When to Pursue a Brand Refresh, with Adam Taylor

Adam Taylor is a multidisciplinary designer, illustrator, and educator with more than 15 years of professional experience in Utah, Michigan, and Seattle. Throughout his career, he has worn many hats within the ever-evolving world of design, but his strongest affinities lie in strategic brand development, UI/UX, and illustration.

Adam also serves as a remote Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Michigan State University, where he teaches courses on design tools, theory, and brand identity development. Outside of work, he’s an occasional exhibiting fine artist, a novice dungeon master for a very patient group of friends, and a small-time local musician.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

• When to pursue a brand refresh or rebrand including outdated visual identities, poor digital performance, or falling behind competitors.
• The classical branding process: research, strategy, brand identity, touchpoints, and asset management.
• How organizations can approach rebrands incrementally by tackling different phases of the branding process over time instead of everything at once.
• Why research is the foundation of successful branding, guiding strategy, messaging, and design decisions.
• How to refresh brand positioning when messaging lacks clarity, value propositions are weak, or target audience shifts.
• Why new company or product launches require a strong brand story, clear positioning, and a distinctive visual identity.
• How mergers and acquisitions create opportunities to unify cultures, align offerings, and establish a shared brand DNA.
• Less common triggers for rebranding, including name changes, leadership transitions, and major market shifts.
• How brand strategy helps organizations win in the market by building authentic connections and creating long-term value.

Additional resources: 

• Adam Taylor on LinkedIn
• Brand Naming by Robert Meyerson
• Josh's Podcast with Rob Myerson
• Just Enough Research by Erika Hall
• Josh Dougherty on LinkedIn
• Josh Dougherty’s speaking site
• A Brave New’s Website
  
  

Transcript

Josh Dougherty:
Welcome to A Brave New Podcast. This is a show about branding and marketing in the healthcare space. But more than that, it's an exploration of what it takes to create brands that will be remembered and how marketing can be a catalyst for those brands' success. I'm Josh Dougherty, your host. Let's dive in. All right. Welcome back to A Brave New Podcast. It's great to have you along to listen. I'm joined again today by Adam Taylor, our senior designer here at A Brave New. Hey, Adam, how's it going?

Adam Taylor:
It's going great. How are you doing, Josh?

Josh Dougherty:
I'm doing well. I'm really excited to have this conversation actually. I think whenever we talk to clients, to partners, to prospects, there's always this conversation around, I know that branding's important. I know that we need to think about it. We're really, really busy. How do we know what is the right time to invest in a branding project? And certainly once someone commits to a branding project, they see the power of it and the value of it, but it's really hard for them to figure out when to pull the trigger because, frankly, things never slow down at their company. You have to really count the cost about when you're going to get rolling.

And so today, Adam and I are going to have a conversation around six common scenarios of when it's a good idea to think about doing a branding project. And we may be throwing a couple other bonus items along the way. But as we talk about this, I think one thing I want to just demystify, and I'd love to get your thoughts on this as well, Adam, is the fact that you can take on portions of a branding project and not have to do a full rebrand at any time. So we think about the classical branding process of first phase really conducting research, understanding what's happening in the market, what's happening with your customers, what internal sentiment is, then clarifying and working on the strategy, then designing out the brand identity, the visuals, creating touchpoints, and maybe managing assets after that and rolling it out.

And I think there's this sense that you've got to do all that stuff at once, right? But really, I think people perhaps should free themselves to think maybe we only need to do a couple of those things at a time, and we can bite this off sequentially, even though it may not have the same impact of a full rebrand, but it will have moved you forward incrementally. Do you have thoughts about that?

Adam Taylor:
Yeah. I mean, I think that's something that absolutely makes sense. And I understand why this process can be overwhelming. It's often thought about in two different ways. It's either thought of as something that's very simple, like we're just going to make a logo and call it done Or it's thought of as being something very complex, like that entire process that you just laid out, these six steps and it feels really, really big. And it is okay to sort of bite it off into chunks as long as you're willing to understand that investing in your brand is a process and that it takes attention and activity and effort.

So as we talk about these six different areas where you are considering entering into a brand process, you might already have an existing brand that you're going back and trying to adhere to and making sure that you're finding yourself positioned correctly within the market. So if you do bite it off in a small chunk, just remember that you're going to have to go back at some point and address things a little bit further and build things out more if you want your brand to really work for you.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. And I think I did say you don't have to do all these things. The one thing I would say you need to ground your process in, in some sort of way, is this idea of research. So even if you're going in and saying, "We're only tackling the identity. We're tackling the visuals in this project, and we're going to update those." You still need to do research. Or if you're just doing brand strategy, there needs to be some level of research because I think, at the end of the day, you need to make sure that you're grounding what you're doing and what the market is thinking about and how your brand or your brand expression, whichever portion you're working on, shows up in the market.

So one of the tools that I really like—if you want to think about how to do research but do the right amount of research—one of the books I love is this book called Just Enough Research by Erika Hall. I'd encourage people to pick it up. And she talks in this book, in a relatively brilliant way, about how there's always a desire from people to say we need to do all this deep, deep research, but how do you identify what is the right amount of research to do to get the right insights and inputs?

And she talks about how good research is about asking more and better questions and thinking critically about the answers. And you can do that sort of thing, whether it's with a bunch of focus grouping, if it's doing in depth interviews, if it's doing surveying. I think if you come with that frame of How do we ask more and better questions to build understanding and think critically about those answers?, you can then say, "What is the right amount of research to do to inform our work?" But regardless, you got to do some research.

Adam Taylor:
Yeah. Your brand needs to exist with some sort of information and data behind it. You need to understand your audience in some way. Great design and great designed brands out in the world don't really exist in a vacuum. There's always an idea, a tie-in to an audience, a business goal or something like that that has to inform the way things look and feel. So research is important. It might seem daunting, but resources like that book I think are really great to break it down.

Josh Dougherty:
Yep. So let's dive in to talking about when you should invest in a branding project. As a brand strategist, I say you should always invest in a branding project and a podcast.

Adam Taylor:
And as a designer, I would also agree with that.

Josh Dougherty:
But if you're not a designer or a brand strategist, you probably want some better advice than that. So the real answer is there's probably six to eight core times when you should invest in a brand, a branding project of some sort. And so I think one of those that I'd love to have you talk about first, and we've kind of alluded to this already, is when you need to revitalize your brand identity, your logo, your visual system. Adam, what do you think about what is unique about that trigger? How can someone tell if they're at that place, and what do they need to think about?

Adam Taylor:
It can be difficult to recognize this, especially if you've been living with your brand for a number of years and you're familiar with it. It feels like that comfortable coat that you put on that's broken into your body. So I think that it takes a little bit of willingness to step back and think about your market space and think about the services that you offer. Are you looking behind the times? Are you looking dated out in the market space? Are your customers coming to different platforms where your brand needs to exist and your identity is just not performing well on those platforms? Mobile is over 50% of traffic online. And so if you don't have a mark or a brand identity system that is structured in a way to show up well in that interface, you're going to have a good portion of your audience just disengage with it because they feel like it doesn't work.

Another thing to take into consideration too is, what are your competitors doing? Do you look like you belong in the same market space? Are you able to sort of leverage your brand to position yourself uniquely amongst them? And how do you feel when people are interacting with your brand? Do you feel embarrassed? Do you feel proud? Is it something you know that you need to adhere to?

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. I think one of my exercises you were talking about, how do you look against your competitors? One of the things I love to do is to build a deck of logos and stick them up of like ... I think about, we did this when we were branding Huntsman Cancer Institute years ago and we were talking about how do we turn Huntsman Cancer Institute into someone who's respected across the country and not just a regional player?

And so we put the two simple slides, right? One was all the regional healthcare providers and they looked like they matched up. And then we put them up against like the biggies, MD Anderson, Fred Hutch, other big cancer centers nationally. And all of a sudden they looked like a JV player. And that was like that breakthrough for people to be like, "Oh gosh, we could do a little work here to make sure we match up with the people we are actually playing with." Unlike from a program-wise, from a research-wise, they're doing that work of all those people nationally who are leaders, but they didn't look the part.

Adam Taylor:
Yeah. I think that's a brilliant exercise because what you're doing there is that you're showing them their future, right? You're showing them where they want to go and saying, "Let's think about your ideal future state here and are you ready for it?" And that's a really great way to see at a glance if you are or if you aren't.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. And so if you're an internal marketing leader, that might be an exercise that you do every year to just check and see like, do we fit? Do we still look good? Do we still stand out? And if not, you can start thinking about what's the solution to move forward there. That's great.

I guess my question here is, how much should I let my gut guide me? So you talked about if I'm embarrassed when I show people my brand. How big of a factor, like we're talking about health tech, health systems, et cetera. Is that real? Is a marketer feeling embarrassed, is that something that should drive a decision? Or how do you determine if it's just your gut or if it's something that needs to change?

Adam Taylor:
I think it's something to pay attention to for sure, but it shouldn't be the entire driver of that decision. It's an indicator. It's like a check oil light or check engine light for your brand. Ultimately, it's difficult with this type of work because it is so visual to not bring our own sort of subjectivities into how we think about our brands. So if you start to feel that way, that's a good time to start a conversation, a wider conversation with stakeholders, with people that interact with your brand, and then let that inform and build momentum in the conversation to help you understand what you need to do next.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. I think all of these, I think it's well said that all these are kind of a trigger to start exploring something but not to maybe make a decision. I think related to this is like when we need to revitalize a brand from a positioning perspective, right? So, we talked about the visuals. I think it's similar here, but the symptoms may be slightly different. I think the symptoms of maybe needing to take a look at your positionings are: if you find yourself or your team finds themselves struggling every time someone asks them, "Who are you? What do you do?" And it's hard to come up with that answer, that's a dead giveaway, right? That maybe you need to work on some positioning.

If you have a good answer, but they're like, "Oh, isn't that like everyone else?" That's the response you get—another dead giveaway that you maybe want to look at this. But my favorite exercise to do if I'm trying to explore in an organization whether a branding process needs to happen—that is, if a client brings us in early enough to help them determine whether they need to approach a positioning project—is to ask 25 people in the company, "Who are you? What do you do? How are you unique?" And then to just listen. And oh my gosh, the things you discover of like 30, 25 different answers to something that you thought was straightforward, how can 25 people describe what you do so vastly different?

If there's lack of alignment there, it's probably time to get into positioning and time to get better known. So that might be the first symptom, like lack of message discipline. I think another symptom that we think about is we're breaking into a new market. So maybe you're expanding from the United States into the Canadian market, or maybe I think those markets are somewhat similar, but from the US market into the UK, where you have bigger change of cultural norms. You probably should step back and say, "Does our brand resonate in the same way in these different cultures? And if not, how do we refine that?"

And then I think other places is if you're trying to change who your target audience is, that's probably at the other big place. So maybe you're trying to go from selling from SMB to mid-market size companies to enterprise. You may need to look at your brand and say, "How does this change our positioning to make us appear like the experts we are, but operating at an enterprise level at a more complex level to make sure that we don't feel overly simplistic to a more complex buyer?" Do you have any other thoughts there around revitalizing positioning? Any other maybe triggers or signs that you would recognize, Adam?

Adam Taylor:
I think that this is a good moment to point out too for our listeners. If you're not used to thinking about brand this way, that a moment ago I was speaking about brand identity and revitalizing that visual component. Josh is talking about your brand as a perception and as a memory. And so these activities about asking a company, stakeholders within a company who they are, that can represent misalignment even within ownership. And so it's important to take into consideration that your brand is internally facing and externally facing. Your logo and your identity is a component of it, but all of these things come together to shape how people think about you in the market space.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, such a good point. I think if we're thinking about brand and we're approaching a branding process, it's not just a marketing-driven process, it's a process about discovering what is at that core DNA of the company that can kind of flow out into everything from marketing, branding, operations, finance, training, culture, all these sort of things.

So maybe we talk next about the more obvious one. You have a new company and a new product. That's a good time to start thinking about this. I guess you can talk a little bit about that trigger. I think it's more clear than the others but, maybe, what are the first things you would have someone think about from their brand in a branding project there?

Adam Taylor:
Yeah, this is probably the most recognizable moment when somebody might start trying to address their brand. You're starting a new business, and you need some way to represent yourself out in your market space. You need a business card, you need a website, and you need a way for it to look like it's coherent and part of the same company and that it represents your offering. Or maybe you've gotten down the road a little bit and you have that key logo, but now you have a new product and it needs its own branding that fits within your existing brand system and it needs a name. It needs its own sort of presence in the market space to help you carve out your positioning even more meaningfully.

And maybe it's a simple transition like you're about to go public. I mean, this could be a time for you to take that sort of chunked out brand process that we talked about in the beginning where maybe you're just doing a few of those steps and saying, "Okay, we're about to go public and we need to raise venture capital. We need investors." And so now we need to really address this process in a more meaningful way.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, I think that's a really common time for us to engage with people as maybe they have a product and they're like, "How do we raise capital? How do we get this scaling?" You got to get started. And I think we have a previous podcast, we talked about this, about how for health tech startups that are at that venture phase, how a brand can help you fundraise, sell, and scale.

But I think at the most basic level, you've got to at that point be thinking about what is the key, the core story that we're telling as an organization? What is the position that we're taking or what is the unique essence, the memory, we want to leave behind with people? And then probably how are we parlaying that into a visual, a logo, a brand identity, and a visual system that is unique as well?

Adam Taylor:
Yeah, absolutely. You want clarity in that moment. You want your brand to be able to represent who you are clearly to your intended audience, tell that story about what you do, how you do it, and why it's important that people invest and work with you.

Josh Dougherty:
Totally. And I think, speaking of clarity, another moment where there isn't often a lot of clarity and where brand becomes important is in a merger moment, when two companies are joining together. We were talking about this with a client even earlier today about a previous case study working with a brand process where two companies emerged actually where there's an acquisition. And I think that could be a pretty fraught moment. And everyone, I think this is an interesting project, right? Because you have two companies coming together, you have two cultures colliding. You have maybe complementary or somewhat overlapping offerings colliding together.

You need to send a strong signal to the world that maybe you're unified and that there's greater power in your combined offerings than there was before, but internally there might not be that much unification because you're jamming together two operations that weren't operating very similarly. And I think this is a place where it's a chance to take a pause and, as you think about branding, give yourself a little bit of a broader look because the branding work that you might undertake here may not be a traditional rebrand process, but you do need to sit down and think intentionally about brand and how you want to go forward.

Do you want to have two brands going forward? Are we consolidating into one? Are we forming a new company out of the two brands? Which I think can be challenging. Typically, I would run with some of the equity that exists in one of those current companies, or how are we going to retire one of those brands? So there are different questions that I would ask here that may be in other parts of a branding process, but at the end of the day, you've got to get to a place where you can say—and put a stake in the ground for your shared employees across the two enterprises—"This is who we are now. It's informed by where these two companies came from, and we can be excited and work towards building this new reality or this new DNA and representing it to the world."

Adam Taylor:
Yeah, absolutely. Show them that ideal future state. Show them where things are going to go.

Josh Dougherty:
Otherwise, we're going to have this belief that we got acquired and now we're fighting the war of attrition of survival. I mean, I don't think people often talk about that when they're talking about these two companies going together, but you talk behind the scenes to people who are going through a merger and it is rough. They need some vision to get behind.

Adam Taylor:
Absolutely.

Josh Dougherty:
I think the one thing here is there can often be, if I can talk a little bit about pitfalls here, is there's, I think, a desire to move quickly often in this process. And here my big thing would be to say, do not move so quickly that you don't do your due diligence of checking stuff with legal and making sure that you can own the decisions that you're making. Otherwise, your team and your company in the market, for all matters and purposes, is already going through a challenging moment. And so you want to land that challenging moment and not have to jump back into it again because you made a hasty decision that felt expedient at the time but doesn't actually work.

And then the one other thing I would say here is this work of rebranding when companies merge is maybe more about culture than many of the other moments. Because if you can come up with an essence everyone can rally behind and identify, like Here are four or five ways that we're all going to live out that essence together, all of a sudden you can create a unifying moment for your teams to become a single team.

What about the third kind of way, Adam, that I would love for you to talk about. And this is maybe a little bit more of a normal process—but it could come out of a merger as well—is this idea that we need to create an integrated system. Stuff is inconsistent. This wouldn't be surprising if after a merger, you go through a branding process, you have a bunch of inconsistencies, but it can happen in a normal company too. Can you chat a little bit about that sort of trigger?

Adam Taylor:
Yeah, absolutely. This is something that can be common under a number of different scenarios. So one is something we've already touched on. Maybe you've gone through part of that truncated branding process and you have had several different marketing initiatives. And because you only have these kind of components, your marketing and your brand and these different campaigns that you've launched feel misaligned visually. So you need to create a way to be able to speak out to your audience and also maybe internally too, to talent that you're trying to attract, that you are one system, that you are consistent, that things work together in the way that they're meant to.

Another setting that you might find this in is that you are within an organization that is starting to acquire different companies and you need to create a system that's going to make it feel like you are all part of the same brand—whether you're going to take an approach like say FedEx where you have the same FedEx logo that's iterated with different colors and different taglines or you're going to create a visual system where the marks are distinct but feel related visually. You want that consistent system. You want it to be easy for your team to use, and you want it to be easy for your audience to recognize. And I think that if you have a larger organization where you have different teams and divisions doing different marketing, it's important to create the system so that they are launching their own initiatives but within the same consistent brand voice.

Josh Dougherty:
I love that point because most organizations, as you grow to a certain extent, you can't control everything going out. And it's natural to want to grab hold and hold onto everything as a visual person or as a marketing person, but you’ve got to give people the tools to create within a system.

Adam Taylor:
Yeah, absolutely. Marketing teams are going to want to have some ownership. And if you don't have that system in place, things can go a little bit awry in how you're showing up in the market. So if you have an integrated system in place that is easy to understand and use, you still give your marketing teams autonomy to speak out in the way that they need to and be empowered in that way but not in a way that's compromising how you're being positioned and showing up in the market.

Josh Dougherty:
What role do you think having a digitally accessible tool for someone to grab positioning, messaging, visuals, like those sort of things, image libraries, all those sort of things, what role does that play in the system building?

Adam Taylor:
I think it plays a very large role. I mean, it's not uncommon within the design and marketing world for things to sort of live in PDFs and documents that sort of live within marketing teams. But I think if you can have a single source of truth that people can go to and pull the right information that you can keep updated, it's just going to empower those teams to move quicker. So if you're able to create a system that is accessible and isn't siloed within any particular team, you're just going to have a lot more success in making sure that you show up consistently.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. Awesome. Well, I have three other places, and I'm only going to speak to them ... I think we've covered the five biggies. I have three others that are maybe less common, but also important that I'll just mention briefly. The first is a name change. Typically, there's a lot of equity in a brand name, so we want to be really careful about when we change it, but there can be times when it is needed or when we need to change it. I can think of multiple episodes in recent history where someone chose a really cool name for their brand and then got a cease and desist letter months later and had to change their name. So that's an opportunity to think about a branding project. And I think it's a chance to really not just think about the name and have a random brainstorm about the name but think a little bit about what is your unique DNA as an organization? What's that core memory you're trying to leave behind and then define that and then move on to the name. So that's an opportunity where you might need to think about it.

Maybe another is when there's negative connotations with the name in new markets. So you're moving into a new market, new culture, and your name just doesn't work there. And then another might be that you merged, like we talked about a little bit previously, and you're coming up with a brand new name to match the new DNA of the company. So that's one area where I think it's pretty obvious that branding needs to get involved. You shouldn't just pick a name out of a hat. There's a disciplined way to do it. I have a past podcast with Rob Meyerson that we'll link in the show notes that talks about ... I mean, if I was to name someone to be like the brand-naming guru, he would be the guy, and he came on the podcast about a year ago, and it's a good episode to listen to. If you want some tips on how to do that, you can also read his book on brand naming, which is also excellent.

The other two areas to think about for a brand shift is when leadership changes. If you had a long-term CEO who was really instrumental to driving the culture and the brand, it might be a good time to shift. And then the final piece is maybe when the market has shifted. So if AI's completely destroyed your market and changed how people are thinking about the product, it's time to think about How do we reposition to make sure we're still relevant in this space? Those are some kind of more edge cases that happen and that I think are more clear for people to go back to branding. Are there any other areas you can think of or anything you'd add there, Adam?

Adam Taylor:
I think one thing that I would note about the leadership change is if you have a leadership team, like a CEO or a group of people that are instrumental to where the company is going and you are transitioning to a new leadership that represents a directional change for the company, I think that's kind of important to dial in. It's not just that the leadership is shifting, but it's that the company might be shifting itself. I mean, this could be a generational transition for a family business or somebody that has a completely new vision for the company.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, that's a really good point. And hopefully this conversation, as we're closing it out, has given you a little bit of clarity that branding is hard work, it takes time, it takes effort, but there are moments when it's really worth it because if we circle back about why we do branding anyways, I think of this quote by Mark Pollard, which is really valuable. It says, "Brand strategy is an informed opinion about how to win." At the end of the day, from a marketing perspective, we are trying ... Or from a branding perspective, I do not believe marketing and branding are interchangeable.

It'd be nice to think we're just trying to create something beautiful, but we're trying to create something that builds real connections with people—so your company can win in the market—and that is authentic, and is real, and feels ethically viable, all those things. But at the end of the day, we're trying to figure out how do we build those connections so that you can build value for your organization. And so it really is our commitment that when you hit one of those moments we talked about, it's a good time to step back and think about: Are we best positioned to win and do we need to look at our strategy to be able to refine that? Because we simply can't afford not to.

Adam Taylor:
Yeah. I think that's really important. And keep in mind where you're going. What are your goals? Where do you want to be in 5 years and 10 years, and is your brand going to carry you there?

Josh Dougherty:
Yep. Excellent. Well, with that, I think we'll wrap up. Adam, thanks so much for coming and sharing your wisdom and your knowledge in this area. I look forward to the next time we can have one of these conversations.

Adam Taylor:
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Josh Dougherty:
Thanks for listening to this episode of A Brave New Podcast. Go to abravenew.com for more resources and advice on all things brand. If you enjoyed this episode, show us some love by subscribing, rating, and reviewing A Brave New Podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts. A Brave New Podcast is created by A Brave New, a branding agency in Seattle, Washington, that crafts bold and memorable healthcare brands. Our producer is Rob Gregerson.