Building enduring brands with purpose and vision
Introduction
What actually ages
Look at a brand that has held up for twenty years and the surface has almost certainly moved: the wordmark has been redrawn, the palette narrowed, the photography restaged twice. What has not moved is the reason the company exists and the way it talks about it.
That is the useful distinction when you are deciding what to fix. Surfaces are supposed to change. If the surface is the only thing holding the brand together, every refresh is a rebuild.
Building the part that does not move
- Write the purpose as something you could fail at. A purpose no one could disagree with is not load-bearing.
- Decide what the brand will not do. The exclusions age far better than the ambitions.
- Give the vision a horizon and a measure, so a team five years from now can tell whether it is being met.
Refreshing without restarting
A good refresh changes the things that have started to date — the type, the crop, the density — and leaves the recognisable shape alone. Customers notice discontinuity far more than they notice datedness, and the cost of being unrecognisable for a quarter is higher than the cost of a slightly old palette.
Conclusion
Enduring brands are not preserved, they are maintained. The purpose stays still so that everything else is free to move, which is the opposite of how most refreshes are scoped.
