Working within a brand and a business, you understand the pressure to stay relevant. New trends keep popping up, and growth can feel stagnant. So, you think... why not a brand refresh? But what exactly is it?
A brand refresh is more than just altering your logo and your color scheme (although these are great important details that we will come back to). What you're trying to accomplish is connecting with your clients, fans, and potential customers in a deeper valuable way. If you only change the look, the refresh will not feel authentic. When you refresh your brand, this is a great time to look at:
1. Awareness of where you are in the marketplace
2. Confidence to solve your clients problems
3. Vulnerability - showing both the good and the hard
4. Story Telling - a look behind the scenes
5. Community & culture - what is happening in the company or brand internally
6. Visuals of how you show up - colors & logo & marks... finally right?
When talking about the brand, there is no way to create it without a community. In the words of Marty Neimier,
"A brand is a person's gut feeling
about a product, service, or organization."
To help create a specific feeling, it must look, feel, and be what you are trying to develop at each touchpoint. So beyond the colors, beyond the logo, you can start to look at and answer:
- how do people email and communicate in the brand/business
- how do your sales decks look and feel?
- how does the brand or business show up on social media?
- how do you answer DMs?
- how do you share stories?
- who do you endorse, support, and show up for?
- what stance do you take on topics?
- what do you internal documents look like?
- what does your email strategy look and feel like?
- what would your employees say about the company behind closed doors?
- how does your website look?
- what tone of language do you use when writing copy?
- AND -
Is all this consistent?
This is a clearer way to see that a brand refresh, can really be a brand realignment to get back to how you want people to feel when they interact with you, your brand, your company or the business you work within.
The goal of any business is to profit, grow, connect, and thrive. However, if your brand fails to inspire confidence, or communicate its value effectively, you may struggle to attract new customers and expand your reach. A brand refresh empowers you to unlock your brand's full potential by optimizing your messaging, visual identity, and overall brand experience. By presenting a cohesive and compelling brand story, you'll attract more customers, drive more sales, and ultimately, achieve greater success.
To quote Albert Schweitzer, this is great but, "a good example has twice the value of good advice." So let's see this in action.
Parity needed help strategizing fresh ideas and creating designs to elevate their brand not only externally (think social media) but also internally to increase profit. As a company they help brands get higher awareness by giving them access to top pro women athletes for social media partnerships and in-person activations such as speaking events. To reach this goal we did a discovery call, and two team meetings and agreed on a 4-month contract to work through and create:
✅ incredibly designed sales decks that were editable internally on Canva
✅ attention-grabbing content for multiple social media channels
✅ bolder layouts for their speaking events that included ads
This is where they were starting:
- cohesive colors
- sports imagery
- wanting to show the value of the athletes
Sales Deck
Sales Deck
Sales Deck
The Breakdown: The brand colors were present, but the design wasn't expressing how sleek the brand ran and the value of the athletes. There was a ton of potential to really show off what this company does and how well they do it.
After the discovery call with both the branding department and the sales team, the main feedback was that everything needed to be beautiful but also editable for someone without a design background aka most of the sales team.
(Not a problem - Canva and Google Slides has entered the chat 💬)
In just 4 months together, we were able to completely revamp their internal sales decks to give more ammunition to the sales team and this is where they are now:
We LOVE your ideas Kayla!
- Parity CEO Leela
Once the sales decks were updated, fully editable, and ready to go with instructions for the sales team in Canva and Google slides, it was time to create content for them to post specifically to IG & LinkedIn.
The last piece of the puzzle was creating content-rich ads for their speaking events to draw more attention to their brand. We explored working with the bold color scheme.
But, there was only access to previously photographed athletes. So with some creatvity, this is an example of one of the video workshops content posters.
With these fresh ideas and designs, Parity is moving forward with their refreshed brand celebrating and bringing financial profit to women in sports on their terms.
