Taking time for reflection can help personal and professional growth. As you head into the new year, make time to pause and reflect on the past year, the lessons learned, wins achieved, and goals you'd like to continue to work towards. These prompts can help you get started.
Throughout the 24 years we've been in business as a branding and design firm, we’ve seen many organizations refresh their brands with new websites, messaging, and logos. We’re no different. We’ve tweaked and refreshed the insight180 brand several times, as a way to commemorate a shift in focus or celebrate a new chapter for the business. Each time, we’ve approached the process similarly to the way we would advise our clients if they were considering a logo refresh. If you're considering refreshing your logo, read about when and why you may want to do this sooner than later.
UPDATED. Social media can be a valuable marketing tool for a brand, but only if you have a strong social media strategy in place. Read on for the social media guidelines we recommend to all of our clients.
Instead of a new year’s resolutions for your business, try setting a new year’s intention. A simple phrase that reminds you of your goals all year long. Here are five steps and some questions to get you started.
In the ever-changing business landscape, a brand refresh can be a powerful tool for staying relevant and connecting with your audience. By embracing change, fine tuning your unique brand essence, engaging stakeholders, crafting a compelling story, and updating your visual identity, you can reestablish meaningful connections with your most important stakeholders.
In the ever-changing business landscape, a brand refresh can be a powerful tool for staying relevant and connecting with your audience. By embracing change, fine tuning your unique brand essence, engaging stakeholders, crafting a compelling story, and updating your visual identity, you can reestablish meaningful connections with your most important stakeholders.
In the ever-changing business landscape, a brand refresh can be a powerful tool for staying relevant and connecting with your audience. By embracing change, fine tuning your unique brand essence, engaging stakeholders, crafting a compelling story, and updating your visual identity, you can reestablish meaningful connections with your most important stakeholders.
In simplest terms, think of a brand refresh as a makeover, update, or renovation of your organization’s image, while maintaining its core identity and positioning strategy. It is not a complete overhaul of your company (even though that can be a tempting option), but more like a reimagining to break free from outdated perceptions or old ways of communicating with your audiences.
While it usually centers on an updated visual identity, a brand refresh can also affect company culture, processes, and offerings, and go a long way toward breathing new life into employee morale and performance. A refresh can’t solve deep-seated issues like core values misalignment, broken processes, or major shifts in an organization’s positioning — that would be a much more extensive rebranding – but it can:
If it’s been a decade (or more) since you’ve refreshed your brand, it’s time to take a look. Is your brand image and messaging standing out within your industry? Does it work in your marketing presentations and on LinkedIn? Social media has changed the way we communicate and opened up so many opportunities for businesses to reach very targeted audiences. Does your brand make the kind of visual impact you want it to?
While still a really important organizational decision, a brand refresh requires less risk than a complete brand overhaul and can provide some very positive outcomes. You might argue that you already have a strong logo that works well, and besides, your clients and prospects know it. But how well is it really serving you? Have you become outdated? Often a refresh can be the thing that gets clients and prospects interested again. It can provide an opportunity to retell your story, share exciting changes, and reconnect with longtime customers (and their newer employees and partners).
How do you know when it’s the right time to refresh your brand?
Corporate Identity. Differentiation. Branding. Positioning. Even among the business savvy, it’s not at all uncommon for these marketing terms to be used almost interchangeably. In fact, they are quite different and play very different roles in business development and marketing. We thought it was time to revisit the terms and clarify the differences, so you can be better-informed about marketing, design, and branding services.
A brand is the idea behind a company’s identity, the impression people have of you. A brand is what you stand for, believe in, behave like, and how you are perceived by those that conduct business with you or otherwise experience interaction with you. It’s the collective sum of who you are as an organization and how you communicate your value and culture in a variety of ways.
A brand takes time to build because it’s defined by what others think about you, and such impressions (be they positive or negative) take time to form and build.
“A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization. A brand is a person’s gut feeling, because brands are defined by individuals – not companies or markets. A brand is a gut feeling because people are emotional, intuitive beings. A brand is not what you say it is, it’s what they say it is.” — Marty Neumeier, author
Corporate identity is how a company or organization presents itself to the public. It’s the intentional image and aesthetic that is created to help form its public image. Think logo – an image that is both a recognizable mark, symbol, or icon plus a specific type treatment – and colors, tagline, or definition statement of an organization. A corporate identity includes the key visual and verbal elements that work together to create a definitive, consistent, and recognized persona for the business. It should represent the key ingredients of a brand but ultimately it serves to identify, not explain or sell.
What differentiates you is not your logo, tagline, slogan, or what your website looks like. Your differentiation is what you offer or do that sets you apart from other organizations that are similar to you. For professional services businesses, which is our area of specialization, it can be a minor characteristic that a company embraces as its signature difference. Without an obvious or expressed and declared differentiation, it can be difficult for potential customers to detect how you are different and even harder for them to choose you as their preference.
Branding is the strategy behind corporate identity and brand, as well as the process that ensures they are representative of who you are — the why, what, and how of your organization. It’s as deep as the core values and as detailed as crafting messages and communications materials that will help to form the impressions people will have about your company. It is also the implementation of consistently applied communications that express who your company is at its core. Branding is rarely a destination. It is nearly always an ongoing process that evolves as a company evolves and grows.
Positioning refers to where you stack up within your industry, relative to your competitors and in the eyes of your customers. Branders like us use positioning strategy as a way to tell customers what you do, for whom,, how you help, and how you are different. Your differentiation (see above) is a function of your positioning strategy. If you know how you can help and how you are different, you can tell potential customers what your position in the industry is relative to them. This is very helpful information for customers to have. It’s one of the key ways they evaluate you; customers will assign a position to you in their minds even if you don’t tell them your thoughts on the matter.
Bringing it all together
Valentine’s Day is almost here and you know what that means – it’s time for us to reveal this year’s shareable Valentine’s cards! While we wholeheartedly believe in showing love and appreciation for others every day of the year, we particularly enjoy leaning in to the sweetness of V-Day to do what we love most -- Design!
Is Santa Claus in need of brand refresh? Whether you believe in Santa or not – and whether you buy into his whole naughty or nice routine – you have to admit, the man with the white beard in the red suit from the north pole is a really strong brand. Everyone knows who he is and what he stands for. His values and passions are clear to us. And they are consistent. Santa Claus is about the good in life. He is jolly, generous, hard-working, and giving. But has he been “played out?”
Join in the fun of spreading holiday cheer and send virtual cards, courtesy of insight180. We’ve created some colorful, cheery holiday cards you can send to everyone in your contact list. Simply click on the card image below to share directly to Facebook, tagging the one(s) who deserve some extra cheer this season. Tag us, too, so we can see how you’re celebrating this year! Happy Holidays from team insight180!
