When Is It Time to Update Your Branding?

You might think that your logo is timeless, but modern design and digital ad creative heavily favour simple logos and visual symbols over complex designs with lots of detail. You can always refresh a logo while keeping the elements that are most powerful and iconic of your brand. Just updating colour can give a new sense of energy to your logo and imagery.

If your business has evolved significantly since you last updated your branding – it could be that you offer new products or services, you might have been through a merger or acquisition, or even have a new mission – then your branding won’t accurately reflect where your business is now, let alone where you want to go in the future.

Your messaging should be consistent across all elements of your branding, both visually and in the language used. If your message isn’t reflecting a single identity which consumers can easily recognise, you need to make updates to get all aspects of your branding on the same page.

Remember that product packaging is a physical manifestation of your branding, and, especially in retail spaces, your brand will be under constant scrutiny by consumers. As such, you need to always be in conversation with customers, finding out what they like and dislike in your packaging so you can make sure your packaging is user-friendly, enticing, and reflects the rest of your branding and the story you’re telling.

Many marketers will recommend six years as the maximum time you should go without updating your packaging design, but the truth is that with packaging you may well need to make changes much more often. This isn’t simply so you can keep up with trends, but so you don’t risk getting lost on the shelf next to competitor products. Staying attuned to what your competitors are doing is key, and most large organisations will track their competitors’ packaging in real time, noting any changes they make and keeping score on how customers respond to them.

It’s crucially important to be able to tell the difference between a short-term aesthetic trend and real movements in branding and design. When you incorporate these kinds of trends into your branding design, even the average person with no design knowledge will identify the outdated elements and be turned off by them. For example, any business you see using overly italicised or bubbly lettering, or over-the-top clip art imagery, at one point chose to follow a trend that became outdated, and hasn’t realised the need to update their branding since.