[00:00:00] Lori: If you're a regular listener, you might be wondering what's going on with the Sticky Brand Lab podcast. And, you might be wondering if we're going to return. If you're new to the show, you also might be wondering, should you continue listening? Well, the answer to both of those is, drumroll please! Yes!
[00:00:21] Nola: Of course we will be returning. And as to what's going on, well, we're in the midst of a rebranding overhaul. You see, what began as our annual first -of-the-year goal-setting and strategy session for 2024, it quickly evolved, or devolved, depending on where you stand, into a full-fledged makeover plan.
[00:00:46] Lori: That is so true! Each new revelation, idea, and goal has and is taking us on a very curious and creative journey. And while we are a little nervous, we are also very excited and think you will be too. Over the next several weeks, we're going to be sharing a little bit of our process and dropping in a few hints of the good stuff we'll be bringing you. Like our interview with a Colorado entrepreneur who turned her personal interest and passion into a side business that grew from an online marketplace to a brick-and-mortar store. She'll be sharing her inspirational journey as well as many actionable steps and practical resources she discovered along the way, including financing.
[00:01:32] Nola: In the meantime… Have you ever considered whether your side business, like our podcast, could benefit from a minor makeover or a complete rebrand? Well, stay tuned friend, as we reshare one of our greatest hits: five signs your business needs a refresh or total rebrand. Come back next week for more updates and an informative episode. Or better yet, just hit that subscribe button. And remember, your path to becoming a successful first-time entrepreneur in the second half of a vibrant life begins right here.
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[00:00:00] Nola: Are your sales sluggish? Do you have trouble explaining why your business is different from similar businesses? Is your brand sticky? Whether you answered yes to one or all of these, it might be an indicator that it's time to change your business brand. So, should you totally rebrand or just refresh your current brand? Stay tuned friends because in this episode, we're sharing five indicators that it may be time for your brand to get a make-over.
[00:00:30] Announcer: You're listening to the Sticky Brand lab Podcast, where time strapped professionals, like you learn how to create a business you love in as little as three hours a week,
[00:00:41] Lori: As the CEO, creating a brand that sticks in the minds of your ideal customer is the goal. But when you're just getting started, your brand's identity is often aligned with you. And while that's not a bad thing, it may not be serving your business, which means it's not a good thing either. In fact, it may be time to change your brand identity. In today's episode, we're exploring the topic and giving you five indicators to help you determine whether it's time to rebrand or refresh.
[00:01:11] Nola: There's a saying in real estate: location, location, location. Well, when it comes to your business, the saying should be sticky brand sticky brand sticky brand, because you want to stick in the mind of your current and future customers. Yet in our experience, when we ask a new entrepreneur about their brand, we tend to hear we're designing a logo. And that's usually what comes to mind for most small business owners, but it takes so much more than the perfect logo to create a sticky brand. In fact, it's a whole package of elements that make up a complete brand identity.
[00:01:45] Lori: Yeah, I think that's why branding is so important and such a confusing topic for business owners because the visual aspects are often what people associate when they're first getting started. And that's not necessarily the case.
[00:02:00] Nola: Exactly. It's the combination of a comprehensive brand identity, along with the active branding efforts that you take that result in humanizing your business so that you can create a deeper connection with your audience. In other words, as a brand, the audience, they hear you. They recognize you. They relate to you. And if that's not happening, or it's no longer happening when it used to, it's an indication that it is time for a change.
[00:02:31] Lori: When people start to expand, one of the things that they'll hear from their customers is, that's great. Congratulations, but we'll still be working with you, right? That's when you need to step back. So just to clarify, we're going to give you two definitions, one for rebranding and one for refreshing, so that you can distinguish them in your mind's eye.
When we're talking about rebranding, that is completely changing your brand identity. When we're talking about refreshing that's when we're talking about certain aspects of your current branding, or maybe you're introducing new elements to the existing brand. Another way to think about this is yourself. One of the things that happens with spring for a lot of people is they want to refresh their look. So, a good refresh, you could think about it being a new haircut, a new color. You could think about the cut being changed. All of those are elements of a refresh. You might even add to go with your new style, a new outfit, for example. All part of the refresh. So changing your slogan or adding a slogan or a tagline, tweaking the colors of your logo, maybe updating the font, adjusting colors, adding marketing material, really distinguishing your tone of voice and where it appears in emails or on social platforms. All of that is a total refresh. When you rebrand, think of plastic surgery.
[00:04:09] Nola: Yes. That's a great analogy. Because that plastic surgery means you got a whole new identity, but you keep the same name, right? And similarly, rebranding is a way to completely change the image of your business. And that's often done when a company wants to target a completely new market or industry, or say a company merges with another company. Those are good examples of times when rebranding really happens. And rebranding, that total comprehensive image change, includes developing a new brand story and philosophy or targeting a totally new audience. And in doing so, you're looking at every touch point that audience has when they encounter you and what their experience is. It may perhaps be redefining your company's unique selling proposition, like restating what it is that sets it apart from the competition. And all of that also does include changing or modifying the visual elements such as your logo, fonts, and colors, those kinds of things that people usually think about when they're thinking about a brand.
[00:05:15] Lori: So five indicators or five signs that might be time for you to change up your brand. The first indicator or an obvious sign is that your look, your brand elements, they're out of date. A good example of a company that refreshes consistently is Starbucks. If you look at the original logo of Starbucks, you'll see iterations, but they pretty much have stayed the same as a business or as a brand identity. So they refresh their look. They do that seasonally. You'll see them come up with new colors for cups at the holidays. All of those are not a rebrand. They're just a simple refresh.
Another good example: Southwest Airlines. When Southwest first part of their brand the logo was the airplane, but now a lot of their messaging and their looks, switched from the airplane to the heart. So their colors stayed the same. They bring more of their personality through, and that's what the heart represents.
Now, if we want to think about a rebrand to a refresh kind of changing things a little here, Dunkin Donuts would be a really good example of both. Initially Dunkin Donuts was all about the donuts. And their commercials were, Time to make the donuts, time to make the donuts. And it was this kind of frumpy big guy who wore a baker's uniform and hat, and he was going into the local Dunkin Donut early in the wee hours of the morning to make the donuts. But now when you think about Dunkin Donuts, they switched from that look to kind of like a person running. Their colors changed, the actually their focus of colors just narrowed in. So they still have that orange color, but it's more intense or more a part of their branding element. So they move from donuts to Dunkin Donuts with the running and the focus was on the morning and breakfast elements. Then they switched to refresh to focus more on their coffee. Cause you can buy their coffee in the containers or you can go into a local grocery store and get them and they have since removed the word Donut and now you see Dunkin. So that's a really good indicator of a rebrand to refresh.
[00:07:42] Nola: Several iterations.
[00:07:44] Lori: Exactly.
[00:07:44] Nola: Really from one end to the other is very different. So those are the good example of refresh and then like a refreshed to a rebrand. And an example of a, I would say another rebrand is WeightWatchers. I would say that they went through a rebrand where they were no longer WeightWatchers. They changed who WW. And I just know that my image growing up of WeightWatchers was of women going to home support groups like ladies, home meetings. And while that still happens, the brand image now is more on wellness. So what you hear more about now is Oprah Winfrey's wellness road show. And they even have wellness or had wellness as part of their tagline. And there've been a few lessons in that. They've learned lessons about how quickly to make a brand transition. And that's something we'll talk about later, but it is a good example of a complete rebrand.
[00:08:41] Lori: Yeah. That was a really good example. A second indicator would be your brand lacks cohesive look, and feel across marketing elements, such as your website, your signature on your email, your social platforms that you're on, any hard collateral that you might have. Often, when you get started, you might have the name of your company. You kind of pick out some colors and every element looks different. So here, in order to be consistent, the goal is that people can identify you by your elements. A refresh in this case allows you to tighten up the existing brand to make it more cohesive across every element or touch point that a customer or a prospective customer might have.
The third indicator is your loyal customers aren't engaging in social platforms. So they're not engaging with your business on those social platforms. Now, in this case, your customers love your product or service. You have repeat customers, but when it goes to your social engagement, Crickets. Here what's happening is you have a brand, but your personality isn't coming through in the elements that customers can interact with. So here the refresh is to bring that voice to life.
[00:10:04] Nola: So that is a good example of how to make your brand consistent through the social media channels. And like you said, it's assuming that your audience is on the right platform and your business's good in every other aspect. However, if your brand is losing sales, you might think possibly rebrand. Just saying.
[00:10:27] Lori: Well, if your stuff is outdated, people are not going to respond to it. And they're going to look for the new, the improved, the most recent kid on the block, if you will. So in that case, to give a new pep, a rebrand may be much better than a refresh.
[00:10:45] Nola: Yep. So, the fourth sign that your brand may need a makeover is that your business is adding new products or additional services. So it's not like a negative. It's not like, oh no, something's wrong. I better do a makeover. It's like, Hey, this is a great opportunity to refresh. And in fact, we would advise that you do not rebrand at this time. This is a great opportunity to expand your brand because while new editions can cast a wider customer net and often result in new customers with your new products and services, you don't really need to change your brand identity to accommodate growth. That's the last thing you want to do. You can grow your brand, the grow that identity. And we did that, actually.
[00:11:28] Lori: Yeah.
[00:11:29] Nola: So we did that in Sticky Brand Lab, our company Sticky Brand Lab, we created a podcast related product for a B-to-B market. But rather than creating a distinct brand for this new product and service and market, we just expanded the umbrella of Sticky Brand Lab. We created a modified version of our logo. We took the primary colors of our existing brand, created a muted version of it, added a complimentary color. So you can look at our colors and fonts and everything side by side, and we'll have those in our, the resources page of our website for you to see, but to compare them side by side, you can see they're related. And exactly you can see how the umbrella expands.
[00:12:16] Lori: That's a really good point when your business is recognized, then an iteration of that for a new vertical. So they recognize the authority that you bring, or the expertise that you bring to the table. And that subtle expansion, that's what adds credibility, because you're under the larger umbrella. So do take a look, you'll see exactly what the logo iteration looks like and the brand colors look like.
[00:12:45] Nola: And we did have some intense conversations about it, but we in the end made an intentional decision to keep the customer experience consistent between our B to C and our B-to-B audience. We have distinct personality that is related to our brand. And while we changed some visual elements and of course our messaging that pertains to the specific product and service, we retained that voice throughout the brand. So again, we're talking about the larger brand identity.
[00:13:16] Lori: Another good example, I think of, a, kind of that refresh versus rebrand would be MasterCard. MasterCard has those two overlapping circles, and it used to be that you saw on the orange and kind of reddish color that they have overlapping, you would see the words MasterCard. And so they took a lesson from Starbucks and removed the word MasterCard. So we really are just looking at that visual identifier versus the needing to have the word as well.
[00:13:52] Nola: Interesting. Well, the fifth sign that your brand may be in need of a makeover is when it gets lost in the crowd of competitors. If your business and your business brand just blends in, you need to differentiate and you need to make sure your brand is differentiated from the rest of the sea of competitors out there. So just evaluate it. It might be time for a rebrand, or it might be time for a refresh, whatever it takes to make it stand out.
[00:14:27] Lori: I was thinking about that. Another good example of a rebrand or an ability to stand out from the crowd is happening with Arby's. Arby's was all about the roast beef and now it's all, We've got the meat for sandwiches. So they're expanding to really focus on not burgers, but as an entity of freshness with their variety of sandwiches, not just roast beef sandwiches.
[00:14:58] Nola: Oh, that's interesting. Well, one of the occasions that sometimes you might need to look at your brand and make sure you're differentiated is when you have come to the point where starting out, you've bootstrapped your brand, right. You've created your own logo or you've taken maybe some stock logo and you've created your own colors based on your favorite t-shirt and you created a tag and that's kind of it, and that's great. You've done what's necessary. It's been a little messy. You moved forward with what you've had. You've gained some customers. You've got some income coming in. And now you are in a position, especially since you pretty much know how you're differentiated, now you're in a position to use professional resources to really upgrade your brand. You can perhaps keep the same colors. And get a professional color palette. You can take that logo and just bring it up a bit.
[00:16:01] Lori: I would agree with that one. A good example. I think of rebrand and refresh would be VRBO. So when they started, they were Vacation Rental By Owner. And it was focused on more putting your home on the market and going into other people's homes. Then they shortened that down to V R B O and now their VRBO and their commercials are all customer-focused. So you could say they kept the name but they didn't really, cause it was vacation rental by owner, and then they were V R B O and now they're VRBO. So, I don't know, is that a refresh or a rebrand?
[00:16:46] Nola: And it was a slow process, which is a really good idea because if you rebrand too quickly, that can have negative consequences and WW, WeightWatchers, found that out.
So did JC Penney
[00:17:00] Lori: Oh, yeah.
[00:17:01] Nola: They should have refreshed, but instead they rebranded. They had gotten to the point where they felt their brand was a little stodgy and stale and they did some drastic rebranding. And it was to the point where almost half of their loyal customers didn't even recognize their logo anymore. And their customer experience that they could rely on was gone. So that know, like, and trust factor was diminished. So, they ended up having to change out the leadership and do another campaign of, we want you back. They had to go out to the customers and have a, we want you back campaign.
So you don't want to be a JC Penny's, but there have been a couple of companies that so far, their branding seems to have been positive. And one of them, I think we all know about, we've seen Facebook. It has started as a platform and company with the platform and the platform remains Facebook, but the company itself has grown and expanded in market and products, services, vision. And so it has renamed itself as Meta. Another one I've witnessed of a completely rebranding is where a couple of banks, BBT, which is probably got a more traditional image merged with SunTrust Bank, which was more of a friendly regional bank. When they merged, they created an entire new company with an entirely, completely different brand. Their existing brands or prior brands were very, very different from each other. So it's probably a wise thing to do. But the brand that came out of their merger is completely different. So it was a, anyway, that's an example. It's now called Truist by the way.
[00:18:48] Lori: Yeah, that is a really good example. You and I were talking earlier about Kentucky Fried Chicken, so that was another one. And their motto was. Finger licking good. In today's health-conscious world, you don't want to be licking the grease off of the fingers. So, they totally rebranded. You don't really think of Kentucky Fried Chicken. You think of KFC.
[00:19:11] Nola: KFC.
[00:19:13] Lori: Yeah.
[00:19:13] Nola: That's because they wanted to even take the word fried out of their name.
[00:19:17] Lori: That's right. That's right. Well, one of the things that we hope that you've gotten from listening to this episode is that a refresh not only gives kind of an updated look or adds elements, but it's also cost effective a rebrand is very cost-intensive because you have to do every element. So knowing the difference helps you as a company financially, but also to make that connection with your audience, as you alluded to earlier, when you talked about humanizing your company. As your business evolves, or your customers enjoyed working with changes, you might need to update your brand. And when that happens, sometimes all you need to do is change some minor elements. Other times you need to rethink the entire approach.
[00:20:11] Nola: Absolutely. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. We hope it makes all the difference in you getting started on your business so you can create your best and most exciting life. If you found the information shared here today helpful, let us know by posting here, where you're listening, or on our Facebook page.
[00:20:29] Lori: Not sure how to turn your idea into a profitable side business? Contact us at stickybrandlab.com/contact. We'd be happy to help you.
[00:20:38] Nola: Be sure to come back next Tuesday and every Tuesday for another informative, inspiring and motivating episode. And remember. Action creates results. So tap into your desire to create a business and brand you love by taking 1% action every day. Small steps, big effects.
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Yes.
[00:21:04] Lori: Sure. Whatever you say. I'm just now reading and staying in
[00:21:09] Nola: No, I'm trying to figure out how to, how to interject with some discussion and, you know, I don't even do that in real life, so it's hard to ...um,
