whether the owners, the staff, the prices or the warranty changed with it.

Keep the core

For most businesses the core is three things: the name, the main colour and the outline of the mark.

The name stays exactly as customers say it. If it has problems of its own, that is a separate and larger decision.

The colour can be adjusted rather than replaced. A slightly deeper shade that holds up on screens and passes contrast checks still reads as the same green.

The mark can be redrawn inside its outline. A shield stays a shield, however much simpler its contents become.

A worked example

A dryer vent and duct cleaning company with eight vans across the Fraser Valley had used the same identity since the 1990s: a green shield around a cartoon fan, heavy italic lettering, and a slogan in quotation marks.

The first proposal replaced all of it with a navy wordmark in lower case, and one van was painted to try it.

Within a week, a technician in the navy van was turned away at an apartment door. The building manager's notice about the vent cleaning had told tenants to expect the green van.

The second version kept the name, the green, deepened slightly for screens, and the shield. The fan became a simple line drawing, the italics went, and the slogan was retired.

Everything on a screen switched over on one Monday. The vans were relettered over the next five weeks, at their regular services.

Roll it out everywhere at once

A refresh that trickles out over two years produces the problem it was meant to solve: several versions of the business in circulation, none of them clearly current.

Everything on a screen can change on the same day, and should: the website, the browser tab icon, the Google My Business logo and cover photo, social profile pictures, email signatures, and quote and invoice templates.

Physical items need a schedule with dates, not a plan to replace them as they wear out. Vans at their next service, signs within the month, uniforms and cards with the next order.

Because the core has been kept, those few weeks of overlap do no harm. An old van and a new website still look like the same business.

A short post with the old and new side by side tells customers the rest: same people, same phone number, same work.

Where the old look survives

Every refresh leaves copies of the old look behind, usually in places customers see more often than owners do.

Automated emails are the usual culprit: order confirmations, booking reminders and form notifications, each with the logo set inside its template. So is the quote that staff fill in from a saved file.

Directory and review listings keep whatever logo was uploaded years ago. And the old file sits on staff computers, ready for the next flyer, unless somebody removes it.

The counter-case

Sometimes a complete change is the right call.

A name that must change after a merger or a dispute takes much of the rest with it. So does a mark that closely resembles a competitor's.

A business changing what it does, or who it serves, may want customers to notice the difference. And a business only a year or two old has little recognition to lose.

For everyone else, keep the name, the colour and the outline, update the rest, and switch it all over together.

Before the new look goes live

1. Ask customers what they remember about you.
2. Keep the name, main colour and outline.
3. Update the lettering and the detail inside.
4. List every place the old look appears.
5. Switch everything on screen on one day.
6. Put dates against vans, signs and uniforms.
7. Remove the old files from shared folders.

Step four is what makes a clean launch possible. The list is always longer than expected, and anything left off it goes on showing the old look for years.

Whether the name itself is helping or hindering is covered in a business name that search engines confuse.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.