Why Do We Update Our Brands?

By: Christa Tuttle, Launch Marketing CEO

From Google to Budweiser to Intel – familiar brands have been rolling out new looks, taglines and logos lately, drawing reactions from indignation to applause to indifference – but why even do it? Why do we change well-established identities that our markets are familiar with? Don’t we have more important things to do with our time and money?

Over the years, we’ve worked with many clients on re-branding projects and here are some of their reasons:

“We need to support our new business strategy.”

“We need to create a new identity for the post-merger company.”

“We need to update our brand to reflect the fact that we’re no longer a start-up.”

In fact, today we, at Launch Marketing, are announcing our new brand identity and website, however, we haven’t pivoted, bought anyone or needed to dust ourselves off. So why did we do it?

I started Launch Marketing 15 years ago (yes, a big birthday cake is in our future!) and at the time I sat down with many business people and marketers to understand what they needed that they weren’t getting from existing agencies – looking for the untapped aspect of marketing that we could provide. What I learned was that there were many agencies and consultants who could help develop strategies and plans but then few who could also implement the strategy in a pragmatic, speedy and cost-effective way. People were looking for a way to prove a strategy worked by carrying it all the way from the initial idea to fruition.

So, this is what we set out to do, and after 15 years and over 140 clients served, we still pride ourselves on being a strategy-to-execution marketing machine. But when we reviewed our own brand we saw that there was room for us to reinforce who we are, and what we mean to our clients.

Cobbler’s children? Maybe – or more politely put, we have been very busy working on our client’s brands to update our own! What made this the right time for our own brand update? A number of reasons:

1. Tactically, we wanted a new website to make it easier to communicate with prospects and clients.
2. Strategically, we wanted our brand to really represent who we are and what we do – to say unequivocally that: “From marketing strategy to execution – we are a well-oiled marketing machine for our B2B clients who want to implement the right marketing tools at the right time to help their businesses acquire, retain and expand new customers.” This was important for both our markets but also our own internal culture.
3. Practically, we knew that with some focus (and late nights) we had the in-house tools and expertise to get this done within a three-month timeframe.

So – without further ado, here’s the new Launch Marketing website which is the core representation of the new brand identity – which you’ll also see in our next presentation, collateral and social media presence.

What do you think? Does “Well-oiled Marketing Machine” represent what Launch Marketing means to you?