Incremental change, or a wholesale upgrade for your tech brand? It’s a big question.

Here we look at why you need to evolve your brand and the practicalities of how to nail it.

The best brands continuously evolve.

They are normally established, with bags of heritage, and have a brand strategy that drives the evolution process. They do it over a period without you even knowing. Next time you see it, it will just be different. And it would have been done with a purpose in mind. 

This is all true and great advice, but it’s more challenging if you’re a brand leader in the tech world. Categories are being created, and companies are moving at break-neck speed going from start-up to a billion-dollar valuation in a couple of years. Whether you’re on growing rapidly, or a more mature business, you’re juggling so many competing priorities, that there’s every chance your brand won’t get the attention it deserves.

Your brand might fall behind and not be an authentic reflection of your business or the stage you’re at. Or it might even start to hold back your ambition. And that’s ok, it’s going to happen. But recognising this and doing something about it is the most important thing. And when that time comes, it’s a perfect opportunity to revitalise your brand.

Re-brand vs. Revitalisation – which is the best choice?

Here’s a slightly pedantic but important point. When you reach this stage it’s more likely a revitalisation job. Rebrand is a phrase that gets lazily thrown around and it can mean something very different. A rebrand is a huge undertaking, shouldn’t be taken on lightly and could do more harm than good without a clear rationale and strategy. It normally involves a new name, new brand mark, or a radical shift in your positioning or proposition. By changing this you lose your brand equity and you have to start from scratch which takes time, budget and a lot of resources.

If you’ve got the rationale to do this, then great. But rebrands shouldn’t be thought of as the go-to as often the brand revitalisation route is a better way to solve your problem.

A brand revitalisation is taking what you have and evolving it making it more contemporary or fit for purpose. It’s rooted in your original brand – the essence that made it special attracting all that excitement, investment, and talent – but driving it forward. Salience is so hard to build and takes time. A refresh carefully assesses how you evolve your brand without losing the associations and value you’ve built.

You aren’t changing the core thinking or foundation of your brand. Think vision, purpose, and values – the heart and soul of who you are. But what you can change is how it’s represented visually making it a better representation of who you are so the audience understands and relates.

Good brand guidelines are a springboard, not a straightjacket

A reason brands fail to evolve is because guidelines become too strict which can stifle any flexibility for the brand to naturally evolve. What you need is guidance on what you can do, rather than what you can’t.

We think of guidelines in a practical way. A good idea is to have core brand guidelines, and then think about what you’re likely to want, and then create guidance around the wider activity that enables a brand to be more expressive.

License to grow – freedom to be expressive in your executions

So what is up for grabs when it comes to a brand revitalisation? Firstly, it doesn’t have to be daunting. You don’t necessarily need a complete overhaul all at once. You can be tactical in your approach making incremental gains. Let’s look at some now.

Visual language – the bedrock of how you communicate through design. We’re talking colours, fonts, textures, patterns, imagery, shapes, and icons. This can be an ideal launchpad to innovate your design and update your aesthetic to align it more with audience expectations.

Content and campaign activity are also ways for your brand to flex and grow to be more expressive or emotive. Your brand can build personality without damaging the consistency of the core brand. These shorter-term activities can be expressive and impactful to keep your brand looking fresh, bringing it to life in different ways. But the core brand remains consistent.

Our client Rubrik is a great example of this. They’ve got their core brand and don’t change the brand marks or colourways and are locked into certain typefaces. But they do enable additional typefaces and colour palettes to be used in other guises. For Rubrik Zero Labs content, we introduced colours and typefaces which gave it more of a thought leadership and editorial slant, but worked with the core Rubrik brand.

Campaigns can also be a doorway to evolving your brand. Lacework launched an awesome Livin’ the Security Dream campaign to capture the zeitgeist of the Barbie movie. They saw an opportunity to raise the profile of the conversation around the lack of representation of Women in tech – a cause close to their brand’s heart. It was also a great opportunity to express their playful personality in an impactful and engaging way evolving where they can take their brand while staying true to the core.

Be distinctive and ownable

Your brand needs to build up recognition and awareness. Part of its job is to be distinctive so it looks like it could only have come from you, and people easily connect the dots in their minds. There’s no point in doing something great visually if people have no ideas who’s behind it.

With the sheer volume of companies and start-ups rapidly entering the market, it’s tough going in the tech world. This is where you need to balance differentiation and distinctiveness to find a way to stand out. Differentiation gives you a perceived uniqueness, and distinctiveness to make your brand easily identified by people.

Think of what your brand looks like in motion

Think about building that toolkit so you can draw upon it to help you communicate, and motion is a great strength to bring to that. There is so much motion used in brands in B2C, it’s surprising it’s not more prevalent in B2B. Take KFC or Netflix as examples of how motion is used at a basic level for their logos. It’s synonymous with them and adds another ownable strength.

Your brand can’t be static because it lives on your website, social media, digital OOH, and on screens at events. There are huge opportunities for B2B brands to think about how they move. Think about how it expresses itself, how it moves, how it locks up. What do icons, illustrations and colours look like within storytelling animation? How does it load into a screen, how does it reveal, is there a sound?

Again, have flexibility and treatments for different contexts. You can then start to develop it and think about motion guidelines. There are so many components to it and opportunities to help you build recognition, awareness and be impactful and memorable.

This is exactly what we did for Noname Security delivering their brand revitalisation.

If you’re looking to revitalise your brand, there’s plenty to think about. We can help you with your brand strategy, looking at opportunities to flex and revitalise.

When you’re ready, let’s chat.