In my experience, businesses don’t often wake up one morning and decide they need a rebrand.
There isn’t usually some dramatic moment when the logo suddenly becomes unbearable or the website finally refuses to cooperate. More often, it starts with something much smaller. You send someone your website and find yourself apologising before they’ve even clicked the link. You hand over a brochure with the caveat that it’s “a bit old now”. Somebody asks about a service you haven’t offered in years and you realise, slightly awkwardly, that your marketing is still introducing people to a version of the business that no longer exists.
This is hardly surprising, businesses grow and evolve. They discover new opportunities, attract different customers and change in ways nobody could have predicted when they first opened the doors. Meanwhile, websites, logos and messaging often sit patiently in the background, waiting for somebody to remember they exist.
At The Creative Branch, we’ve seen this countless times with businesses across Cumbria and the Lake District. In fact, needing to refresh your brand is often a symptom of success rather than failure. It often means you’ve spent so much time developing the business that you’ve forgotten to bring the outside world along with you.
People often assume branding starts and ends with appearances, although Simon, affectionately known as the ‘King of Brand’, would probably spend a considerable amount of time explaining why that’s not the case.
Nobody is entirely sure when he acquired the title (whether he commissioned the crown himself remains unconfirmed) although years of helping organisations understand how perception shapes trust have certainly earned him the position. While most people see a business card as little more than something to exchange at meetings, Simon sees it as another brand touchpoint and an opportunity to reinforce quality and professionalism.
Admittedly, if you ask him a simple question about business cards, there’s every chance you’ll receive an answer involving paper weights, texture and the subtle emotional qualities of uncoated stock. Fortunately for our clients, experience means these decisions are instinctive and made remarkably quickly, which is fortunate because clients generally prefer solutions to lectures on the merits of 400gsm stock.
The details matter, but not because anyone enjoys making life complicated. They matter because all those small choices combine to shape how people feel about a business, often before they’ve consciously realised they’re making a judgement.
Which, when you think about it, is exactly what expertise should do.
The signs are rarely dramatic.
You hesitate before sharing your website. You find yourself explaining away old brochures. Your team somehow accumulates seven different versions of the logo, each with increasingly alarming file names like FINAL FINAL NEWEST LOGO 2, which everyone knows is usually followed by FINAL FINAL NEWEST LOGO 2 ACTUAL.
New enquiries are coming from customers who aren’t really the right fit, while services have evolved and ambitions have grown, yet your story still reflects where you were five years ago.
None of these things represent a crisis. If anything, they suggest progress. Perhaps the business that once operated around a kitchen table now has twenty employees. The company that started by serving local customers is now working across the UK. What once felt ambitious has become normal and, somewhere along the way, the identity that supported you at the beginning stopped telling the whole story.
The signs are rarely dramatic.
You hesitate before sharing your website. You find yourself explaining away old brochures. Your team somehow accumulates seven different versions of the logo, each with increasingly alarming file names like FINAL FINAL NEWEST LOGO 2, which everyone knows is usually followed by FINAL FINAL NEWEST LOGO 2 ACTUAL.
New enquiries are coming from customers who aren’t really the right fit, while services have evolved and ambitions have grown, yet your story still reflects where you were five years ago.
None of these things represent a crisis. If anything, they suggest progress. Perhaps the business that once operated around a kitchen table now has twenty employees. The company that started by serving local customers is now working across the UK. What once felt ambitious has become normal and, somewhere along the way, the identity that supported you at the beginning stopped telling the whole story.
The same thinking extends into websites.
Josh and Sue spend their time translating brands into digital experiences that people interact with every day. The speed of a website, the clarity of a journey and the overall feel of an experience all contribute to how people perceive a business, even if they never consciously notice the details.
Much like good service in a restaurant, the best experiences often feel effortless precisely because so much thought has gone into making them that way. Nobody has ever visited a website and thought, “I wish this was slightly more confusing.”
And that really sums up good branding as a whole. Clients don’t pay us to obsess over the finer points of typography or animation timings. They pay us to solve problems, build trust and make their businesses easier to understand. Experience simply means we can often spot things that others wouldn’t think to ask about, which is considerably more useful than spending three hours debating whether a button should move two pixels to the left.
Most of the time.
Ironically, outgrowing your brand is usually a sign that things are going well.
It’s not always about a dramatic reinvention (although sometimes it definitely is!). Businesses usually need their identity to just catch up with the organisation they’ve become. Sometimes that’s a new website, sometimes it’s clearer messaging, sometimes it’s a refreshed visual identity. More often than not, it’s about bringing everything back into alignment.
Because branding isn’t about chasing trends or changing things for the sake of it. It’s about making sure that when somebody encounters your business for the first time, they’re seeing the company you are today rather than the one you used to be.
And if that question makes you pause for a moment, you’re probably already starting to answer it.
Just don’t ask Simon about paper stocks unless you’ve cleared your diary.
