flux branding

The Secret to Branding? It’s Personality

Would you describe Google as smart? SpaceX as bold and fearless? Hershey’s as an old friend?

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Chances are, the brands you like have distinct, human-like traits. When you think of them, it’s like thinking of someone you know and like– they’re funny, reliable, comforting, exciting, or a whole host of other things. When you engage with them, you’re not just buying something. You feel like you’re connecting to a much bigger feeling.

Companies aren’t people. But successful brands make us feel like they are.

Powerful brands know who they are and speak it loud and clear, elevating transactions to meaningful connections. Successful brands have personality.

Knowing and expressing your brand personality means you’ll communicate beyond words. Connect directly to your customers’ hearts and minds.

This month, as we launch our new Brand Personality Quiz, we’re talking about the importance of personality in branding. What does it mean? How can you tap into it? Read on to find out.

What is Brand Personality?

At Flux, we see personality as the secret ingredient to branding. Without personality, there’s no flavor. We think it’s so important, we’ve developed an assessment to tell you all about your brand personality in just 6 questions. It’s what informs all the decisions your brand makes– how you speak, how you look, how you act. But what exactly is a brand personality?

Brand personality refers to a set of human traits and characteristics that are attributed to a brand. Just like people, brands use particular personality traits that help us understand who they are and what they’re all about. A brand personality is a way of defining the written and visual tone of a brand in human terms, and helps to create a human-like identity for the brand.

Your brand personality is something you sense innately about your own brand, simply based on the experience you give your customers and the kinds of services you offer. For example, a bank usually won’t be fun and silly, but will have a personality that feels trustworthy, safe, and formal. If your company is customer-centric and friendly, your personality might be more cheerful, upbeat, and casual.

All brands have a personality– but not all of them communicate it effectively across the many facets of their brand experience.

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Why You Need a Brand Personality

Brands that have a well-defined personality create a deeper connection with their customers because they communicate a unique and recognizable identity that customers can relate to and feel emotionally connected to. A brand’s personality reflects its values, attitudes, and beliefs, and it humanizes the brand, making it more relatable and appealing to customers.

When customers feel that they share similar values and beliefs with a brand, they are more likely to form a bond with that brand, making their relationship more meaningful and long-lasting. A strong brand personality can also create an emotional connection by appealing to customers’ desires and emotions, whether it’s through creating a sense of security and stability, or by inspiring customers to pursue their dreams and reach their full potential.

But a brand personality isn’t just for your customers. It’s also for your competitors, your employees, and your stakeholders. Having a strong brand personality is important for a number of reasons:

Differentiation: A well-defined brand personality helps to differentiate a brand from its competitors and sets it apart in the market. This makes it easier for customers to identify and remember the brand, and can help to create a competitive advantage.

Emotional connection: A brand personality helps to establish an emotional connection with customers by creating a human-like personality for the brand. This emotional connection can lead to increased loyalty and a stronger bond between the brand and its customers. They aren’t just buying– they’re connecting.

Consistency: A strong brand personality provides consistency in the brand’s messaging and communication, making it easier for customers to recognize and remember the brand across all touchpoints. It also makes it easier for your marketing, branding, and social media teams to all stay on the same page, speaking with the same voice no matter where your brand shows up.

Credibility: A well-defined brand personality can help to build trust and credibility with customers by demonstrating the brand’s commitment to its values and identity. When you are authentically yourself, your customers take notice.

Marketing: A strong brand personality creates the foundation for creative campaigns that effectively target and engage with specific customer segments. And it’s not just that brands with personality engage more effectively with their audiences, it’s also that having a well-defined personality could save you tons of money in your marketing budget. When your personality is clear, your team knows who you are and how you show up, taking much of the guesswork out of creative campaign creation and streamlining the process. You won’t be getting the question, “Would our brand say that?”

How To Develop Your Brand Personality

Developing a strong brand personality requires a thoughtful and strategic approach. To express your brand personality, your brand adopts specific traits in visual, written, and experiential communication. But before you do, you need a deep and authentic understanding of what you do and why you do it. To uncover your brand personality, you’ll need to take several steps:

Conduct market research: Start by understanding your target audience, what they want and need, and what they look for in a brand. This information will help you identify the traits and characteristics that your target audience values and that can be incorporated into your brand personality. Ensure you also have a clear understanding of your competitors– you don’t want a personality that sounds exactly like everyone else.

Define your brand values: Clearly define the values that your brand stands for. What is your mission? What are you committed to? Why do you do what you do? Your brand values will shape the personality of your brand and help to guide your decisions.

Determine your brand voice: Decide on the tone and language that your brand will use in its communication. This voice should be consistent across all touchpoints, including your website, social media, advertising, and customer service. If you’re committed to brightening people’s lives, perhaps your voice is funny and cheerful. If you’re committed to protecting people from harm, perhaps your voice is serious and knowledgeable. Whatever you choose, it’s important that it comes from a deep understanding of your personality.

Create a visual identity: Develop a visual identity that reflects your brand personality. This can include things such as a logo, color palette, and typography. Your visual identity should be consistent with your brand personality and values– a brand that’s happy and easy probably wouldn’t use dark, moody colors. The brain processes images before words, so the visual tone of your personality is just as important as the voice.

Integrate your brand personality into everything you do: Your brand personality should be integrated into everything you do, from your products and services to your customer service and marketing efforts. This helps to reinforce your brand personality and ensure consistency in your messaging and communication. Let your personality inform your campaigns, not the other way around.

These aren’t easy steps– each one takes time, resources, and strategic thinking. But the revenue you’ll generate with a strong brand personality more than pays back the effort. If you’re not sure where to start, our Brand Personality Quiz is a great place to begin– you’ll find out your personality in just six questions, and get concrete tools for bringing it to the world.

 

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The Brand Personality Quiz

We think personality is so important, we’ve created an assessment to help more brands get in touch with their personality. After working with hundreds of brands across industries, we’ve found that there are four major brand personality types. Each type can effectively tap into particular personality traits to inspire action and loyalty. Below is a graphic representation of how the personality types and their traits work together, with example brands.

 

BPQ Quadrant

 

The axes of the wheel represent two critical dimensions of every brand: the offering and the experience. How you answer the questions in the Brand Personality Quiz place your brand on the X and Y axes, determining your brand personality type.

Horizontal Axis = OFFERING

The offering is your product or service. Is your offering historic and recognizable, or is it totally new in the market?

Heritage Offering: Established and familiar products and services (example: Rolex watches)
Innovative Offering: Products and services that disrupt the market or have never been seen before (example: iPhone)

Vertical Axis = EXPERIENCE

The brand experience is what happens when someone engages with your offerings and services. Is the experience you offer to customers familiar and expected, or new and/or constantly changing?

New Experiences: Customers are drawn to your brand because it helps them discover new things about themselves and the world (example: Google)
Known Experiences: Customers are drawn to your brand because it is comforting, nostalgic, or trusted (example: Campbell’s Soup)

The 4 Quadrants = PERSONALITY TYPES

Where a brand falls on the axes places it into one of four quadrants, each representing a particular brand personality type. There are four main types of brand personalities: Dreamer, Protector, Explorer, and Lover. Each of these personalities appeals to different emotions and desires, allowing brands to connect with their target audience in a unique and meaningful way.

Dreamer Brand

Dreamer brands are creative and innovative, always looking for new and exciting ways to do things. They create a sense of transformation and change, appealing to customers who are looking for new experiences and a sense of novelty. Apple is an example of a dreamer brand, with its bold marketing campaigns and innovative products that introduce us to completely new realities.

Protector Brand

Protector brands provide stability and comfort, offering trusted and familiar products and services to established markets. They create a sense of nostalgia and security, appealing to customers who value reliability and tradition. Johnson & Johnson is an example of a protector brand, known for its high-quality products that help people care for their families and maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Explorer Brand

Explorer brands are disruptors, taking familiar products and services and doing them better. They create a sense of excitement and adventure, appealing to customers who are looking for something new and innovative. Tesla is an example of an explorer brand, known for its electric vehicles that are changing the way people think about transportation.

Lover Brand

Lover brands are warm and nurturing, helping customers to discover new things about themselves and the world. They create a sense of belonging, happiness, and possibility, appealing to customers who are looking for a sense of community and a connection to something greater. Coca-Cola is an example of a lover brand, known for its cheerful marketing campaigns that bring people together and spread happiness.

The quiz is an easy way to understand your brand personality type in just six questions. You’ll get immediate results, and a customized report that will give you concrete strategies for communicating your personality to the world.

 

BPQ report sample
Customized report with insights into your specific brand personality type.

Personality is Everything

Personality is the key to infusing your brand with humanity. The result is a much deeper affinity that goes beyond a particular offering or price point. That’s the magic behind branding: a clear personality elevates a transaction to a connection, making it much more meaningful, inspiring action and forging loyalty.

When brands show their personalities, they make clear statements about who they are and what they believe. But if the story doesn’t feel real, the spell is broken. Brands must be authentic in order for us to believe.

Uncovering your authentic personality and speaking it clearly can be a challenge. It’s what branding specialists do– bring out your brand personality and communicate it to the world.

Our brand personality quiz pinpoints your core brand personality, then gives you specific traits you can use to craft campaigns that resonate. Get the tools that will help you connect on a level deeper than words– speak directly to your customers’ hearts.

Take the quiz >

When you’re ready to start a project with us, just get in touch. We’re honored to be part of your brand’s journey.

5 Reasons Why: Your Brand Needs Frontify

Flux is Now a Frontify Agency Partner

Flux is excited to announce we are now a Frontify agency partner. Frontify is an exciting platform for brand asset management, allowing us to build Brand Guidelines and centralize brand assets in a whole new way for our clients.

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After building hundreds of brands, we know how challenging it can be for clients to keep track of the many parts that make up an identity. Where is the logo in black and white? What version of the brand platform was final? Can we get a .png of this? With Frontify, these questions disappear. Everything lives together in a beautiful, easy to use platform. It’s trusted by major brands like Lufthansa, Bang & Olufsen, Volkswagen, and more.

What is Brand Asset Management?

First, it’s important to understand what we mean by brand asset management. Brand asset management protects a brand by ensuring that all brand assets are used consistently and in the correct way. This includes everything from using the correct color palette to ensuring that the brand’s messaging is consistent across all channels. Consistency is key to building brand recognition and trust, and brand asset management helps to maintain that consistency over time.

Digital asset management (DAM) is a subset of brand asset management that specifically focuses on the management of digital assets, such as images, videos, audio files, and other types of media. In the context of brand management, DAM involves the organization, storage, and distribution of digital assets to ensure that they are used consistently and effectively across all channels. In this day and age, pretty much every asset is digital– so how your brand manages digital assets to key to how clear your brand can communicate across touchpoints.

 

Frontify Brand Portal

What is Frontify?

Digitizing assets has been an incredible step forward for the brand world, but it’s also made organization of those assets absolutely critical. Frontify allows brands to centralize all brand assets– identity, positioning, media, and more– into one system that’s flexible and adaptable to each client’s needs. With Frontify, brands can build their brand guidelines and manage, share, and download the assets, all in one place.

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Frontify has four major components:

Digitizing assets has been an incredible step forward for the brand world, but it’s also made organization of those assets absolutely critical. Frontify allows brands to centralize all brand assets– identity, positioning, media, and more– into one system that’s flexible and adaptable to each client’s needs. With Frontify, brands can build their brand guidelines and manage, share, and download the assets, all in one place.

1. Brand Guidelines:

This is a best practices document that explains the core of the brand. It’s shared with internal teams and external partners to ensure consistent brand presentation. It includes brand positioning, visual identity, and more. At Flux, we create Brand Guidelines for all of our clients. Before Frontify, the only way to do this was in a PDF – a static document that was highly limited in sharing and updating ability. Frontify allows us to build customized, beautiful brand guidelines documents that are live and shareable, making updating and collaborating a breeze.

2. Digital Asset Management:

Frontify integrates DAM and Brand Guidelines into one platform, so as your guidelines evolve, so do your digital assets. There’s no need to go back and forth, trying to remember what the latest version of the campaign image is. With advanced sharing settings, it’s easy to customize who can access assets for download or viewing. You can also embed assets directly onto the web from Frontify, ensuring that if they ever need to be updated, they’ll update automatically across your online presence

3. Creative Collaboration:

Frontify is also a shared project platform, allowing teams to collaborate on asset creation in real time. With workflow management, it’s easy to work across teams or with external partners to share, give feedback, and approve asset creation.

4. Digital & Print Templates:

You can create templates for digital, print, and video to be housed directly in your Frontify platform, streamlining the creation of repetitive assets and ensuring that all visuals follow the same style. This is especially useful for working with external teams who may not be as well versed in your brand as internal designers, allowing them to seamlessly build assets that are always in line with your brand.

How Flux Can Help You Build Your Frontify

As an agency partner, we are using Frontify to build Brand Guidelines for our clients. Frontify is replacing our traditional approach of using Google Slides and PDFs to distribute brand guidelines to our clients, supporting them in better digital asset management practices from the start. We are well versed in the possibilities and customization available within the platform, and focus on building beautiful, branded guidelines which include strategically organized assets for future use and growth.

We’re incredibly excited to be using Frontify for our clients, and believe it’s a major advancement in brand management. Check out brands using Frontify on their website, and get in touch with us if you’re interested in using Frontify for your brand. Flux can build your identity from the ground up, culminating in a brand manual built on the Frontify platform, or we can help you integrate your existing brand assets into Frontify to streamline organization in the future. Wherever you’re at with your brand, Frontify is an amazing tool that will allow your brand to scale like never before.

Bringing your company into the future is important work – so don’t let fear hold you back from it. If you want some guidance along the way, our branding agency in Los Angeles is here to help.

Viva Magenta: Pantone Color of the Year 2023

It’s the end of the year. We’re giving gifts, decorating, and spending time with family and friends. Holiday parties. New Year’s celebrations. It’s a festive time no matter what religion you observe. And it’s also an important moment for those of us who follow the cult of design– the announcement of Pantone’s color of the year.

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The Pantone color of the year is chosen by the Pantone Color Institute, created to shed light on the connection between color and the larger cultural moment. A color is selected each year to reflect the zeitgeist, drawing on everything from industry trends, pop culture, current events, future forecasting and more.

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Pantone’s color of the year for 2023 is Viva Magenta 18-750. Pantone describes it as “a shade rooted in nature descending from the red family and expressive of a new signal of strength.” Other descriptors include optimistic, joyous, brave, and fearless. It “vibrates with vim and vigor.” It’s “an unconventional shade for an unconventional time.”

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Magenta is quite an interesting shade. It technically doesn’t exist, as there’s no wavelength of light that corresponds to that color. But that may be the very reason why Pantone chose it– it’s a hybrid and a shapeshifter, straddling warm and cool, red and purple, natural and digital.

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Announcing their selection with the statement, “Welcome to the Magentaverse,” it’s clear that Pantone is reflecting on the connection between the physical and virtual worlds. Derived from the cochineal, the insect from which carmine red is created, magenta is just as at home in the natural world as it is in the tech space. Compared to last year’s color of the year, the bright periwinkle hue Veri Peri that was invented just for the color of the year, Viva Magenta feels more soulful, organic, and bold.

 

It’s an interesting hue with a fascinating reasoning behind it. Does Viva Magenta speak to you? We’d love to know what you think. Send us a note and tell us about it.

What’s the Value of Branding?

Brand Equity

Branding is a company-wide effort that takes time, energy, and resources.

It’s not easy.

It’s not cheap.

We’ve talked about the many benefits of branding. But you might still be asking yourself where branding shows up in your revenue reports, and how you can measure the actual value of a branding effort.

The answer is multifold.

While marketing focuses on specific, targeted campaigns, branding is an evolution. In marketing, there are set points to measure your return on investment, but with branding, it’s not as clear-cut. In branding, it’s all about building value.

But what does that mean?

And if you can’t measure it based on income and expense, how do you know if branding is actually worth it?

Let’s break it down.

What do we mean by value?

There are two primary reports for measuring a business: profit and loss vs. balance sheet.

The P&L statement compares income and expenses, and then makes a simple subtraction of the two to determine profit. The balance sheet compares assets and liabilities and uses equity to force them to balance.

Marketing is on your profit and loss statement.
Branding is on your balance sheet.

Branding and marketing have different end goals. Marketing is about developing a return on investment within a set period of time. Branding is about building value over the long term.

Marketing shows up in your profit and loss. You can compare directly what a marketing effort costs and how much business was generated, and see if you made a profit.

But branding aims to build value and is more abstract. It’s located on your balance sheet. Unlike a simple income versus expense calculation of marketing, your brand is an asset, which means it can grow and change, as well as be bought and sold.

The same is true for the timeline of returns: marketing is short-term, and branding is long-term. Marketing creates sales in the moment, but branding builds longevity and loyalty.

Branding builds brand equity.

In short: just because branding doesn’t lend itself to a direct income vs. expense comparison like marketing, that doesn’t mean branding isn’t important. The benefits of strong branding resonate both internally and externally across consumers and employees. Measuring the impact of branding on your organization requires a different perspective, a focus on long-term value rather than short-term gains.

What is brand equity?

Brand value is also referred to as brand equity: the accumulated value of a company’s brand assets, both financially and strategically.

In practice, brand equity is the overall market strength of a brand.

What is your brand worth in the marketplace? High-value brands are memorable and authentic, and inspire loyalty in their customers. Brand value is a huge asset – it’s how you keep customers coming back in an ever-changing marketplace, even when you have a myriad of competitors.

When your brand is valuable, consumers trust you.

Think of a brand like Coca-Cola. The value of the Coca-Cola brand is most likely equal to, if not exceeding, the value of all the physical assets of the company, like warehouses, factories, offices, personnel, etc. Imagine if Coca-Cola sold its brand. The company that bought them would have an instant foothold in the market. And that’s not because Coke is delicious, it’s because people know the brand.

It goes to show that the power– the value– of the company isn’t just in its production capacity. It’s in the strength of their mindshare.

Brand Value in Action

Brand value isn’t all abstract. The impact of a valuable brand can be seen in concrete, measurable ways. A strong brand makes your sales and marketing teams, as well as your internal hiring practices, much more effective, directly increasing revenue.

Powerful branding supercharges your sales team

    • Consumers use a bold brand as shorthand, so your sales team doesn’t have to introduce everything about you in every sale.
    • By developing a well-recognized identity that communicates an authentic concept, people feel a connection to the special offering you provide. That connection forges loyalty, which rises above features and benefits.
    • Branding makes it easier for your sales team to close deals and get new business because their targets already know what the company is about and are connected to it through the brand.

Branding also boosts your marketing efficacy.

Marketing is a short-term investment and can reap great returns. But you will end up wasting time and money on disparate marketing campaigns without a solid brand identity and equity to base them on.

    • When your brand is strong, your marketing efforts are more focused and therefore more effective.
    • With a solid brand, marketing and branding work in a symbiotic relationship, each reinforcing the other.
    • Your branding efforts create a loyal consumer base, while your marketing efforts strengthen your brand identity by getting your message out to the right people.

Further, there are internal benefits to building a strong brand. 

    • Your brand develops a sense of spirit among the people who stand behind them..
    • Spirited organizations are highly effective because the hearts and souls of the employees, investors, and contractors are committed to their success.
    • Recruiting and retaining top talent is easier when you have a great brand because your visibility and position within your industry are clear.
    • With the right people in the right roles who care about your company, the business will run better– and generate more profit.

Brand Value: 5 Key Takeaways

1. Brand Equity is on the Balance Sheet

Executives tend to look for ROI on branding initiatives as a way to determine budget levels. But equity isn’t found on your P&L; it’s on the Balance Sheet.

Brand equity is an asset, so consider the budget as an investment. The ROI will be long-term, contributing to the valuation of the organization

2. Brand equity is often greater than book value

In many cases, the value of a great brand can eclipse the value of a company’s tangible assets.

Brands like Coke and Google drive valuations far higher than the sum of their facilities and inventory. Taking an investor’s approach to branding opens up the opportunity for high rates of return.

3. Branding drives more than revenue 

Branding does increase revenues by making your sales, marketing, and hiring more effective. But it’s also more than the sum of its parts– a strong brand can drive up the entire value of your organization.

Branding is a long-term, capitalized investment that delivers benefits over time.

4. Brand value is largely emotional

The degree to which your customers form an emotional connection with your company has huge ramifications for your longevity in the marketplace and ability to capture mindshare.

It is through branding that customers form an emotional bond with your company, elevating the interaction from a simple transaction to something much more meaningful. That’s what gets them to return, choosing you over a competitor. This translates to strong brand loyalty even when your offerings change.

5. Branding is a strategic investment

Branding is an essential element of your strategic plan, requiring an integrated consideration from leadership. Attempting to assemble piecemeal funding from the marketing department alone is like leveraging investing for retirement with loose change.

With a solid understanding of the value of branding, it’s clear why you need to allot funding and energy to such a critical initiative.

Branding is an all-encompassing process that reverberates internally and externally through your company over time. The accounting complexity required to develop a strong ROI formula for branding makes it difficult to project returns. But that’s not a reason to discount the value of branding.

The results for companies with strong brand equity speak for themselves. If you’re dedicated to building long-term value in your company, it’s important to keep an eye on your brand.

If you’re ready to build value in your company through branding, we’re ready to help. As a top branding agency in Los Angeles, we’ve helped hundreds of companies across industries sharpen their position and clarify their place in the market.

Branding aligns your team and connects your customers. The value of that cannot be overstated 

Cooper Hewitt 2022 NDA Winners

NDA banner

October 17-23 is National Design Week.

Launched in 2006, it’s a time to celebrate the power of design in our everyday lives. Held in conjunction with the National Design Awards, it’s an exciting time to shine a spotlight on some of the world’s most exciting designers and design thinkers.

Here’s a description of the awards from the Cooper Hewitt website:

The National Design Awards is a Cooper Hewitt initiative launched in 2000 as an official project of the White House Millennium Council. The awards and its associated public programs seek to increase national awareness of the impact of design in our everyday life.

Reflecting the ever-growing scope of design, the National Design Awards program currently includes nine award categories:Design Visionary, Climate Action, Emerging Designer, Architecture / Interior Design, Communication Design, Digital Design, Fashion Design, Landscape Architecture, and Product Design.

In addition to the annual awards ceremony, Cooper Hewitt integrates National Design Award winners in a series of educational programs happening throughout the year and during National Design Week.

Check out all of the incredible winners at the awards site. From building affordable and beautiful housing, to recycling vintage textiles in men’s fashion, to visualizing big data at a human scale, the featured work is truly extraordinary. Many of the recipients are using inventive materials and incorporating digital technologies in their work.

While they’re all unique, they share the common ground of using design as a way to approach some of our world’s greatest challenges. Design affects the way we live and understand our time. Congratulations to these design mavericks who are endlessly inspiring.

Do you have a favorite? Tell us about it!

Below is a small sample of the amazing work these Designers produce.

Nader-Tehrani
Nader Tehrani, Tanderrum Pedestrian Bridge, a new pedestrian bridge (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 2016). Collaborator: John Wardle Architects. Photo: Kristoffer Paulsen

 

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Giorgia Lupi, Mindworks: The Science of Thinking, data visualization and experience design for the world’s first working lab dedicated to behavioral science, hosted by the University of Chicago (Chicago, Illinois, 2020). Project Partners: Abbott Miller (Pentagram), Luke Hayman (Pentagram), K&S Partners. Photo: Tom Rossiter

 

CWT
CW&T, Penny Pelican, a penny farthing style cargo bike for hauling around goods and small children (Brooklyn, New York, 2018). Photo: CW&T

 

Is it Time to Rebrand?

Time to rebrand

Change is the only constant. But timing is essential.

Whether you have your standards defined or not, the truth is that brands are in a continual state of flux, internally or externally.Branding is most successful when companies embrace this fact and move with the market and respond to customer sentiment, rather than trying to stand still. While taking a real look at your brand is always beneficial, there are times of change that signal a branding effort is not only helpful – it’s imperative. How do you know when it’s time to rebrand?

In this essay, we’ll go over six major triggers that should prompt a rebranding conversation. We’ll also talk about what rebranding is, why it can be both risky and rewarding, and what to do if you’ve found it’s really time to rebrand.

Contents

1. What is rebranding?
2. Why you shouldn’t rebrand
3. Six trigger events for rebranding
4. Where do you go from here?

What is rebranding?

Rebranding is the process of shifting how a brand is perceived through repositioning and strategic messaging. It’s more than just changing your logo– a true rebrand will alter your market position, the big idea from which all external brand manifestations grow from. Rebrands can result in huge evolutions, including changes in naming, communications strategy, visual tone, and internal restructuring. Brands are the basis for forming tribes, so a rebrand needs to be carefully design to embrace your loyal followers— not to offend them.

Successful rebrands always begin from in-depth research to determine the root of the issue. It’s important to know whether the issue triggering the rebrand is a symptom or a cause. Is your brand having trouble maintaining relevance because your core message no longer resonates with consumers? Or is it due to lack of brand governance in an overly siloed organization that struggles to consistently deliver that message across media touch points? These are different problems with different solutions. Both require a look at your current brand, but in distinct ways.

Why you shouldn’t rebrand

Change is not easy. The process of transformation can even be painful, requiring you to take an honest look at what is and isn’t working. Rebranding takes time and effort– it’s not a light undertaking. If it’s the right time for the process, the rewards can be huge. If it’s the wrong time, the risks can be disastrous. Let’s look at an example.

Tropicana is one of the biggest rebranding fails to date. In 2009, the juice company invested $35 million in a rebranding effort that culminated in a package redesign. The iconic carton with an image of an orange and a straw sticking out of it completely changed. It was replaced by an entirely new logo (a sans serif font), a wrap-around image of a glass of juice, and all new messaging.

Tropicana rebrand

The idea was to modernize the Tropicana brand. But the backlash was swift. Consumers hated the bland packaging, and Tropicana went back to their original carton in a matter of weeks. It was a major waste of time and resources, not to mention a $20 million loss in sales. What went wrong?

    • Looking in the wrong place: Wanting to be hip and cool isn’t a reason to rebrand. That’s an outcome, not a trigger. Maybe it was time for Tropicana to evolve, but they didn’t know where or how the transformation needed to occur. Clearly, their customers love their packaging– meaning they funneled the resources for the rebrand into the wrong place.
    • Change all at once: Change is hard. Rolling out a new logo, messaging strategy, and package all at the same time is difficult. How you communicate the changes is just as important as making the right changes.
    • Misaligning design and strategy: The whole point of rebranding is to make you more yourself– to more closely align the internal intelligence (the why) with external appearance (design). Tropicana’s new packaging does the opposite– the modern, ascetic design clashes with their positioning as a family oriented comfort brand. The disconnect was immediately clear to consumers.

Tropicana took a $55 million hit on the rebranding. This isn’t to say rebranding is futile. It’s just to say that it’s not without pitfalls. And it makes it even more essential that you’re doing it for the right reasons.

6 trigger events for rebranding

INDUSTRY CHANGE

1. Losing market share to a competitor: Competitive attack is a sign that your brand is not yet memorable and irreplaceable enough to win out in your industry. Uncovering what your brand is missing and repositioning it based on your unique advantages is an investment that will pay off for years to come.
2. Launching a new product or service: When launching new goods or services, your brand is in a particularly sensitive state. If the face you present to the outside world is shifting, your brand needs to shift, too. Expanding your offerings can be great for your brand, but without a clear strategy, new facets of your brand can serve to muddy the water and confuse consumers. Brand focus is key to memorability, recognition, and loyalty, so it’s imperative that your brand encompasses your new offerings in a way that is true and authentic to your brand position.

ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE

3. Not attracting/retaining top talent: Branding isn’t only for influencing your consumers – it also has a major effect on your employees. With both internal and external benefits, good branding can breathe life into your company. If you find that your team is not excited about your company and not proud to pass out your business card, the story you’re telling isn’t working. A hard look at your brand can put you on the right track.
4. Change in leadership: A change over in leadership, such as a new CEO, prompts a key time for branding. It’s an effective way to break with the past and cement a new culture of leadership and company values
5. Mergers and acquisitions: If you are diversifying your brand portfolio, it’s critical to have a clear strategy for expanding your brand or re-branding your subsidiaries. A good brand strategy will expand your reach, while a messy one can seriously damage your recognition.

EXTERNAL CHANGE

6. Reputation crisis: rebranding can be an important strategy to distance your company from negative associations. Obviously, rebranding doesn’t totally clean the slate. You’ll still have to do the work needed to fix whatever problem has caused your customers or your employees to see you in a negative light. But, when combined thoughtfully with other strategies, it can help shift perceptions.

Where do you go from here?

You’ve identified that you’re facing a trigger event. Rebranding is necessary. Now what?

    • Make sure leadership is on board.
      Successful rebranding comes from the top down. Leadership needs to be willing to change and engage.
    • Define your goals.
      What’s your vision? Defining the objectives and clearly conveying them gives your team something to rally around and work towards.
    • Be ready to open up.
      Get ready to take an honest look at what’s working and not working. The research phase of rebranding is critical and acts as the basis of any rebranding strategy. The more real and honest you can be, the more authentic your direction will become.
    • Find the right branding partner.
      Rebranding is a journey of transformation. An experienced guide with an outside perspective can lead you on the right path. Any branding agency leading your rebrand should have a proven methodology for developing a strategy and then translating it into creative assets.

Over the last 20 years, we’ve crafted hundreds of brands, and led many through rebranding at times of major internal and external transition. Change can be scary, but with the right partner, it’s hugely rewarding. Is it time to rebrand? If you’re ready to transform, we’re ready to take your brand from now to next.

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6 Internal and External Benefits of Branding

Benefits of Branding

It’s often said that brand is everything.

The meaning is twofold.

At one level, “everything” refers to the make-or-break success of branding and rebranding campaigns – if you don’t have good branding, you aren’t going to have a competitive edge and reach your potential. At another level, “everything” refers to the totalizing nature of branding.

It’s the sum of all internal and external parts of your business. And the benefits of branding impact both.

The 6 essential benefits of branding

Brand is everything. It’s a huge statement.

In this essay, we’re going to break down why branding is so important – and share some of the benefits of branding.

    • What does it do for your company?
    • What does it do for your employees?
    • And what does it do for your loyal customers?

A strong brand strategy is a critically important part of building longevity in a rapidly changing market. But longevity isn’t the only benefit of branding. As a top branding firm in Los Angeles, here are some of the other benefits our clients experienced after letting us build their brands:

Internal benefits of branding

Branding impacts the very spirit of your company, which impacts your day-to-day operations.

1. Better, more engaged talent

Your brand isn’t just for your customers. It’s just as much for your employees. A part of your brand strategy process should include defining your company values, culture, and philosophy. Strong brands rally their teams around a unified mission, resulting in alignment and cooperation.

One of the benefits of branding is making people feel something for your company – and that affects your employees even more closely than it does your customers.

In fact, 72% of recruiting leaders worldwide say that employer branding has a significant impact on hiring. People want to work for a company that they know stands for something and aligns with their own sense of purpose.

2. Increased revenue

One of the most desired benefits of branding is its impact on revenue. And this is three-fold.

Branding helps qualify customers more quickly, helping improve marketing efforts and decrease acquisition costs by quickly attracting the right people who are most likely to become customers. This in turn has a tremendous impact on sales teams, allowing them to focus their time on helping prospects who are qualified and ready to buy.

Further, another surprising benefit of branding is lower price sensitivity. This means customers give less weight to price when they are purchasing from a business with an intentional brand identity.

Lastly, branding goes hand-in-hand with increased revenue because it creates loyalty and repeat customers. It’s much easier to re-engage an existing customer than a new one. And research shows that 57% of customers spend more money on brands they’re loyal to.

3. Streamlined product launches and marketing efforts

The benefits of a strong brand mean you don’t have to figure it out from scratch every time your company evolves.

Whether it’s launching a new product or service (and navigating product marketing vs brand marketing), expanding into a new market territory, or managing a new acquisition, your established brand paves the path forward.

It acts as a guiding light that empowers better decisions, streamlining complex business changes and ensuring that stakeholders are all on the same page.

 

External benefits of branding

Your brand affects your customers on multiple different levels.

4. Increases loyalty

This is one of the benefits of branding that straddles both internal and external parts of your company.

Customer brand loyalty is the natural effect of a positive experience, product satisfaction, and the perceived value of your offering.

Getting customers to buy is one thing– getting them to return again and again is another. While marketing may get people in the door, branding is what really cultivates loyalty. Loyalty can only be formed if customers have a reason to believe. Knowing what you stand for and what drives you as a company allows them to align their beliefs with yours.

Engaging with something they believe in is a much stronger motivator for repeat action than simply buying a product or service they want.

And as your brand loyalty grows, so too does your brand reputation.

5. Creates a stronger connection

Brands use emotional branding motivators to elevate transactions to memorable experiences. When it’s more than a purchase, people are driven to action.

They’re not just buying a car, they’re buying adventure.

They’re not just buying a computer, they’re buying innovation.

They’re not just joining a gym, they’re joining a community.

This is an incredible benefit of branding that fosters long-term engagement and staying power in a crowded market. A huge part of branding is about figuring out what feeling you want to inspire in people, then engineering the response.

We’ve written extensively on the powerful relationship between branding and emotion– check out this series of articles for more information.

6. Improves brand recognition

Strong brands are instantly recognizable through visual cues and messages.

In a crowded marketplace, you have just .05 seconds to make an impression. It’s essential that you stand out from the competition.

Having a clear brand strategy process means having a plan to align your brand voice and identity across all platforms and mediums, ensuring consistent presentation. The easier it is for customers to know who you are, the better they can make decisions. In fact, a consistent brand presentation has been seen to increase revenue by 33%.

Ready to experience the benefits of branding?

The multiple benefits of branding aren’t always obvious. Branding can have a huge effect on your business – internally and externally. Whether meant to boost your company culture, boost sales, or increase customer loyalty, a well-executed brand-driven strategy makes a major impact.

As such, you shouldn’t think of a branding or rebranding campaign as a secondary part of marketing. We are a branding firm in Los Angeles that’s dedicated solely to crafting exceptional brands.

Branding requires resources, time, and effort. By enlisting an experienced, professional team with a proven process, you can let your internal team focus on their primary roles. Partnering with a trusted agency helps bring out the authentic core of who you are. At Flux, we help companies bring their stories to life. If you’re ready to take your brand from now to next, we’re here to help.

The potential for long-term success makes a branding campaign more than worth it.

In need of branding services today for a stronger brand tomorrow?

Get in touch.

LIV on Pico Naming Party

KFA Rendere of LIV on PICO

It’s always fun to see the brands we make enter into the world. We’ve been hard at work with Cityview Developers to craft identities for several of their new major residential projects across Los Angeles. A few weeks ago, Alex and Olivia attended the naming unveiling ceremony at LIV, an amenities-forward building in Mid-City that we named, positioned, and built the entire visual language for.

LIV-Naming_Party

The building’s location near LA’s museum row and particularly the Los Angeles County Museum of Art makes it a perfect place for creative minds, and the event definitely had an artistic flair. A local spoken word artist introduced the name with a poem, while a painter created a work that will be hung in the finished lobby.

LIV-Naming-Party_Music

The event also featured live jazz, an oyster bar, and a cotton candy machine.

LIV-Naming_Party_Painter

We had a great time seeing how far the building has come since we last toured the property and seeing all the attendees experience the name and logo we created for the first time. The signage we designed will be going up soon, and we can’t wait to print the fun brand experience pieces we developed, including a set of postcards featuring original art.

A lot of love and effort goes into taking a brand from idea to reality, and we so enjoyed getting to celebrate that together. Take a look at the website we designed. It will give a taste of the brand we created for LIV on pico.