Brand Revitalisation: 6 Vital Signs For Evaluating If It’s Time to Revitalise Your Brand

6 Vital Signs for Identifying If It’s Time to Revitalise Your Brand

1. Brand Revitalisation Can Help When Your Brand Loses Uniqueness and Pricing Power

One critical role of branding strategy is to differentiate your product or service from competitors in the marketplace. So if your brand lacks genuine perceived uniqueness, it is failing to do this. If you don’t give your customers a compelling reason to buy they’ll default to price based decisions and possibly buy from your competitors. 

For some discretionary categories, the sale will simply be lost altogether. At any one moment, lots of brands lack uniqueness. Sometimes, a brand has never been unique. At other times, the flattery of competitor imitation means that a successful brand suddenly finds that it no longer looks as distinct as it did before.

Brand revitalisation can help you find new, compelling ways to help potential customers understand what is different about your brand versus the competition.

It can also help you understand the key elements of the brand purpose, vision, mission, values, promise and story, which as well as helping in communications can help you identify a product roadmap for future development.

Related: How to Use Brand Values to Drive Unwavering Customer Trust and Commitment

Image via ©Arla

A case study is the dairy brand Cravendale. For most consumers, milk seems like an undifferentiated commodity. That is one reason why dairy farmers struggle to control much pricing power. 

Related: Why Do I Need A Brand? I’ve Got A Great Product and a Logo

Cravendale found a way to stand out in this crowd, by using a filtering technology and ownable tone of voice, as seen in this video.

This has helped them to stand apart in the milk aisle in shops. Once consumers think differently about your brand, the pricing comparison link to the rest of the category is weakened and you have more permission to command a premium price.

2. Struggling to Generate Communication Ideas can Mean Brand Revitalisation is Required

Sometimes you may find it difficult to generate communication ideas for your brand. This might manifest itself in advertising copy which gets low uniqueness scores in testing, or not being able to come up with digital advertising ideas that are distinctive. But it can also mean that at a simple level, such as explaining what is good about your brand at a networking event or dinner party, you find yourself struggling for words. 

A strong brand with good brand strategy and well developed brand architecture will always lend itself to powerful communication. Struggling to generate communication ideas can be a sign that it is time for a brand health check. Brand revitalisation may be in order.

Consider as an example the directory enquiries market. After deregulation, it had low barriers to entry and potentially highly lucrative. That meant that many companies entered the market. However, most of them have not produced strong brand strategies or advertising which is well remembered. An exception is 118 118. By crafting their brand carefully, they have enabled a consistent stream of communications for over a decade.

With videos like these below they have managed to produce instantly recognisable, brand building communication year after year even for a largely undifferentiated product.

Related: Use Humour in Branding to Create Strong Emotional Bonds so You Increase Sales 

In the business to business space, the same applies. Brewing giant AB Inbev isn’t a memorable name around which to build communications for customers such as bars and retail chains. Therefore the U.K. business of AB Inbev has repositioned itself as “Budweiser Brewing Group”. This isn’t exactly a rebrand – the “B” in AB Inbev stood for Budweiser. But by emphasising this recognisable brand which allows easier communication, the brand expects it will be “more recognisable”[1].

Related: What’s In A Brand Name? Lessons Learned From 5 Brands Who Made A Change

Image via The Grocer

3. Your Category is a Lot More Crowded than Before Resulting in The Need for Brand Revitalisation

When not many suppliers provide a product or service, branding doesn’t have such a huge comparative role required to influence customer choice. However, as a category becomes more crowded, it is more challenging for any given company to win over a customer. In that situation, brand is a crucial differentiator. If you find that your marketplace has become crowded, it is a sign that it may be time to consider revitalising your brand to help it stand out from your competitors.

Image via Packaging News ©Innocent

Think about the case of the drinks brand Innocent. When they launched, they were a pioneer in the smoothie market with a playful, upbeat tone of voice. But rapidly other brands noticed Innocent’s success and moved into the smoothie market, often using a similarly simple, positive branding strategy. 

Innocent revitalised their brand by promoting elements of it which helped them stand out, for example fostering engagement amongst older lonely people. By getting them to knit little hats to put on Innocent bottles, as part of the campaign seen in this video, they were able to communicate their brand revitalisation with brand packaging instore in a unique way.  

Related: How to Use Brand Activism to Mobilize Your Customers

4. Brand Revitalisation Can be Very Effective if You’re Not Getting Enough New Customers

A fall off in new customer acquisition can be a sign that your brand is in trouble. Unfortunately, this can sometimes take time to notice. If you have a loyal existing user base, it can be years before you realise that your business continuity is being driven by repeat business without new customers joining the franchise. That is fine in the short term, but to survive over the long term a brand needs to be recruiting and retaining new customers.

Related: Rebrand or Refresh? That is the Question 

A case study of the risk of not revitalising a brand is the Yellow Pages. The directory market was shrinking due to competition from the Internet. However, there is still a directory business in some markets and directory brands have continued in other formats. Yellow Pages was a well-loved brand with deep brand equity, as captured in this video. 

But it failed to keep up with the changing landscape, and struggled to attract new customers. In the end the brand vanished and the physical directory business stopped. A brand refresh earlier on could have helped revive the brand for use online or elsewhere. 

Related: 5 Red Flags That It’s Time For A Brand Audit Health Check

Vodafone’s B2B division refreshed its brand in 2018, shifting from Vodafone Enterprise to Vodafone Business [2]. The company wanted to attract business customers across a wide range of purchaser personas. The revised name reflected this broader target market including SMEs, not just large-scale enterprise.

5. Customers Threatening to Delist Your Brand Can Mean It is Time for Brand Revitalisation

Retailers often have a choice of different brands to sell. They may have a range of considerations, from profitability to the relationship with the supplier. If there is not sufficient pull through from consumers, they may decide to drop your brand (or not to list it in the first place). 

This can be particularly problematic where products are seen as largely generic – which can be true for everything from beer and packaged sugar in retail, to dentistry and gardening services in the services market.

Related: 7 Ways A Brand Refresh Will Make You More Productive And Increase Sales 

Giving customers reasons to choose and prefer your brand — to request it by name — helps combat this. For that to happen though, the brand needs to have a clear, ownable brand identity and customer appeal.

Image via ©Brewdog

Beer is a very crowded market, even in the craft beer segment. Brewdog came in with a unique tone of voice and direct conversation with consumers that most beers lack, as seen in this video. 

That helps them to justify why they need to be kept in retail distribution. It has also helped them launch their own bars, an unusual move for a single beer brand but one which we expect further helps them fend off any delisting threats in retail as it shows they are less dependent on retail distribution alone than many competitor beer brands.

6. Has Culture and Trends Shifted Around You? Brand Revitalisation Can Help

In a time of swift social change and increasingly well-informed consumers, social or cultural shifts can turn a brand from an asset into a liability in a short amount of time because it loses relevance. Sometimes it may be best simply to abandon the brand, as News International did by closing down the News of the World and filling the gap with a Sunday edition of the Sun. 

On other occasions, the brand may simply need to be revitalised to bring it into line with the shifting consumer market. Pret massively expanding its “Veggie Pret” footprint while retaining the base brand is a good example of brand revitalisation in the face of a fast increase in the number of vegetarian and vegan consumers [3]. 

Image via Metro

The Caledonian Sleeper is a case study of this. The overnight train market has reduced in the U.K., due to cheaper flights, expensive ticket costs and a dated travel experience The sleeper train to Scotland first introduced Caledonian Sleeper branding, then recently reimagined the brand not as a functional transport offering but as a hotel on wheels. They showcase this in this promotional video.

Final Thoughts

A brand is a critical way in which a business can communicate to customers, users, employees and other stakeholders what is different and valuable about its offerings. But even a well considered brand can be in need of brand revitalisation. It may have lost its specialness, the market may have changed or consumer demands may have evolved. Whatever the reason, if you notice the signs that brand revitalisation may be in order, don’t delay!

Questions to Consider

1. What makes your brand unique?
2. What is the number one brand apart from yours in your area of business? What could you learn from them?
3. How much help is your brand in converting new customers for your business?
4. What do you offer business partners such as distributors that they cannot get from other brands?
5. Are there cultural factors which challenge the relevance of your brand?
6. Do you need a brand audit to help you evaluate the health of your brand so you can decide if brand revitalisation is required?