Evolving your brand without losing what people love about it

How do you evolve your brand without losing what people love about it?

Recently, I was wondering what it feels like to be on the John Lewis advertising team when the Christmas campaign launches.

Months of conversations, ideas, decisions and work. Then out it goes, for everyone to have an opinion.

Everyone has a favourite from across the years. Some people want to feel how they felt watching an advert ten years ago. Others are waiting for something different. And somewhere in the middle, there’s a business that needs people to buy their Christmas presents.

When your brand has become part of people’s Christmas traditions, you’ve earned something valuable. You’ve also given yourself quite a recurring challenge, year on year.

How do you keep moving forward and evolving, when people are so attached to what you’ve done before?

It’s a question we all need to consider in our businesses. And the longer you’ve been around, the more complicated this can become.

What should you change? What should you hold onto?

Very few brands stay exactly the same.

Your business grows and your customers’ lives change. Your team gets bigger, your products develop and the world around you moves on.

Something that worked really well when you started might need adjusting five, ten or twenty years later. But that doesn’t mean everything needs replacing.

There might be enormous value in your name, your story, your way of doing things or a promise you’ve kept for years. Sometimes those things are so familiar inside the business that you forget how much they matter to the people outside it.

Equally, “we’ve always done it this way” can keep you hanging onto things that have stopped being useful.

Knowing the difference takes care. This is where your brand strategy becomes SUPER important, and where our four Cs framework comes in:
Clarity
Creativity
Consistency
and Control.

Clarity: know what you’re staying true to

Before you decide what to change, you need to understand what makes your brand yours.

Why does your business exist? Who are you here for? What do people value about you? What do you want them to expect whenever they deal with you?

These are the foundations for your decisions.

If you’re clear that customers choose you because you make something complicated feel manageable, you can use that understanding to develop a new service, redesign your website or introduce a different way of working.

If you have a brand strategy in place, then you have something concrete to judge new ideas against: will this help us keep true to who we are?

Without clarity, decisions can become a matter of personal taste. Someone likes a new colour. Someone else prefers the old website. The most forceful voice in the room wins, and nobody is quite sure whether the business has moved forward.

Creativity: give the brand somewhere to go

A clear brand strategy gives you plenty to work with creatively.

You can find fresh ways to bring your story to life, demonstrate your values and connect with your audience. You can respond to what’s happening in their lives and explore ideas that wouldn’t have been relevant when you started.

The John Lewis concept of ‘nostalgia’ is a good example. I’m pretty sure that this word will feature somewhere in their brand strategy.

An old song or a familiar object might help people connect with a story. The creative judgement is in understanding whose memories you’re drawing on, what those memories mean to them and why they matter to the message.

The same applies to any new idea you might want to try. What will it help people understand or feel about your business? How do YOU want to make people feel? This is something John Lewis nails time after time.

For you, that’s a much more useful starting point than just looking around and wondering what everyone else is doing.

Consistency: help people recognise you as you evolve

People build an understanding of your brand through repeated experiences.

The way you speak. The care you take. Your appearance. How you respond when something goes wrong.

As you evolve, enough of that needs to remain familiar for people to recognise you and know what to expect.

You might update your visual identity while keeping a distinctive colour. You might introduce new services while continuing to give customers the personal guidance they’ve always valued. Your language might become more confident as the business matures, while retaining its warmth.

Consistency comes from understanding which threads need to run through everything. Your strategy helps you identify them.

Control: make deliberate decisions

This gets harder as you grow.

More people are making decisions. More suppliers are creating things on your behalf. There are more places for your brand to appear and more opportunities for it to drift.

Control means giving people the understanding and tools to make good decisions: clear messages, useful guidelines, templates and examples, backed by a strategy they can use (without having to ask you for clarification).

We use our Three Decision Questions™ as a filter when we’re making choices:

Is it strategically right?

What does this say about us?

How will it land with people?

They’re useful whether you’re considering a social media post or a significant change to the business. They make you pause long enough to consider the consequences.

Give people a reason to come with you

Before changing something, find out what people value about it. Listen to customers, look at how they behave and question your own assumptions.

Then be clear about what the change will make better.

You won’t please everyone. A familiar brand belongs, in a small way, to all the people who’ve formed an attachment to it. Some will need time to get used to something new.

But you should be able to explain your decisions with confidence and see how they connect to the business you’re building.

Evolving a brand is a fine art. You need to understand its history, recognise its strengths and see where it could go next.

That’s why you need a strategy to guide you.

And, occasionally, a branding consultant to help you see what’s worth keeping when you’ve been looking at it for twenty years…

If you’re working out what comes next for your brand, we’d love to put the kettle on and talk it through.

You can book a FREE call with us here:

https://links.eschub.com/widget/bookings/bookacall-30min-with-ailsa

B is for Brand – Achieve Brand Clarity