Refresh Your Brand and Rewire How Your Audience Sees You

 

There is an incredible characteristic of the human brain called neuroplasticity. In simple terms, neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to change and adapt by creating and reorganizing neural connections. Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to form new neural pathways in response to new experiences, repeated signals, and reinforced behaviors.

As we learn, experience new things and repeat certain behaviors, connections in our brains can become stronger. We can develop new ways of thinking and responding instead of being permanently locked into the patterns we have already established. There is a branding lesson here, because brands, like brains, create pathways, too.

When someone repeatedly encounters your business, they gradually develop a mental picture of who you are. Your logo, colors, website, messaging, reputation, customer experience and even the types of projects you take on contribute to this picture.

Eventually, people don’t have to think very hard about what your brand means to them. They simply “know.” This is incredibly valuable when the associations are the ones you want. But what happens when they aren’t? Or, what happens when your business has changed, but people’s understanding of your business hasn’t changed with it? That’s where a brand refresh can become particularly powerful.

Your Brand Lives in Someone Else’s Brain

One of the fascinating things about branding is that you can create a brand identity, but you don’t completely control your brand perception. Your audience does. You can decide what your logo looks like, what your website says and how your marketing materials are designed. Ultimately, however,the people interacting with those things determine what they mean.

Over time, those interactions create associations. What do people associate with your company or organization? Perhaps people associate it with being small and scrappy. Maybe you’re known for one particular service. Maybe people perceive you as affordable, traditional, innovative, highly specialized or community-focused. Those perceptions may have been completely accurate five years ago, but what about today? They may not be accurate in the here and now.

This misalignment can create a common challenge for growing businesses: the business evolves faster than the perception of the business.

You’ve added capabilities, capacity and clientele. You’ve launched into new markets with offerings and new technologies or tools.Internally, it feels like a completely different company. Externally, people may still be operating from an old idea or image of your firm. A brand refresh gives you an opportunity to change that picture.

Refreshing Your Brand Creates New Pathways

This is where the concept of neuroplasticity becomes a useful metaphor.

Our brains don’t necessarily have to erase an old pathway in order to create a new one. Through new experiences and repeated reinforcement, different connections can be formed and strengthened.

Something similar happens when you refresh your brand. You aren’t necessarily asking customers to forget everything they already know about you. Rather, you are giving them new information that helps them understand you differently.

A brand refresh works because it connects new meaning to existing memory, much like learning a new interpretation of a familiar concept.

• The audience already has a mental “folder” for your brand
• The refresh reorganizes what’s inside that folder
• The brain updates the associations instead of creating a new file

This is why, when brand refreshes are done well, they feel clarifying, not confusing.

For example, a refreshed visual identity might communicate greater sophistication and new messaging might reposition your company from a service provider to a strategic partner. Every intentional change to what people know and understand communicates a signal and each of these changes creates another pathway into the brand.

Instead of: “They’re the company that does X.”

The perception gradually becomes: “I didn’t realize they could also do Y.”

And eventually: “They’re exactly who we should talk to about Z.”

That progression is what makes a meaningful brand refresh much more than a cosmetic exercise. You aren’t simply changing how the brand looks. You’re changing how the brand can be understood.

New Doesn’t Mean Unrecognizable

There is another important lesson in this analogy: Refreshing a brand doesn’t always mean replacing everything people already associate with it. In fact, doing so can sometimes destroy valuable brand equity.

If your audience already trusts you, recognizes you and understands something meaningful about your brand, those existing associations are assets. The goal should be to build upon them rather than reflexively discard them. This is one reason we distinguish between a brand refresh and a complete rebrand. A refresh can preserve the strongest existing pathways while creating new ones.

The familiar logo may evolve rather than disappear. A recognizable color may remain but become part of a more sophisticated palette. A longstanding message may be sharpened rather than abandoned. Your core values may stay exactly the same while the way you communicate them changes dramatically.

The question isn’t simply, “How can we make this look different?” A better question is: “What do we want people to understand about us tomorrow that they don’t understand about us today?” Now your refresh has somewhere to go.

Repetition Reinforces the New Brand

There is, however, a catch. Introducing a refreshed brand once isn’t enough. Imagine announcing a new identity, updating your homepage and then continuing to use outdated presentations, old messaging, inconsistent social graphics and legacy materials everywhere else.

You haven’t created a new pathway. You’ve created confusion. New associations become stronger through reinforcement. Branding works similarly.

If you want people to see your organization as more innovative, that idea needs to be reinforced through your messaging, visual identity, content and customer experience. If you want to move upmarket, the quality of your sales materials needs to reinforce that positioning. If you want to be known as a thought leader rather than simply a vendor, your content needs to consistently demonstrate your thinking.

The refresh is the introduction. Brand management is the reinforcement. This is why the work following a brand refresh is just as important as the refresh itself. Your audience needs multiple opportunities to encounter and experience the new version of your brand.

Consistency gradually turns something unfamiliar into something recognizable. Recognition becomes association. Association becomes expectation. Expectation becomes experience.

A Brand Refresh Opens New Doors in the Mind

Businesses sometimes approach a brand refresh by saying, “We need something that looks more modern.” There’s nothing wrong with wanting to modernize your brand. But that’s a relatively small ambition for something that can have a much larger impact.

A good refresh should create new possibilities. It should give customers new ways to understand you, your people new ways to talk about you, prospects new reasons to consider you, partners new opportunities to work with you. And perhaps, even give you a new way to see your own business.

This is especially important for businesses that have outgrown the brand they originally built. The problem isn’t necessarily that the old brand was bad. It may simply have been built to communicate an earlier version of the company. Growth requires creating some new pathways.

Don’t Just Refresh. Rewire.

Your brand already occupies some space in the minds of the people who encounter it. The question is what kind of space. If the perception people have of your business no longer matches its capabilities, ambitions or value, simply doing more marketing may reinforce an outdated idea.

Sometimes you need to give people a new pathway. This means something more than simply changing colors, typography or a symbol. A thoughtful brand refresh can preserve what people already know and trust while introducing new ideas about who you’ve become and where you’re going. Think of it as not simply giving people something new to see, but rather giving them a new way to see you.

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At Enthuse Creative, we help growing businesses position, polish and promote their brands so that how they are perceived better reflects who they are and where they’re headed. If your business has evolved beyond the brand you’ve been showing the world, it may be time to create a new pathway forward. Contact us to get started.