Refresh or rebuild? How to tell which one you need

Most owners arrive at this question the same way. Something about the business feels dated or off, the logo is the part you can see, so the logo is what gets blamed. Sometimes that's right. Often it isn't, and starting there is an expensive way to find out.

The question underneath

Before deciding how much to change, work out which kind of problem you have. There are two, and from the inside they feel almost identical.

The first: your brand no longer looks like the business you've become. The words are still true and customers still know who you are, but the look has drifted. Three shades of the same blue, a logo that falls apart small, a website that feels ten years old. That's a refresh.

The second: the business itself has moved. You sell something different now, or to different people, or the name describes a company you stopped being years ago. No amount of new colour fixes that, because the problem is what you say rather than how it looks. That's a rebuild.

Signs a refresh is enough

• The name still fits what you sell and who you sell it to.
• Customers recognize you and get your name right.
• The logo itself works, but everything around it disagrees: the van, the invoice and the website look like three companies.
• You can say what you do in one sentence and people nod.
• The website looks tired, but nothing on it is untrue.

Signs it's a rebuild

• The name misdescribes what you now do, or you spend the first minute of every call explaining it.
• You've changed who you serve, and the brand still speaks to the customer you used to have.
• Two businesses merged, or you split one off, and the brand covers neither of them properly.
• You avoid handing over your card.
• You can't say what you do in one sentence, and neither can your staff.

The trap worth naming

A rebuild is more exciting than a refresh, which is exactly why it gets chosen when it shouldn't be. Redrawing a logo is a satisfying way to avoid the harder question of what you're offering and to whom. If the words are the problem, new colours only make the confusion better looking.

There's a cost people forget, too. Recognition takes years to build and a rebuild spends some of it. If people already know you, that's an asset worth protecting, and changing your name deserves a better reason than being bored of it.

How to decide without guessing

This is the whole reason we score a brand before touching it. Five areas, each out of 20: how you look, what you say, how easily you're found, how your website works, and what others say. If the low number is how you look, a refresh will move it. If the low numbers are what you say and who it's for, a new logo won't, and the score afterwards would say so plainly.

The Brand Check-Up is $495 and it answers this question specifically: the five numbers, what we'd fix first, and a straight recommendation either way. That includes the times we say the brand is fine and the problem is somewhere else, which happens more often than you'd think.