Brand evolution or revolution? Knowing why and when

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Now, let’s discuss branding change…

What you’ll learn about updating a brand

• What are the differences between brand evolution and revolution?

• Is it a chasm or a continuum?

• Why do many struggle to decide which path forward?

• Why change at all?

• Examples of brand successes and failures

• Finally tips to make better choices

Brand evolution vs revolution

One of the great tensions when approaching an existing brand is: evolution or revolution? You could see one as making the most of what you have, and the other, wiping the slate clean to come up with something dramatically better. Both arguments have their pros and cons; in reality we find it is rarely this black and white.

The debate may be the subject of regular LinkedIn posts, but we at Koto want to dig a little deeper. The purpose of this newsletter is to help you understand the difference and hopefully make an informed decision if faced with it.

Whether you choose evolution or revolution, upgrading a brand helps you stay relevant in a changing market, enhance perception, expand your audience, and gain a competitive edge. 

It gives brand’s a fresh chance to reignite loyalty (where it might have waned) and make sure the brand strategy is still in line with the business goals, values and objectives. But it’s not just the immediate impact. Changing a brand for the better can help attract the right talent and future-proof any business. 

There’s plenty of common ground between evolution and revolution; it’s the degree of change that’s most contentious.

So, what’s the difference?

There are different ways to define the difference between evolution and revolution. As Koto CEO and founder James Greenfield puts it:

“A refresh is about reinvigorating specific aspects of a brand, bringing new energy. A rebrand means resetting everything from the ground up. The difference should be clear to your audience.”

Even within Koto, there’s some debate over the definitions of brand evolution (refresh) vs. brand revolution (rebrand). We’ve highlighted key differences below:

Chasm or Continuum?

We may have just scored a line between revolution and evolution, but whilst imagining a chasm between the two may help create distinction, both are designed to meet the same objective: to use the right levers to deliver the best possible result for your brand. 

It isn't a matter of either/or – evolution and revolution live at opposite ends of a continuum where the degree of change is the variable. Most projects have a bit of both; we see it as a sliding scale.

And, based on experience (because we're not aware whether this has ever been quantified), most branding projects will lean towards being evolutionary rather than revolutionary: 

Why change at all?

Before we get into choosing an approach, let’s identify some common triggers for brand change.

A brand may be a good fit at the start, but become irrelevant further down the line, such as when a business makes a pivot, or its products or services outgrow their original purpose, name, identity or messaging. Then, the entire brand can fail to signpost what the business now offers (e.g. SendInBlue transforming into Brevo as it moved beyond newsletters).

Similarly, if a business launches with a core product and subsequently expands to a suite of products, the original branding may prove too rigid. Some companies choose to create sub-brands; another response is to upgrade the branding to better accommodate the expanded product portfolio. 

Working with the team at Activision on Call of Duty, we felt that the complex spread of content built over 20 years required bringing together in a more meaningful and aligned brand ecosystem. 

When targeting new markets, the existing brand strategy, verbal and visual identity, product messaging and touchpoints may not support your ambitions. (On the other hand, entrants into new markets may simply face a trademark challenge: if you don’t change, you’ll be sued.)

Changes in the business can also be a trigger. With mergers and acquisitions, a new unified brand identity can ensure consistency and clarity for customers and stakeholders through what can be a very tricky transition. And major business investment will often coincide with a branding update and asset changeover. For retailers, this could be a signage or fit out changeover; for airlines, an upgrade to their fleet; for online businesses, as they renew their website or app.

Performance indicators such as a struggle to grow awareness, slow customer growth, or high customer churn and low lifetime value may show that a brand is underperforming and in need of change. 

It's worth considering that brands operating in dynamic cultural landscapes – fashion, sport, music and entertainment – may need more significant change to connect to evolving societal values, beliefs and trends. And as a company adopts new technology or innovative solutions, leveling up the brand can communicate this shift and position the company at the forefront of industry.

One common problem across categories is a lack of distinctive assets, and developing distinctiveness in branding can be key to mitigate commodification and build competitive advantage. 

And if you’ve already taken the decision to change strategy, branding updates can help signal your repositioning and realign the brand with the new strategy, as well as reset expectations in the market. 

Lastly, and one to be wary of, is reputation repair. Where a company has a damaged reputation, a brand update can play a vital role in rebuilding trust and reshaping public perception. But timing is essential, as both the media and the marketplace are sensitive to branding initiatives as exercises in “reputation washing”. An evolution may be easier for people to stomach, but if the brand is badly damaged then a well managed complete reinvention could be the only option, backlash or not.

Why it can be difficult to decide

The evolution vs. revolution debate can get quite heated; after pretty much any brand update you will see a standoff between brand conservatives and reformers. There may be reasons why you favor one over the other, but it’s not uncommon for dogged subjectivity to cloud decision making – when you could really do with fact-based reasoning. 

Being led by that subjectivity and not doing the right homework around your brand can lead to over-correction or under-correction. Get this wrong, and you can picture the “how not to” case studies, haunting social media for years to come.

Being aware of the emotional investment in a brand, especially from Founders or long standing employees is a big factor. You want to be sensitive to this, but don’t let it hold people back. You can only change a handful of times.

Here are some common “tells” that your reasoning might not be entirely sound – and the mistakes you risk making:

Under-correction

• Blanket insistence that almost any change to branding is a bad thing

• Default low appetite for risk (is it actually a lack of brand management competence in the organization?)

• Expecting a minor change in branding to lead to a disproportionate benefit in the market

• Ignoring or minimizing the problem with an existing brand

Over-correction

• Knee-jerk reaction to the market, misidentifying a fad as a long-term shift

• Personal desire to make a mark over the right choice for the brand / business

• Chasing the new thing (i.e. undertaking a rebranding project to adopt the latest design trend)

• Someone senior (CEO, founder, chairman) hates the (insert log, color, font, etc.)
  

One often cited example where chasing the latest trend backfired was the craze for sans serif fonts and minimalist branding among luxury fashion brands. Burberry, Balenciaga, Saint Laurent, Berluti, Balmain, Gucci, Maison Margiela, Jimmy Choo, Diane von Fürstenberg and Valentino all swapped their distinctive fonts in favor of sans serifs that were allegedly better suited to digital media and merchandising.

In these cases, less really did mean less, and some businesses (Burberry) have had to invest again to reverse the decision.

Left to right, Burberry’s 2018 and 2023 logo updates

Updates that pitched it right

While it is the disasters that stick in the mind – people are still talking about Royal Mail’s disastrous name change to Consignia, years later – we wanted to share some examples of successful brand evolution and revolution.

1. Evolution

Citing a 1915 Coca-Cola design brief: “A bottle so distinct it could be recognised by touch in the dark or when lying broken on the ground”, Turner Duckworth celebrated Coca-Cola’s recognisable brand assets, reducing them down to color, script, bottle and ribbon before having fun with them.

For Discord, a firm fan favorite for gamers, we wanted to stay true to its quirky culture while helping new users connect beyond gaming. We refined brand symbol Clyde, and developed strategy, positioning and a design refresh to level up Discord’s brand while remaining true to its blurple beginnings. Which wasn’t without its controversy for the hardcore community on its release, but this soon faded.

2. Revolution

Our work for Glassdoor looked to shift it from a destination for insights into a community for real workplace talk. Across the updated brand – focused on confidence, open-mindness, and amplifying users’ voices – g/d-shaped quotations flanking the wordmark and other copy put Glassdoor at the center of those all important workplace conversations. 

But revolution doesn’t always have to be new, as JKR showed when it tapped into Burger King nostalgia, going back and refining an older, iconic logo combined with a bold new verbal identity and illustration style. This relied on some skill to pitch this just right.

But even after all this, we’re still on the fence with some examples.

Ragged Edge did more with less for Wise – the logo and fundamental ideas remain the same, but new texture and typography makes it feel far richer. We’re saying revolution, but the debate is open…

Tips to help you make better choices

Branding is complex – or we wouldn’t be writing these newsletters. It is often difficult to identify what is and isn’t working, as well as how much change is necessary. 

But there are certain tips that can guide you in the decision-making process:

— Set objectives. What’s the purpose of updating your brand? What jobs do you need it to do? How clearly and specifically have these objectives been defined? 

— Laying out the right objectives should point you in the direction the branding should take and inform how you measure the change, once the update hits the market.

— Good data. Too often decisions around whether to evolve or radically change a brand are taken on very flimsy evidence. Gathering and analyzing objective data will help direct the degree of change that is necessary.

— Quantify brand equity. Quantify what equity exists within your branding. The stronger the equity, usually the more carefully you need to tread with a brand update. Often organizations overestimate the equity that their brands hold and assume that longevity = equity, but this is often a false correlation.

— Distinctive brand assets. These are key to building recall in your audience, but many brands are terrible at building them. There’s an opportunity to fill these gaps with an update; on the other hand, removing or even evolving these assets can have a disastrous effect.
 
HBO Max transitioning to just Max, leaving behind four decades’ worth of audience recognition in the process, was a move that bewildered many.

— Lifecycle. Early-stage businesses often have more latitude to experiment with how their brands achieve product market fit. Established brands with large customer bases may need to tread more lightly, as the foundation of their branding has already been established in the market.

🔥 Hot tip for the turnaround scenario: avoid reaching for the branding lever before rebuilding the foundations of the business. Any premature branding upgrade will just add to the pile of complaints that your ailing company is already facing – even if it seems the easiest thing to turn to.

— Category dynamics. Some categories are more sensitive to brand change than others, such as in supermarkets, where selections are decided in seconds. If consumers scan for a product and can’t immediately recognise it, they are likely to assume it is out of stock or has been delisted.

— Support at all levels. Company buy-in at all levels can impact the success of a branding initiative. The degree to which leaders and front-line employees are committed, primed and motivated matters. It's not surprising that some companies with strong brands have cult-like support from the top down.

— Support for the long term. It’s not uncommon for branding programs to be heavily front-loaded with investment, prioritizing the launch and forgetting ongoing support. 

— The launch of a brand update should be seen as the start, not the end; it needs maintenance to stay effective, and the more radical the change, the more you may need to invest to reconnect with the customer.

— Read your environment. The competitive, social or technological environment can all impact how the market reads your brand. But over-sensitivity can lead you to misread fads as long-term shifts. (Will companies with ‘AI’ in their names have to remove it once it becomes a common tool?)

— Don't confuse the market. Coherence and confidence in the argument that you put to the market is essential. Nothing elicits a more negative response than a brand that tries too hard to spin their story. (Consider this twenty-page explainer from Pepsi).

And you won’t get away with labeling significant brand changes a "refresh",  as Bumble found out when it introduced controversial new features earlier this year. If you fumble that effort, a “refresh” banner isn’t going to lessen public antipathy.

— Watch your timing. Don't launch a branding update in the heat of a situation where customers or shareholders are unhappy – it’s likely to make things worse.

— Who decides? We’ve seen many evolution projects go wrong as there was a misconception the company leadership would need to buy-in from day one.

But it’s also important to keep an eye beyond your company, as Austrade, the Australian Trade and Investment Commission, discovered after a reported $10m brand update. Launched in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was quickly pulled because the new symbol for the brand—a wattle flower—resembled the virus. 

And once you’ve launched your brand update, make sure to back yourself and measure the change.

You can expect to have media, consumers and the branding industry chuck a few rocks at you, but if your analysis, strategy and the execution is robust, that criticism should vanish quickly.

When Airbnb updated its branding in 2014, they received significant criticism and their Belo symbol suffered all sorts of indignities. But they held the line and time has proven them right. 

And while it’s tough to measure impact when branding is tied up with a wide range of other performance-enhancing activities, it’s important to benchmark before launch to provide a baseline for comparison.

Expect revolution to have a more visible impact than evolution, which may not be distinguishable by audiences. Some immediate effects may be picked up in social buzz, as well as perceptual and attitudinal measures, but it can take longer for behavioral impacts to flow through. Brands are long-term assets, and pricing, margin and profitability improvements may take years, not months, to show. 

Rarely is a branding update perfect from day one. Measurement allows you to confidently course correct, refine and optimize over time. 

So evolution or revolution?

The majority of brand changes are more evolutionary in nature because, let’s be honest, people are naturally conservative, and change is hard. However, our view is that most brands can and should be better than they are.

Too many brands are mediocre, managed too timidly, reactively, or aimed at being just “good enough” — which is typically not enough. These are all indicators of a lack of brand leadership — a lack of vision, ambition, and the substance that comes with an expert understanding of a brand and the business behind it.

In the past, many companies could get away with this, as they probably faced less competition and had limited market access, especially in a B2B environment. But in the digital age, this is no longer the case. Every sector is feeling disruption, and being a timid, average brand that is little more than a logo won’t suffice.

Every industry has examples that strike fear into decision-makers. Tropicana’s brand update 15 years ago was a lesson in misjudging the level of brand change required, with enormous backlash forcing them to revert to their previous, successful branding formula.

However, with the category as a whole struggling due to health concerns over sugar content causing juice to fall out of favour, licking their wounds may no longer be an option. Last year, Nielsen data reported that the Tropicana business saw a 30.7% decline in juice sales. Once accused of changing too much, could Tropicana’s recent tentative brand refresh now be too little to respond to this structural shift?

While neither evolution nor revolution is inherently right or wrong, our perspective is that too few brands take bold enough steps to lead their categories — instead, they spend most of their days quietly fading into obscurity.

Is this due to a lack of confidence, ability, vision, or a combination of factors? That depends on many things, but Koto’s default position tends to be more revolutionary: confidently building brands for higher performance and impact. Adapt or die.

Deep-dive further with more reads 

If you want to dive deeper into the topic, we recommend the following books: 

• How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know, by Byron Sharp

• Primalbranding: Create Belief Systems that Attract Communities, by Patrick Hanlon

• The Brand Gap, by Marty Neumeier

Let us know what you think

Hit reply or comment:

• What’s your experience of brand evolution or revolution?

• What have we missed?

• What resonated with you the most?

• Any suggestions for our next newsletter?

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See you in a few weeks for the next edition of OFF Brand. Let’s hope it’s (r)evolutionary.