Thinking of changing your marketing graphics?

Over time, your business will grow and evolve. You can offer new services or products, enter different markets, or target another demographic.

If this happens, you may need to consider changing your marketing graphics.

However, you need to be careful not to undo all the hard marketing and branding work you’ve put in, and fully understand how to rebrand for the most effective results.

Your brand tells a powerful story and you don’t want to water it down by fixing (or breaking) something that doesn’t need fixing!

Here are some times when rebranding your company logo is a bad idea:

1. You are tired or bored with colors, image or font and want something new. You may have built up a lot of brand equity, which refers to the value of having a well-recognized name and reputation.

If you don’t rebrand your company logo for the right reasons, you could dilute all this capital you’ve built up. You need to take a look at your ideal customer and their data before making important decisions.

Here’s the “old” Gap look on the left and a new one they tried to implement back in 2010. The negative feedback was so overwhelming that they soon went back to classic.

2. Customers don’t understand what you do. Before you start working on your graphics to clarify what you offer, take a step back. Is there something unclear about your positioning statement, mission statement, or website copy that is confusing people?

Sometimes a picture isn’t worth a thousand words; you may need to figure out how to rebrand your written marketing materials instead of your images.

So when should you think about rebranding your company logo?

I’m going to use a very personal example! We are going through a change. We originally chose the emperor penguin after Daniel and I went to see March of the Penguins.

We realized that these majestic creatures were symbolic of the qualities we stand for: Strength, Endurance, Pride, Reliability, Commitment, Loyalty, Togetherness, and most importantly, Nurturing.

We are built on nurturing our customers for success and being the support system a business needs in this technical age. The emperor penguin was the perfect symbol to portray these qualities.

So why change it?

We want to appeal to our existing demographic plus a new demographic: people who are leaving the corporate world for the exciting world of entrepreneurship plus micro-businesses looking for outside help to achieve their goals.

As we move into a new market, we wanted to better showcase our services and modernize our visuals.

Starting with our logo, we recently asked our Facebook fans the question: which one do you like the most?

We had some interesting responses: those who knew us and what we do tended to gravitate towards the more familiar layout (A). Others did not see a penguin in some of the designs or saw a woman’s face and hair in others.

While we are now back at the drawing board, so to speak, this was an incredibly worthwhile exercise. If we had picked the one we liked best and thrown it away, we might have alienated and confused the very people we want to attract.

Once our logo is finalized, we’ll move on to updating our website and other marketing materials.

Some other reasons why changing your logo and marketing graphics might be a good idea:

• You need to differentiate yourself better from another company: your color, images and/or font are too similar.

• If your appearance is out of date, you could be turning away customers. I said tweaking things for the sake of change can be a no-no, but if your 1980s color palette or old-fashioned font makes you look bad, it’s time to take a hard look at your marketing materials.

• You’re in the middle of a merger or acquisition and need to balance two companies in one design. When United and Continental Airlines merged, their creativity did too: you see the word UNITED with the globe that comes from the Continental Airlines guarantee.

• The personality of your organization has changed. Maybe you were a startup on a shoestring budget when you started your journey, and now you’ve grown your profits, customers, and employees.

Investing in your appearance can be a must if you want to stay ahead of the competition.

There are many situations in which you must change your creativity. But you need to focus on why you’re doing it or you could be damaging your reputation, brand value, and revenue. The best way to go through the process is to hire a professional marketing company to do it for you.

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