Building your brand is a major undertaking that comes with high stakes. When you get your branding wrong the first time, especially as a startup, your failure to resonate with your audience poses risks for your business. When you rebrand as an established business, rebranding still risks losing part of your customer base if you don’t get it right.
So, boost your chances of rebranding success with careful planning, strong strategy, and attention to detail. The most powerful rebranding tool in your kit is color for its memorability, its message, and the way it psychologically impacts your audience.
Rebranding & Your Emotional Value to Customers
It’s easy to run off the branding road and into the weeds when you look at starting over. This is why your creative direction must be highly focused on staying on track. Your attention to detail in strategy is what will shift the focus of your customers to your emotional value as a brand.
When rebranding, revisit what value proposition means to you. What is the problem you’re seeking to solve within the marketplace? Has that shifted? Your rebranding efforts need to communicate that shift. How are you different from the other brands out there?
Most importantly, why should your customers care? Your rebranding should cultivate a trigger for your customer emotionally that resonates with their immediate concerns, which your brand will solve. Let them feel the why and how. Show them.
The Psychology Behind Color and Branding
Color holds sway over your audience and influences their emotions and purchasing potential. Here are a few examples of how color can impact your branding or rebranding message:
Red is a very emotional color due to its association with the heart and blood. A red-orange communicates both warmth and danger, where a little red goes a long way to sharing excitement. In excess, red comes across as aggressive.
Blue stands for crystal clear communication, trust, and peace. It denotes dependability. Facebook, Oral-B, and Walmart have all chosen this color to reveal how they want to be perceived in the marketplace.
Yellow radiates enthusiasm and joy. Want to stand out, inspire, or create a social feel? Use yellow as an accent or primary color in your branding.
Different combinations of these primary colors shift the psychology of your message, and it’s perceived. Green feels fresh, stable, and hopeful. Purple shares nostalgia, loyalty, and royalty with your customers. What color or colors will you choose for your rebranding, and why?
Keep in mind that drifting too far off-center from your original branding can feel off-kilter for your customers. Along with picking new colors, those colors have to communicate your brand mission and keep customer experiences consistent clearly.
Communicating Your “Why” When Rebranding
So ask yourself: “Why should people care about my brand deeply outside its principal offering?” How do you cultivate a tribe around your branding and make lasting impact and improvements on people’s lives?
Now, write a new positioning statement with the who, the what and the how of your brand, but never forget the “why” of your brand. It’s your secret sauce to success. And it determines your brand’s true north.
Consistent Color Creates a Trustworthy Brand Experience
What is branding? It’s how customers feel about your company. Rebranding refocuses how your customers feel about your brand. And it should trigger the right conclusions and emotions about what your business is like. You must create a consistent offline and online experience for your customers no matter when, what, or where.
Don’t confuse your customers, dilute your brand, or complicate its message with inconsistent colors. All that does is communicate your unreliability. That reflects on your products and services.
Consistent color creates a trustworthy brand experience, maintains your competitive edge, and communicates across platforms. And always maintain a consistent visual language across platforms and media. People are more likely to link the brand message you want to communicate.