Have you ever wondered if it’s the right time to rebrand? If your logo has felt stale or it’s been a while since you’ve worked with a designer to create your branding, it may be time to consider a rebrand! In this episode I’ll share some of the reasons our clients reach out to us to rebrand and redesign their branding for their food blog. If some of these resonate with you, it may be time to consider a rebrand of your logo!

Now, I wanted to just first kind of define what I mean by the word “rebrand.”  When I think of a rebrand, I think of changing your brand name and kind of going all over from top to bottom and changing everything. What I came to realize is that for most people who are not designers, what they think of as a rebrand is just a new logo design and kind of going through the branding process. So, when I say the word “rebrand” in the context of this episode, I am talking about really revamping the visual side of your branding. If you’ve been around here for any length of time, you know that I truly believe that you can’t separate the brand strategy from the visual side of your branding.  All of this goes together hand in hand. So “rebranding” is going over your brand strategy and your visual strategy, and really refining this and overhauling it.

 I wanted to share four ways that you might know it is time to rebrand. Each of these four things has come from clients that we have worked with in the past. These seem to be the most common things that our clients say to us when they know that it’s the right time to rebrand.

If Your Logo Feels Stale or Outdated

One of our clients specifically said that her business has evolved so much, since she last did her logo design, and she really wanted her branding to reflect that. From the time that you have that new logo design, and you put it up on your website, through the time that you end up redesigning your logo in the future, through every single moment of time in between, your brand is evolving. It is changing and growing and so what often can happen is a logo starts to feel stale or outdated.

This is especially true if you have not gone through the branding strategy process and you’re not really applying those ideas into what you’re creating for your logo. You’re going to find that in a few years’ time, your logo starts to feel stale, or it feels outdated, because your brand has really grown and evolved, but your logo has stayed the same. Another reason that your logo might start to feel stale or outdated is if you used certain trends that were flashy or trendy at the time and have now become something that is not typically used anymore.

If You’ve Never Gone Through a Brand Strategy Process

Like I already mentioned, I really believe that the brand strategy process must be a part of the process of rebranding and redesigning a logo. Even if you’re doing it yourself, I really truly think that this is the first step in really figuring out what you need to know about your brand, before you ever decide on colors or fonts or styles for your logo design.

One of our clients said that she felt super confident in her content, but she doesn’t feel like her current branding was adequately reflecting what her site has to offer. This can happen when you have had a lot of time pass between your last logo redesign and now, as well as when you haven’t done the work for really figuring out your brand strategy. You come up with a logo that maybe you really like or that feels like it will relate to your audience, but you might not really know who your audience is. So as soon as you start to really dig into who your audience is and what they’re looking for, you might start to find that the logo you have chosen doesn’t really match and that is all since you didn’t do the brand strategy work first.

If you’ve never gone through the brand strategy process either on your own, or with a designer who really focuses on strategy, then it might be time to rebrand and really figure that out. One of the biggest benefits in that process of rebranding is that not only do you get a visual logo, but you get all the visual side of your branding to reflect your branding strategy. Going through that process with somebody else is extremely helpful because it can really help to draw things out of you that you didn’t even know you knew the answer to. It sometimes just takes another person on the other side to really help draw out that information that you probably know deep down, but maybe just haven’t thought about before in that context.

If You’re Feeling Disconnected from your Audience, Brand, or Messaging

Often, I hear from our clients in the middle of the process of working with us, that once they start to really uncover these things, it becomes so hard to even look at their old website or their old logo before their new one is ready, as they realized how much of a disconnect there was. Maybe you feel like you really know who your audience should be, you kind of know who that ideal person is for you, but you don’t feel like they’re really the people who are coming to your site. If this is the case, then it might be time to ask the question of whether your branding really reflects what you want it to reflect, and is therefore attracting the right people to your site.

One of our clients said that she had never really given much thought to her audience and what they needed from her. Through our brand strategy process, she was able to gain clarity on who her audience was and what they needed from her. This might also be said in another way, and maybe you would say that you don’t really have a lot of competence in sharing your brand messaging. Personally, for me at the beginning stages of my blog and before I niched down, I would really have a hard time explaining what my blog was about when I went to conferences or met up with other Arizona bloggers.

I would stumble on my words, and maybe say that it was a lifestyle blog that shared a lot of recipes. In going through my own brand strategy process, and really digging into my niche and committing to it, I was finally able to really explain what my food blog was, and what types of recipes I shared. So, if you feel like you kind of stumble when someone asks you about your food blog or if you try to explain it to people and your recipe content is all over the board, then it might be time to invest in that brand strategy process. This will help you dive into what it is that you really want to be sharing or what it is that you’re already sharing, but in terms of how it connects to your audience.

If Your Branding is Inconsistent Across Platforms

I see this happening all the time with people who seem to just not be able to commit to a color palette, or even just the type of fonts that they want to use on their graphics. Again, this can happen when you don’t really love your logo to begin with. Imagine driving up to Target and on the front of the store, you see the red letters, and the red carts and you proceed to grab a cart and walk into the store. Suddenly you realize you’re walking into something that looks more like a Home Depot with the orange lettering and way more industrial feel than what you would expect to feel like inside a Target.

That’s a super extreme example, but that can really happen to our audience. When that’s their first impression of your site and it feels like it doesn’t connect, it can create that disconnect and that lack of trust with somebody. They might even think that it’s a spam pin, if this is something they find on Pinterest, because they clicked on something that took them to a place that looks nothing like what they were expecting. They may just leave your site and not come back to it.

 It’s important to make that positive first impression and one of the ways we can do that is by being consistent. I would almost rather have you use fonts that you don’t like, but stay consistent with what you already have, just to be able to create that consistency with your readers or potential new readers.

Now, this may not even be just fonts, this could also be colors, the style of photos that you’re sharing. You really want to make sure that your branding is consistent across platforms. If you’re finding that you constantly reinvent the wheel here, that could be a good sign that it might be time to rebrand and create something that you love, and you really can follow through with using.

If any of these four things have resonated with you, or maybe all four of them have resonated with you, I would highly recommend figuring out when it is going to be the time to invest in your branding. If you have been listening to this, and you are thinking yes, it is absolutely time for me to think about rebranding, then I would really encourage you to check out our Branding VIP intensive. We’ve basically taken a process that used to take over a month and we’ve condensed it down to happening in just three days. Your brand is our focus for the entirety of those three days, and we hope that this will help you to get fast results, without sacrificing any of the things that are essential to a successful branding process.

In this offering, you work with us directly to create a new logo. You will have a brand guide that helps you to know exactly how to and how not to use your brand. It includes all the details you need to know about your fonts and colors. It’s going to give you the branding elements that you need to implement into all the other places within your business. At the end of those three days, you will have branding that you are extremely proud of, along with the backing of all our brand strategy process behind it. I would love for you to consider this Branding VIP Intensive offer and if you are interested, please feel free to reach out. You can always email us if you have questions about this and to see if it would be a good fit for you.

If this episode really resonated with you and you want to just chat about what it might look like for you, feel free to reach out to us over email or you can always connect with me over @Graceandvine on Instagram. Please give this episode a screenshot and share it on your stories and make sure you tag me, because I love to see who’s listening to these episodes and who it is resonating with. 

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