non-scary rebranding

Blog overview: We discuss the expectations on marketing & branding briefly, then highlight a recent simple rebranding of Stylie Music Studio in Worthington, OH. At the end is a downloadable image that has a great set of examples.

Small teams are constantly challenged to up their marketing game, by customers, by competitors, and internally . Expectations on what marketing can do, what I have coined marketing  euphoria, feel higher than ever. That's because of two things that are constantly impacting people's pereception of marketing/branding:

• Social media has amplified the brands of many, including our own. And with that, we are exposed to way more than ever, and the cost and ease of making something look and sound good is lower and easier than ever. Literally anyone can design something simple in Canva (geez look at our logo!) or use AI to make them sound like shakespeare. Soooo welcome to FOMO (fear of missing out), for businesses. It can get really difficult to focus on good marketing and branding if you are constantly chasing shiny things or trying to reinvent the brand or messaging each time something new comes up!
  
  
• Marketing professionals have done a wonderful job of inflating the profession as the answer to everything! Sorry its kinda true, they got really good at markeing, and then they marketed themselves, and now its just sort of a freight train of over-promising and vanity metrics galore. Most of them don't tell you that many of those tactics don't work in certain settings, kill your engagement over time, or are designed for enterprise-level entities where 1% improvements create monumental returns. For smaller orgs, its just diffferent and you can get trapped into a negative feedback loop of feeling like 'somethings wrong'.
  
  

Getting started in assessing your brand and doing a rebrand or refresh is a bit overwhelming; let's face it, creativity is a messy process. But you can do a few simple things to flip a brand pretty quick and cheap, moving things forward in a big way even if you aren't necessarily a fortune 100 brand afterward.

Lets break a rebrand/refresh into four basic elements:

Define your values
Keep these to as few as possible, and try and avoid redundancy. For a small business or sole-proprietorship, they likely relate to the owners/founders values. For a nonprofit, its likely more community and mission-focused. Either way, its essential that the truly 'speak' to the leadership of the organization.

Refine your core purpose
If you don't have it clearly written out, make a simple statement as to your reason for being, what Simon Sinek calls your 'why', so to speak. This really just prioritizes who you are and who you serve, in a pretty simple statement that anyone can follow.

Create a personality
Make sure you create several simple statements that show the character and spirit of the brand. Is it silly, like Geico? Super-elite? Rebellious? Sharing this is how your internal team, you, and any designers personally related to you, and it lays the foundation for brand trust and engagement from customers if you are consistent. 

Make some art
Typically people get twitchy here because it can cost money, but things are much easier than they used to be, there are great tools and resources to help you get this done on budget or even on your own if you have some decent art skills or the right (cheap) software. Start with the basics, including a good logo (think simple and timeless), a few core colors that fit the personality of the brand, and some web and for-print fonts that are matched or as similar as possible. Standardize this collateral and put it in a document for anyone internally or externally who is designing or working with your brand. 

Don't forget
This process is going to be messy! You are going to just have to deal with the fact that good branding takes creativity, and creativity in some ways is the oppositie of logic. So chill, breathe, and make sure you understand that one round of sample logos does not a logo make, and coming up wiht a personality for your brand might feel dumb but if you don't your brand will feel dumber -- check out this initial round of images produced just to help Stylie Music Studio's owner Matt work toward a logo concept that hit his audience/brand personality but that he also really liked. After all this, we could distill his needs and tastes and he himself created his final logo - talk about ownership of the brand!

So the process is messy, but its not scary, and it doesn't have to break the bank.

We created this simple graphic below with a quick case study, feel free to use and share as needed!