A company’s brand identity encompasses everything about how it presents itself visually, verbally, and through actions. As a business grows and evolves, its brand identity needs to as well in order to continue resonating with target customers. Revisiting and refining brand identity is essential for supporting growth objectives and adapting to changes in the marketplace. 

In this comprehensive blog post, we will explore several key strategies for evolving your brand identity to fuel growth for your business. First, we will look at assessing your current brand identity to identify strengths to build upon and any areas needing improvement. Next, we will discuss understanding your target audience and ensuring your brand identity aligns with their preferences and expectations. 

From there, we will provide recommendations on evolving brand identity across multiple dimensions—from brand values, visual design, voice, content, product offerings, partnerships, and more. While staying true to your core as a business, you also need to be willing to make adaptations to your brand identity as needed to support reaching a broader customer base and achieving growth objectives. 

Let’s get started looking at key steps for thoughtfully and strategically evolving your brand identity for growth.

Assess Your Current Brand Identity

Before making changes to evolve your brand identity, take time to thoroughly assess where it currently stands. Look at all elements of your brand identity from your brand messaging, logo and visual assets, voice and tone, customer experience, products/services, and more. 

– Identify what is working well and still resonating with your target audience. Make note of brand identity strengths to retain as you evolve.

– Look for any areas where your brand identity feels dated, off target, or misaligned. These are opportunities for improvement. 

– Review your website, blog, social media, and marketing materials through a critical lens. Do they clearly communicate your brand identity and value proposition?

– Check if you have brand guidelines in place and if they are still accurate representations of your brand identity. Update guidelines as needed.

– Talk to customers and team members to get feedback on perceptions of your brand. Look for common themes. 

– Assess competitive brands in your space. What aspects of their brand identity outshine yours or better appeal to your target audience?

Take time to be thoughtful in this assessment. The insights gathered will allow you to ensure brand identity evolution supports strengths, addresses weak points, and aligns with customer needs and preferences.

Understand Your Target Audience

A key component in evolving your brand identity is ensuring it continues to align with your target audience. Consumer preferences, demographics, psychographics, and buying behaviors can change over time. Revisit what you know about current and potential target customers.  

– Look at analytics for who is currently engaging with your brand—their age ranges, locations, gender, buying patterns and so on. 

– Talk directly to customers to get insights on what matters to them and what perceptions they have of your brand.

– Understand priorities your audience has when making purchasing decisions in your industry—do they value quality, convenience, status, being trendy?

– Research target audience trends and changes in demographics, lifestyles, values, attitudes, and buying power. 

– Identify where there are gaps between your brand identity and your target audience—these signify opportunities to evolve your identity to foster better alignment.

Evolving your brand identity based on in-depth knowledge of your customers will ensure it appeals to their priorities and preferences. This propels growth by making your brand more relevant and compelling to current and prospective customers.

Reflect Your Brand Values

Your brand values and purpose should be at the core of your business and brand identity. When evolving your brand identity, ensure any changes still ladder up clearly to represent your values.

– Revisit your brand values—are they still an accurate encapsulation of what you stand for? If not, it may be time to redefine your core values.

– Look for ways to better showcase your values in marketing materials, social media presence, website content, and customer interactions.

– Ensure your brand values are conveyed consistently across channels, internally and externally. They should inform everything from your mission statement to customer service policies.

– Have your values influenced the types of customers you attract and want to work with? If so, ensure your brand identity clearly conveys this. 

– If your business has implemented significant CSR (corporate social responsibility) or sustainability initiatives aligned with company values, ensure your brand identity reflects this.

Evolving your brand identity to clearly reflect company values and purpose helps form deeper emotional connections with the customers you want to serve.

Make Your Brand Visually Appealing  

While your logo is a key visual component of your brand identity, there are many other visual branding elements to evolve—photography, color scheme, fonts, packaging, etc.

– Assess if your logo still represents your brand and conveys the image you want to portray. Be open to redesigns if needed.

– Look at current design trends (especially in your industry) and identify ways to weave these in to create a more modern, polished visual identity. 

– Add visual assets like photography, illustrations, icons, or videos that better resonate with your target audience and reinforce your brand personality.

– Pay attention to visual details like fonts, color palettes, and element placements—do minor tweaks to freshen up your visual identity.

– Create visually engaging graphics and content for your website, social media, presentations, ads, and more. 

– Ensure visual identity elements are cohesive across all brand touchpoints—your website, product packaging, business cards, storefront signage, etc. 

Evolving your visual brand identity to be more modern, eye-catching, and on-trend will make your brand more appealing and memorable.

Create a Consistent Brand Voice

The language and tone used in your brand messaging influences perceptions of your brand. Is your brand voice still attracting your ideal customers?  

– Review your brand voice across all communications—is it consistent or disjointed? Identify any areas in need of refinement.

– Ensure your brand voice aligns with your values and personality. Your tone should remain on-brand as you evolve messaging.

– If your target audience has changed, evaluate if your current brand voice still appeals to them. Make appropriate adjustments.

– Check that your brand voice is consistently conveyed across all channels—social media, website, blog, ads, sales materials, product packaging, customer support interactions, etc.

– Provide brand voice guidelines to anyone creating content on behalf of your brand. This includes partners, influencers, or team members.

– Be open to expanding your brand voice as you create content on new platforms or introduce innovative product offerings.

Taking a strategic approach to evolving your brand voice ensures messaging stays engaging, consistent, and effective across the board.

Utilize Social Media 

Social media presents a hugely important channel for conveying and reinforcing your brand identity. Maximizing social media will allow you to drive more brand awareness and recognition. 

– Audit your current social media presence—are you active on the right platforms for your brand and audience? 

– Craft social media bios/profiles that represent your brand personality and values. Ensure consistency across platforms.

– Develop a content calendar to create regular social content that engages followers and conveys your brand identity. 

– Dedicate resources to building an active, loyal social media following through promotions, consistent posting, and community engagement.  

– Use hashtags and tags to participate in larger social conversations related to your industry or values.

– Partner with brand ambassadors or influencers active on your target social platforms to expand reach.

– Run social media contests or sweepstakes to build followers and awareness.

– Advertise on social platforms, targeting relevant customer demographics and interests.  

A strategic, lively social media presence gives you regular touchpoints to reinforce an evolving brand identity with a large audience. Leverage this opportunity.

Develop a Content Strategy 

Well-crafted brand content has a big impact on customer perceptions and brand identity. Align your content development with brand evolution.

– Audit your existing content. Does it represent your brand values and personality? Identify content gaps.

– Create content guidelines/style guides to assist anyone creating content on your behalf.

– Map out a strategic content calendar aligned to brand identity goals—target topics, channels, formats, partnerships.

– Craft engaging content focused on your customers’ interests, challenges, and questions. Offer valuable insights. 

– Repurpose content from one format to another, maximizing value from investments. Turn a blog post into a video or podcast.

– Promote content through social media, email, ads, website banners, gated offers, SEO, and other channels to increase reach.  

– Analyze content performance and customer engagement to identify successes to build upon and areas for improvement.  

Content and storytelling are powerful for continually conveying an evolving brand identity. Take a strategic approach.

Expand Your Product/Service Offerings   

Expanding your product and service portfolio presents an opportunity to evolve your brand identity. New offerings introduce new ways for customers to engage with and experience your brand.

– Before launching new products/services, ensure they align well with existing brand positioning. There should be cohesive evolution, not major departure.

– Promote new products strategically, weaving in messaging about brand values and personality. 

– Evaluate if new products/services open opportunities to reach new target segments. You may expand your brand identity to appeal to new demographics.

– Allow new offerings to positively influence perceptions of innovation, modernity, quality, or capability associated with your brand.

– Let new products/services expand the conversational voice, imagery, or partnerships represented in your brand identity.

New products and services present brand touchpoints. Leverage them thoughtfully to advance the character, reach, and growth of your brand.

Build Strategic Partnerships

Partnering with complementary brands can expand reach and allow cooperative evolution of brand identities.

– Partner with companies that share aspects of your brand values and positioning. Collaborations should feel like natural extensions, not radical departures.

– Seek partnerships that allow access to new geographic markets or audience segments. Introduce your brand carefully and strategically.

– Co-create content with partner companies and cross-promote to efficiently build awareness and associate your brand with new subjects and customers.

– Sponsor or host events with non-competitive partner organizations to highlight shared values and causes.  

– Collaborate on product launches or marketing campaigns to expand visibility efficiently. Ensure partner branding aligns.

Strategic partnerships provide opportunities to evolve your brand identity in complementary ways while expanding visibility. Explore win-win evolution options.

Stay Authentic But Be Willing to Adapt

Remaining authentic to your core brand identity is crucial for maintaining customer trust. But some evolution and flexibility is needed for growth.

– Before making changes, ensure your original brand positioning and values still have strong market relevance. If so, stay true to them.

– Seek input from long-standing customers before making significant brand identity changes—consider the feedback carefully.

– Know when to embrace change vs. when to hold firm on brand tenets that could get compromised or diluted. 

– Be open-minded to trying new tactics, partnerships, or offerings to help your brand identity resonate in a changing market, even if they feel uncomfortable initially. 

– View missteps or criticism about brand evolution attempts as learning opportunities, not failures. Stay resilient.

With balance, you can thoughtfully evolve your brand identity without sacrificing the authenticity valued by customers. Remain anchored but be flexible.

Conclusion

Evolving your brand identity takes careful strategy and execution. By thoroughly assessing your current identity, keeping your target audience top of mind, leveraging new content formats and channels, expanding offerings and partnerships, and staying resilient, you can achieve brand growth. Keep your core values and positioning consistent, but be willing to bring your brand identity into the future.

The outlined strategies provide a blueprint to build upon your brand foundations while making evolutions to fuel business growth. Your brand identity should flex and adapt without losing sight of what made customers passionate about your brand from the start. Use this moment as an opportunity to analyze the marketplace and your customers with fresh eyes, shaping your brand voice, personality, look, and feel to optimize for the future.