A: Over time, the brand image that you have cultivated over the years may not seem relevant to your audience. Or as a business, you may have evolved to occupy a different space in the market. That’s when you need to consider rebranding. A brand refresh is more like an update to your existing brand personality to keep up with changing trends or consumer preferences or reconnect with your customer base. Sometimes, you undertake it for better internal alignment or consistency across consumer-facing assets. It may involve minor changes to the logo, tagline and visual identity, and how this is expressed on various platforms. The core of your existing brand voice stays intact, however. At Think North Consulting, we do a complete brand audit to analyse the brand’s strengths and weaknesses, past perceptions and performance and future opportunities before recommending whether to go for a rebrand, a refresh or additional brand development.

A: While you may have started out alone or as a small tight-knit team who understood your vision and how you wanted to get there, as the firm grows, you’ll need to share your vision, mission and values with a larger set of people, internal and external, without diluting them. That is when you need to take a closer look at your company branding and find ways to make it memorable and actionable for your employees, partners and recruits. We work closely with founders to capture their vision for their brand and make it relatable and actionable, especially as they scale up or as they prepare to take a more hands-off approach to the business.

A: Because branding is a highly strategic and qualitative exercise, a common perception is that the success of a branding strategy is impossible to measure. Nothing could be further from the truth. At Think North Consulting, we believe in measuring the effectiveness of every activity we undertake for our clients, and branding is no exception. Using various online and offline tools and survey methods, we measure changes in brand awareness, recognition, preference, and ultimately, brand love. This is part of our unique iterative process to fine-tune and improve your brand and business.

A: When your existing brand has good traction in the market, you might be tempted to to develop all other products as extensions of your core brand. However, you will need to examine your current brand architecture and positioning first. If the positioning is markedly different, caters to a very different market segment, or could confuse your existing customers and cannibalise your current brand, it is better to spin off the new line as a separate brand. If not, you can identify where it should stay within your current brand architecture and develop it as a sub-brand within the existing brand. Either way, you need a stellar branding strategy and go-to-market roadmap.