Are you bored with your brand or think that your product could do with a refresh? Is there something about the iconography that you feel isn’t right? Do you feel the burning desire to call the experts and give everything a new look? Great. Great for someone and maybe not great for your brand. There are a bunch of design agencies that make a living off this and will charge you a not-insignificant amount of money to delve deep into the brand assets and carve out a new look and feel. It all sounds like a brand manager doing their job. 

Bravo. 

But wait a minute. You could potentially be about to screw up—big time.

What if the consumer spends hardly any time thinking about your brand? What if the consumer, instead of hunting for your intricate brand iconography, is actually just hunting for the ‘bloody yellow one’ and spends 3 minutes getting exasperated because the retailer has moved it from its normal position to the top shelf. 

Frustrating eh? It gets worse. 

What if you knew that a heavy user of your product is someone that purchases it only a couple of times per year? A heavy user of Coca-Cola is defined as someone who buys the brand only a couple of times per year. And that’s Coke! 

Starting to feel those beads of sweat on your forehead yet? 

Remember this: if you are in the CPG/FMCG sector, most of your consumers are light users who might only purchase once per year. Don’t take my word for it; these are the words of the dark lord himself: Byron Sharp. 

Frightened yet? You should be. 

Knowing this, would you embark on a project to refresh the brand when, at best, most of your users purchase your brand far less frequently than you were led to believe? 

A recent discussion with a pal of mine delivered this point brilliantly. He was in a meeting with his team and could not recall a tortilla chip brand that would frequently find its way into his food basket. All he could remember, and to this day, was that it was in a ‘brown bag’. No brand name, no recall of the brand purpose, the latest Instagram post, or OOH billboard… nothing, just the ‘one in a brown bag’.

So, if the brand manager, now fed up with the colour brown, wants to refresh the brand, it doesn’t find its way into my pals’ shopping basket. That hits the bottom line. Hard. 

So next time your brand manager thinks it’s time for a ‘refresh’, stop and take some time to think about what you are about to do. 

At Brand Positioning, we deal with Brand Strategy. We delve deep into your prospects’ minds and understand what makes your brand work; we set the strategy for the next 12 months. We write your brand plan for the coming year so your team can implement a thoroughly thought-through strategy that delivers on the objectives. 

We are single-minded in our approach: Bottom Line Profit.