Rebranding and refreshing to bring in new customers

Maintaining a brand and stock image is important to every business.

These elements aid in increasing awareness, and drawing attention to the quintessential components your business wishes to convey. They can also act as a double-edged sword, however, with older designs relaying an appearance of stagnation that can harm long-term appeal. For this reason, it can be worth investigating rebranding and refreshing. What could be changed in brand imaging to bring in new customers while not alienating the old?

Physical retailers

If you operate a physical store, then a rebrand and redesign are likely to be an intimidating pursuit. Unfortunately, it’s also often a necessity. The design and appearance placed on brands when they’re built places them within a specific era, and depending on which elements a business embraces most, this era can change surprisingly quickly.

Ultimately, the goal of changing brand image involves several main targets. The first is understanding that while you want to update your appearance, you don’t want to overhaul it in a way that fans of the older brand won’t recognise. As seen by GAP and Kraft, going too big doesn’t just erode an emotional connection people have to a brand, it can even outright confuse customers.

Next, brand changes need to understand that for the sake of longevity, they’re going to have to find the balancing point between contemporary design and timeless appeal. Too far in one direction and your brand could rapidly appear out of date, too far in the other and it might seem sterile and zestless.

If achieved correctly, rebranding should leave existing customers coming as always. In addition, it should create such a new appeal that people walking by will feel a greater desire to see what new stock your business offers. As an important part of this equation, the newer stock should also reflect comparable ideals of consistency and evolution as your rebranding does.

Online businesses

In online business, rebranding efforts should take a similarly evolutionary approach that understands the need for well-considered simplicity over complexity. For years, one of the most central fascinations we had with the internet was in the sheer breadth of knowledge and material that is presented. Taking this to heart, many businesses flooded their designs with overcomplexity, to illustrate they had anything and everything a customer could want.

As users eventually were flooded with such websites, they became tired of the sheer inefficiency of at all. In response, modern businesses more effectively understand the necessity for simple and clean layouts. One of the more famous examples of this was the UI refreshing Microsoft adopted in their approach to the design of Windows 8. In this attempt they notoriously failed, leaning too far into simplicity and low information density.

More commonly, this problem raises its head with websites that are improperly designed for mobile viewing. Even big names like YouTube and Major League Baseball’s official websites have struggled in this regard, with poor layouts and scaling leading to clumsy and frustrating services. Though some of these have improved with time and dedicated apps, the harm is done still sticks in the minds of many users.

For a more successful refreshing of design, online casino sites have been much more effective in their approach. Despite offering hundreds of new slots like Cluster Tumble and Wild Harlequin, emphasis on clarity while not drifting too far into oversimplification has proven key. This is especially important when combined with scalability over both mobile and desktop access. Such positive developments have also occurred with the interfaces of social media websites like Instagram, Twitter, and Reddit. All of these could fall into either side of the density trap, but each effectively found balance after years of effort.

Creating an effective physical or digital rebrand or refresh is not a task that should be taken lightly. Instead, consider each element carefully, and how they fit into a central cohesive vision. Investigate ideas from similar businesses, and see what they do well and where they fall short. Make changes one step at a time, don’t compromise your core audience, and your odds at a successful update will be all the better for it.