
From our experience, Q1 is often the prime season for brands to explore or launch a brand refresh. There’s something about the start of a new year—after some well-earned rest, brand founders and teams are energized and ready to bring fresh ideas to enhance their brand’s presence and impact. From our perspective, a brand refresh represents a 'step change,' while a rebrand is a major pivot involving a completely new look, feel, message, and often a new target market.
A brand refresh is about enhancing the existing 'you'—evolving to better reflect who you are today. It aligns with how your business, customers, and market have naturally progressed, ensuring you remain relevant in the current landscape. On the other hand, a rebrand is about starting fresh—targeting new customer segments, redefining your identity, and doing things in a completely reimagined way.
Whether it’s a refresh or a full rebrand, the key is striking a balance between evolution and preserving what customers already love most about the brand.
Assessing Brand Equity: What Stays
The foundation of any successful brand refresh lies in identifying and preserving the elements that make your brand loved, trusted, and memorable. These are the aspects that define your brand’s unique equity—the attributes you ‘own’ in the minds of your customers.
Start by asking:
- What makes your brand distinct?
- What values, visual style, or tone of voice is unmistakably ‘you’?
- What do customers and stakeholders consistently associate with your brand?
Gathering Perspectives:
Begin by collecting insights from multiple angles:
- Customer Research and Reviews: Look for recurring themes in what your customers admire and rely on.
- Internal Conversations: Engage your team to uncover their understanding of what your brand stands for and what feels essential to preserve.
Identifying Pain Points: Uncovering What Needs to Change
A successful brand refresh starts with understanding why change is needed. Begin by clarifying the gaps: What challenges does your team observe, and what sparked the decision to embark on this refresh journey?
This step is critical for:
- Pinpointing Gaps: Identifying areas where the brand may feel outdated, inconsistent, or out of sync with current market trends and customer expectations.
- Revealing Misalignment: Highlighting what’s holding the brand back from reaching its full potential.
Defining Your Strategic Territory
To move forward, define the space your refreshed brand will confidently own. This process starts with a thorough market audit to examine the competitive landscape:
- Understand what competitors do well and where they fall short.
- Analyze their brand value propositions or “customer promises” to uncover their strategic positioning.
From there, identify what sets your brand apart. By understanding where others stand, you can carve out a refreshed value proposition that is not only clear but entirely ownable.
This is where working with a brand agency adds significant value. Often, when internal teams are too close to the brand, it becomes difficult to spot the opportunities that are right under their noses. A skilled agency brings an outsider’s perspective, helping to surface untapped potential and providing clarity on how to position your refreshed brand.
Your Visual Aesthetic Refresh Comes Next
While not every brand needs a visual refresh, many discover that after solidifying their brand positioning, minor tweaks to their aesthetic can help better reflect and illuminate their strategy.
- What visual cues, colors, and elements are quintessentially “you" and must remain?
- What, if anything, needs to evolve to better align with our brand promise?
The common mistake we see is starting with aesthetics before, defining the level of refresh required for the core message and identity—"who are we now." Without strategic intent, brands often brief designers with requests for what simply “looks nice.”
Strategic brand positioning territory and “verbal identity” always comes first. The visual expression through your design identity, then follows. This approach creates a thoughtful and intentional brief that not only strengthens your brand but also provides designers with the context and substance they need to deliver creative, impactful work.
Bringing Customers Along for the Journey
At its core, this refresh is about them—your current and future customers. It’s an opportunity to deepen relevance and explore innovative ways to create more customer-centric marketing.
How will you elevate your storytelling and customer connections—both online and in-person?
With your refreshed brand value proposition and story as the foundation, envision the future of your content and community-building strategy. How can you strike the perfect balance between showcasing your products, your brand’s world and connecting with your customers’ world too? This means creating brand campaigns, content series, community initiatives, and memorable moments that allow both your story and theirs to shine.
The Devil is in the Details
The most important consideration is aligning your team, engaging your customers, and effectively communicating with external partners like agencies and retailers to introduce the brand’s step-change. Don’t leave anything to chance. Download our Brand Refresh Checklist to ensure you’re covering all the critical steps, and set your brand up for a more impactful brand refresh.
If your team could use an external perspective or specialized expertise for your brand refresh, we’re here to help bring your refreshed vision to life. You’re welcome to request our brand refresh checklist to dot your I’s and cross your T’s to think about all the things you should be considering ahead of the big ‘Refresh’ launch day. >>> Click here to get in touch.

Author: Effie Asafu-Adjaye
Effie Asafu-Adjaye is the Founder of Beautiful Sparks. Beautiful Sparks helps beauty and fashion businesses get more fanatics in love with their brands, by refining their brand strategy, messaging, branding, content storytelling, and community-building strategy. Read more about Effie here. Linkedin.