How many times would we have said or heard someone say “It is time to change the brand identity”? In the last few years multiple businesses across industries, even the traditional industrial organisations, have been looking to rebrand or change their identity – be it from a complete name change to something as small as changing a colour. While some are genuine requirements keeping in view that their positioning might have changed or that a business has been taken over or they have changed their business model itself, some are merely based on the fact ‘it is long since we’ve had this identity’. In the marketing parlance, this is called ‘Creative Fatigue’.

Creative Fatigue is when the brand owners (marketing, business and whosoever is looking at the brand on a frequent basis) feel that the identity has become old. This is purely due to the fact that they have been exposed so much that they feel it looks old. But has the customer or consumer or client been exposed to the same level? It takes years to build a brand – be it the consitent use of optics like fonts, colours, imagery or the language and positioning we talk about. This is of course keeping in mind that there are spends happening on building the brand. In the case of Services category of industries, the brand is built a lot more through every touch point with the customer. In the Products category of industries, it is the advertising and the product.

The are some factors that determine the ‘fatigue’ a customer might have with a brand:

  • Level of marketing spend
  • Like illustrated above – the kind of product or service
  • The ‘involvement’ with the brand
  • The ‘ticket value’ of a product or service

B2B organisations build the brand not so much through traditional advertising as much as through ‘personal marketing’ which in these days is being called ‘mass customisation’. FMCG brands just carpet bomb their messages on every media possible. Even here sometimes it is just the positioning which keeps change and not so much the brand identity per se – a good example and also hightlight the differences are Coke and Pepsi. While Coke has remained true to its brand for a long time, Pepsi has changed it quite a few times. But both brands have been changing the ‘positioning’ so to say even almost every year with the launch of new campaigns.

So what do we conclude? Do we change or not? It purely depends on how much of your customer has been exposed to the brand and it’s identity in various forms. If not much, then it is wiser to invest the money in other initiatives rather than on reinventing the brand every now and then.