A brand refresh can seem the perfect way to reaffirm your position at the front of the pack among your competitors and give business a new lease of life. And in fact, if you don’t keep your B2B brand fresh and moving forward, you risk being left behind by competitors that are charging ahead.

However, changing too much, too quickly can have a damaging effect on your brand legacy. If people can’t connect the dots between the old and the new, you could lose the consumer trust you’ve worked so hard to build. Here’s how to deliver your vision without losing brand heritage.

Develop what you’ve got – don’t dispense with it.

A personality scale is a useful exercise to weigh up your brand positioning and assess where your brand stands today versus where you want it to sit – and identify aspects of your heritage you want to carry forward. This can help to inform everything from a tweaked slogan to a re-minted logo.

But brand development doesn’t require overhauling everything that’s worked up until now. You can retain an iconic colour or device as the hero of your visual identity, but build out your palette and creative assets with complementary styles to give you more to play with and differentiate yourself further.

Your tone of voice and messaging should follow. Don’t rewrite your brand values and supporting messages, for example, but if you’re trying to appear more established, shorten them into punchy statements that use the active voice and start with directive verbs.

Keeping your brand’s foundations ensures your legacy remains recognisable and familiar to your customers even as you set yourself apart. The Cannes Lions Creativity Report 2023 notes how essence and longevity are assets you should pull through: “Tell stories about your brand’s heritage to bring loyal customers closer and educate new ones. Focus on the emotional reasons consumers have to buy your brand and turn that into a bold statement.”

Interviewing your customers will give you those emotional reasons first-hand, along with frank opinions on your existing branding and marketing. Using these insights sets up a brand refresh for success by tethering it to customer preferences and desires, and ensuring you don’t inadvertently ditch the good stuff. You can even share some of those insights externally when you launch, explaining the feedback you incorporated.

Promote the purpose of the refresh. 

This means being clear on the intent of your refresh, and tying it back to your core values – such as putting your most popular offering front and centre, or enhancing user experience.

It’s not just about showing what’s changed and what’s remained, but connecting it to what your brand stands for. When Nationwide launched its brand refresh to customers, for example, it included messages around things such as a commitment to keeping branches open (unlike its competitors). The ‘shock of the new’ was carefully counterbalanced with reassurances around what mattered most to Nationwide customers.

Apply sensitivity to every step. 

A phased launch can prevent overwhelming your customers. Your brand refresh strategy should begin by rolling out across your website, before more radical new assets are sent out into the world. This lets customers acclimatise to the new look and feel, instead of introducing them to that on top of a new content format. It also ensures that the central home of your brand – the destination customers are sent to from your assets – is in order and sending the right signals.

Rather than a generic blanket announcement regarding the brand refresh, messaging in emails and comms to existing customers should be tailored so they’re not left to decipher what’s changed. They will continue to be loyal to your brand, just as they always have been.

Have a read of our ANS case study on how we refreshed their brand for their new website. And get in touch if a brand refresh sounds like something we can help with.