Is your company brand still relevant? Does it reflect your current customers, focus, and mission?

In today’s fast-paced business world, branding your business is more important than ever. A company’s brand must stay relevant to their current customer base and keep attracting potential customers at the same time. A successful brand offers advantages to the company like market differentiation, consumer awareness, and company association. These advantages may or may not stay relevant over time depending on many market and consumer factors.

Every company will need to go through re-branding eventually. This is not an effort for a company to undertake lightly. Here are five good reasons to re-brand your business.

Give Your Company a Competitive Advantage

Today’s consumers want a company that show they know what is going on in their industry. If your industry is changing, your branding guidelines need to focus on keeping your company sounding and looking current. An example of a changing industry is the shift made in residential real estate a few years ago. When the housing market collapsed, good real estate companies and agents re-branded to stay competitive.

Stimulate Your Company’s Growth

Your company may have started out with one consumer in mind and found most of your customers coming from a completely different group. Your branding guidelines needs to reflect your ideal customer now. By updating your brand, you can reach more consumers and expand your customer base. If your main consumers are adults between the ages of 25 and 25, but your brand focuses on teenagers, updating your brand to the 25-35 age group will attract more customers.

Branding Your Business: Taking Your Company to the Next Level

Are you ready to take your company to a new level? You may be evolving from a small company to a larger one. You may be taking a local business and going national. You may be going from a national consumer base to an international one. By re-branding or branding your business, you can freshen your image and make it relevant to your new market. For example, if your company started out as a local one, to go national, you want to get away from any local references. For example, San Francisco Staffing might re-brand to Smith & Jones Staffing.

Keep Your Company Ahead of Industry Pace

Most industries change at a certain pace. High-tech companies change rapidly as technology evolves. Older industries with a solid client base changes slower. The idea is to keep your company ahead of your industry’s pace. If your competition changes its image every five years, you want to do your re-brand in the three to four-year range. If the competition changes every year, you want to update your branding guidelines every eight months. Keep your company looking fresh, while your competition’s image goes stale.

Refocusing Your Company’s Purpose

Has your company’s focus changed since you started it? Many companies start serving a specific niche. Over time, they may add more options which take off and start dominating their business. A re-brand offers the chance to refocus the company and broaden its horizons. An example is a company that started out offering janitorial and cleaning services. As a part of their service, they developed their own cleaning products. They begin selling the products to customers and that takes off as their main business. In this case, renaming the Happy Cleaning and Janitorial Services Company to the Happy Cleaning Company makes sense.

When you make the decision on re-branding or branding yourbusiness, be sure you have a solid reason for doing so. Then focus your efforts in making the change have the impact you desire. Know your customer and what they want in a company. You need to become your ideal customer’s ideal brand.