Reinvigorating not reinventing a brand

How to retain brand identity when evolving brand assets: A masterclass in reinvigoration not reinvention for a global FMCG brand

Why it matters

Reinvention can be a powerful restart for a brand. But when identification is key (and when isn’t it), reinvigoration can better aid recognition and distinctiveness.

Takeaways

• Always start a brand refresh from an informed position of knowledge. You are not your audience, and so your opinions may not match those of your audience.
• Identification is vital for a brand for whom every second on the shelf counts. Work out what you do need to change or update on pack, and what you don’t.
• Sometimes, the smallest changes can have the biggest difference. The fact that consumers can’t notice a change in an identity design isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
• Test your new designs with the end consumer. How they react to the designs is what really matters.

Identification first

Brands are complex entities, and the role of brand is multi-faceted. However, before anything else, a brand needs to be able to be identified. Without the ability to be identified, a brand is useless to its associated business.

The ability to identify a brand comes through brand codes (or distinctive brand assets). Whether these brand assets are visual or aural (or in fact experienced through any of our senses) they act as the symbols and the cues for people to recognise and then associate meaning to the brand. They are the cues for the brand, and so they need to be owned and identifiable.

Copycat challengers

Some years ago, we worked with a client who felt they had an issue with their category-leading, FMCG brand. With 79% of the market, they were in a strong position. However, they were also constantly responding to challenges from smaller, challenger brands, and there was a feeling that they might be losing market share to ‘lookalike’ competitors.

The fear was that there was a danger that they would be lost on-shelf amidst a sea of similar designed packs, and that there was a potential for customers to trade-down driven by a mistaken perception that products are of the same quality. A question was, with competitor brands utilising similar patterning cues, was their brand still recognisable?

On top of this potential lack of identity, the pack designs were looking a little tired. Of course, how a visual identity looks is very important, and the need for it to look vibrant and attention-grabbing is always there. It was clear that change was needed, but how much change, and how? This was our challenge – would the brand benefit most from a full-scale reinvention of the visual identity, patterning, and packaging, or would the best way forwards be to reinvigorate the existing approach?

This work would be on shelves from New York to Sydney, Shanghai to London, so whatever was done must also have global appeal.

Thinking design

When starting a brand visual identity project, it can be very tempting to rip everything up and start again. Creating totally new brand assets, such as new logos and graphic styles, is a very visible way of indicating a change. For example, should there be a new CMO who wants to make their mark, a visible change in identity is a great way to symbolise that change.

A totally new visual approach also has appeal to a branding agency. Who wouldn’t want to create something totally new – designing something that creates appeal in, and for, the current landscape and marketplace. Who knows, you might even win some of those shiny awards.

We must admit, when we first considered the brief, this thought certainly crossed our minds. This was a FMCG category leader, and so was a huge opportunity to make a big statement.

Understand perception

But, very quickly, we thought again.

This brand had spent years, if not decades, building identifiable assets, and associations to these assets. It was clear to us that the current visual approach was looking a little tired, but was it also very recognisably them? The fact was, we didn’t know. And we were never going to know sitting in our studio staring at our computer screens.

As we all know, the first rule of marketing is that we’re not the target audience – and this time we really weren’t. So, we asked them.

We undertook some primary research via an online survey of the target audience. By reaching over 1,000 respondents, we knew we had a sample group that could give us a good level of confidence in the research and results (more accurately, it gave us a Confidence level 99% and Confidence interval +/- 4).

We tested key assets, asking people to identify the brand logo from a choice of five designs. We also asked them to select which brand they would associate with another four key brand assets. The responses we got put our thinking into sharp focus.

Regarding the logo question, 60% identified the brands actual logo and 21% selected the design closest to actual logo. We took from this that over 80% of people had a good appreciation and recognition of the brands logo. That’s a considerable amount.

The other major thing we took from the responses was that nearly 50% of people identified the patterns as the brand. Now we know that some competitors are using lookalike designs, but it was clear that the patterning was still an identifiable feature of the brand. Rather than dispense with the design approach, as category leader with identifiable assets the brand was in a strong position. What they needed was some revitalisation and reinvigoration.

A place of knowledge

We figured the logo and the patterns were too identifiable to lose, but they were currently a little tired. We needed to retain the logo and pattern approach, but they needed a new lease of life. We knew now that what would be the best approach for the brand was a reinvigoration of their identifiable assets.

So, the reinvention ended, and the reinvigoration began.

We went back to the drawing board, now armed with knowledge from research, and first looked at developing the existing logo. By skilfully redrawing and crafting the logo, the balance and aesthetic of the mark was much improved. The changes were subtle to the untrained eye, and without placing the new and old logos side by side the change wasn’t noticeable. But this was the point.

The aim was to create a logo that was simply better designed, but that the hand of the designer was invisible.

The craft may be imperceptible to most, but it is an evolution that improves the logo without losing the identification and recognition we know the logo benefits from. Now, this isn’t a unique approach. In recent years, we’ve seen many large brands evolve their logos rather than recreate them. From Boots to Campbells, Cadburys to Batiste, if there’s value and identification in those marks then you need to do everything you can to keep a hold of that. There may be accusations thrown at the agencies involved of doing little work for a lot of money, but these comments entirely miss the point. This is all about retaining the identification but updating the design.