Three Ways to Reboot Your Brand for 2020 and Beyond

Setting ambitious goals for your brand shouldn’t be intimidating. Here are three tangible ways to reboot your brand for the next year and beyond.

1. Audit Your Logo, Marketing Materials, and Website

It’s important for your logo to be an accurate representation of who you are and what you do. Despite the recent trend toward acronyms and shortened brand names (remember how everyone buzzed about how Dunkin dropped the Donut?), research shows that descriptive logos more favorably impact consumers’ brand perceptions and are more likely to improve brand performance.

It’s also the perfect time to step back and see how where your logo stands in the overall marketing landscape. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes to see how your logo stacks up against the competition. Is it distinctive? Does it represent your unique value proposition? According to the Harvard Business Review:

“A well-designed logo can offer substantial benefits to brands. It can help pique the interest of consumers, differentiate brands from competitors, facilitate brand recognition, influence investors’ decisions and convey what a brand is all about.”

While a distinctive logo that represents your brand is important, a healthy brand is not limited to just the logo — it’s the overall brand identity, including digital and physical assets.

To do a complete brand audit, assemble a cross-functional team and collectively pull together as many marketing materials as you can. From business cards to pamphlets and PowerPoint templates, spread the marketing materials out on the table and ask thoughtful questions like:

• Is our brand distinctive in the marketplace?
• Do all of our marketing materials reinforce our brand identity with consistent messages and imagery?
• Do our website and digital assets reflect the same?

The dawn of the new decade could present the perfect opportunity to shed old, outdated materials and emerge with a fresh, new brand identity.

2. Create a Unique Customer Experience

As you see how your brand image stacks up against the competition, give some thought to your unique customer experience. Why should customers pick you over the competition? It needs to be more than product features and benefits. There needs to be a specific value proposition you offer. From manufacturing and production to sales and marketing, defining your unique customer experience takes self-awareness and a collaborative, cross-functional approach.

Once you’ve defined your unique experience, make sure your marketing materials clearly say what you do. Show empathy for your customers’ problems and in presenting a solution. Use testimonials, reviews, and case studies of happy customers as validating supporting points to your claim. Your consumers should be able to see — and experience — your company’s values from the first touchpoint to the final interaction.

3. Use Your Brand to Unify Operations, Sales, and Marketing Together as One

The marketing department should not be the sole steward of the brand. When done right, a brand unifies and inspires across all business functions. Because it unifies a visual identity, messaging, and customer experience, it takes cooperation and collaboration across business functions.

Instead of a hurdle, this should be seen as an opportunity to unite all employees around a common goal. Does your brand offer an exceptionally quick turn-around? Transparency about the manufacturing process? Are you innovative with your solutions? No matter what your niche, everyone should rally around the brand and reinforce the value proposition within their function.

When aligned, all business functions support the brand. Allocating budgets, training, and even making new hire decisions — each and every decision should support the brand. For example, if your unique customer experience is centered on transparency, then the business should prioritize spending budget dollars on technology that provides visibility into the entire sales process with real-time status updates and deprioritize items that do not support the brand promise.

Ready to reboot your brand in 2020? Work with an award-winning branding agency with a strategic vision on how to create successful brands. The experienced team at id8 will ensure your brand is set up for success in 2020 and beyond.