What’s the Shelf Life of Your Brand?

There’s a shelf life for batteries, spices, even boxed dry spaghetti. What about brands?

How often should you rebrand? Every 10 years? Never? There is no right or wrong answer. It depends upon the brand.

A product brand should ask that question every year. Consumer preferences evolve. Product formulas, recipes and ingredients change. Gluten, trans fat and fructose are words that are shrugged off one day but become primary concerns the next. From “high efficiency” laundry detergent to no-smear gel pens, products are reflections of the lifestyles they seek to improve. Their brands need to reflect genuine empathy for their customers. That creates advocates, and advocates create new customers as fast as they can thumb type.

Organizational brands also need to conduct regular self-inspection. A symbol that represented a service 10 years ago maybe unrecognizable in today’s society. Out-dated can be worse than out-sold. Brands exist to make lasting connections with consumers. Images that reflect the good-old-days sever those connections, especially if the good-old-days are no longer seen as good.

Gone is the time when a brand had to appeal to everyone. Today, filling a niche means filling a need. Whole Foods isn’t for everybody. It caters to a more refined taste. Not that the company keeps less-discerning people from shopping there. The prices do. The same can be said of Dollar General. You probably won’t find a line of Jaguars parked at the doors. Again, it’s not that the company deliberately repels high-end shoppers. The prices do. And yet, there are enough upscale and cost-conscious shoppers to grow both companies.

Niche brands must keep their target audiences in mind. As those audiences change, so should their brand identities. A rebrand is the most cost-effective method for keeping pace with a society that moves at megabytes per second rather than miles per hour. Rebranding ensures that everything from color palates to taglines communicates one valuable message.

That your brand is the freshest they will find – anywhere.