This is brand identity. Boring branding is the enemy.

When the brand is costing the business something.

The clearest signs you need a rebrand are commercial. Pricing power is soft, and the sales team is probably feeling pressured to discount in order to close a sale. You might be losing deals to competitors who aren’t actually better than you. The talent you want to attract might not see you as a destination brand to work for. The market you play in might have moved such as new competitors, new category expectations, a shift in how buyers make decisions, and the brand hasn’t moved with it. Or the simplest one: the company you’ve built has outgrown the brand you started with.

The trigger is usually a business event sitting behind those symptoms: moving upmarket, entering a new category, going through a merger or restructure, launching a product that doesn’t fit the current brand, or preparing for investment where the brand needs to signal ‘we’re a very impressive company doing very impressive things.’

It’s also worth knowing that not every rebrand is a full rebrand. Sometimes the whole thing needs rebuilding. But most of the time it’s about making the current branding ooze a lot more charisma.

 

Usually, yes. Most of our work with established businesses, we aren’t touching the logo. There needs to be a really good reason to do that. The refresh is typically about making the rest of the identity system more charismatic and giving the brand the kind of creative direction it needs to help the business perform better. If the logo genuinely needs looking at, we’ll tell you and we’ll explain why.

If the brand strategy and brand positioning are really obvious and the company is clear on where it competes and who it’s for, we can just keep the scope to the brand identity design. We’ll tell you which situation you’re in. We’d rather have that conversation upfront than design something beautiful that can’t do the commercial job it needs to do.

Brand identity is the personality of the brand: how it looks, sounds, and behaves. It’s the full system, the logo, type, colour, photography, verbal identity, motion, the brand voice, and the cultural posture sitting underneath all of it. Visual identity is one part of brand identity. The logo design is one part of visual identity. Brand design is the discipline of building the whole system to be coherent, distinct, and aligned with what the brand is trying to claim commercially. A strong brand identity does two jobs: creates distinction (so people remember you) and signals meaning (how we want people to size the brand up). Both jobs are strategic before they’re aesthetic.

Used interchangeably most of the time, and honestly that’s mostly fine. If we’re being precise: brand design is the process of designing how a brand looks. Visual identity is the part of brand identity you can see, such as the logo design, type, colour, art direction. Brand identity is the all encompassing personality system, a major element of which also includes the verbal identity.

Ha! Unlikely. Proud to say that never happens, because the Mudeboards phase catches misalignment before we commit to concept design. We keep things very iterative as we move through inspiration gathering, Mudeboards, concepts, refinement, to final delivery. We also try to keep the process very divergent so you see lots of potential directions before any decisions are made and we gradually start converging on the final concept.

Our version of mood boards, we’ve just co-opted it with our name. Each one explores a different creative direction for the brand: typography, colour, textures, imagery, marks. We present them early so we can narrow the creative territory before committing to concept design. The conversation they start is usually more revealing than the boards themselves, because it surfaces what the leadership team actually responds to versus what they said they wanted in the brief. Those two things are almost never the same.

The person that is pulling out their wallet. The identity, the brand guide, and every asset we create during the engagement. We keep the right to show the work in our portfolio, because frankly if we’ve done our job properly it’s the kind of work we want people to see. We’ll probably submit yours to design awards too. Who knows.

Identity typically runs 8 to 14 weeks from kickoff to delivery. If the engagement includes strategy before identity, add 10 to 14 weeks. If it includes a website, 5 to 6 months end to end for everything usually. The fastest projects we’ve done had one decision-maker in the room. The slowest had ten people and a client contact with no authority to make decisions. You can probably guess which one everyone was happier with.

Most companies that come to us need a brand refresh rather than a rebrand. Brands need constant work to maintain their vitality. What might be driving a brand refresh is being indistinguishable from competitors, the brand has no cultural posture, and the brand identity isn’t doing the two jobs it needs to do: create distinction and signal meaning. A brand refresh is all about giving the core ingredients of the existing branding some much-needed TLC, and imbuing more culture and charisma into the brand identity, the visual system, the verbal identity, the art direction, the creative and cultural posture.

A full rebrand is a different conversation. It usually gets forced by a business event: a merger or acquisition, reputational damage the current brand can’t shake, a need to signal genuine change to the market, a category that’s shifted underneath the company, or a business that’s simply outgrown the brand it started with. A rebrand typically starts with brand strategy because you’re fundamentally changing the DNA, offer or brand positioning of the company.