One of the perennial battles I have with clients involves their urge to rebrand too often. You put a lot of time into creating your brand, but you live with it every day. It doesn’t take long for you to notice snazzier colors, slicker fonts or zippier taglines that compel you to believe it’s time your image got an update.
But the fact is that your clients and customers don’t live with your brand day-in-and-day-out. They might interact with it once a week or once a month. By the time you are sick and tired of your branding, it’s just starting to become familiar to your clients.
So, I implore you to resist! Your brand is fine. You chose those fonts, those colors, that language for a reason. Unless your business has done a 180, you should see it through. Great brands last for decades, even centuries.
Sometimes, the problem isn’t that a client gets bored with their brand. Sometimes it’s that they overreact to every comment they get on the brand from customers or stakeholders. Then the marketing team gets bombarded with requests for tweaks: “We need a different shade of blue; this shade reminds people of IBM”, or “We need a new font for the logo because this one looks too much like Chanel.”
To those clients I say: If you change your brand every few months, you don’t have a brand.
The fact is, there is no ‘right’ color or font that will drive customers to your door. A brand is only powerful when it is associated with a quality product or service. That’s it. It’s only as good as the good or service you provide. So stay focused on your core business, and the branding will take care of itself.
Branding is one aspect of your business where ‘set and forget’ is the best practice. So, when you start to think your brand is stale, just sit back and learn to love your brand the way it is. And if you give it enough time, your clients/customers will learn to love it too.