But if our brand is working well already, surely the best thing to do is carry on with it for a consistent approach?

While there is certainly merit in keeping a brand consistent, to help make it recognisable, you also need to keep up with the market if you want to succeed. The fact is, the world is constantly changing and if your business doesn’t move with it, you will be left behind.

So, for your business and brand it is imperative that you keep abreast of what your audience wants and needs are, and to recognise when they change and move on from what you are currently offering. Evolving your brand to suit your market is vital for success and Frost Creative can help.

Evolving your brand for success

We like to work with our clients long-term, including helping them to adapt and grow. A brand needs to be organic with tweaks to messaging and updates to campaigns to help match the requirements of the ever evolving market place.

We help brands to develop their identity in the first place, with a brand strategy behind it – and that approach enables us to help with updating messaging, and creating new brand campaigns which effectively demonstrate to customers why your brand is still the right choice.

Don’t get us wrong – we don’t encourage changing your brand to suit short-lived trends or fads, or people’s desires. It’s about considering deeper factors such as changes in customers’ behaviours, shifts in their likes and dislikes, and even a move in their values.

Expanding your brand to meet future needs

It used to be that branding was made up of absolutes—wholesome but incredibly stubborn and totally resistant to the slightest shift. Brands used to be completely solid and very averse to adaptation but times have changed.

For today’s brands it is more important than ever to acknowledge and work with changes in the market place rather than trying to resist them. Whether the business is a new start up or an established player, working in the B2B or B2C arenas makes no difference.

The only way brands can stay competitive and relevant for their particular customers is by investing in a brand strategy which is flexible and can help them to expand and become future resistant.

At Frost Creative we work with all sizes of businesses, from SMEs to huge national corporations, but it doesn’t matter – every type of business brand needs to be able to evolve and adapt in order to survive.

We work with companies that have been trading for more than 20 years, but while the company is established, clearly the generations of customers change over time. A business that markets to the 40 – 60 year olds of today also needs to be able to adapt and talk to the next generation in an effective way if it is to remain successful.

Frost Creative can help to achieve that for you – working on updated messaging, channels and approach, to ensure your brand is reaching the right audiences in a meaningful way that will help to keep your business relevant and competitive.

Keeping an eye on what your customers want

The key to successfully evolving your brand—whether you are planning a complete rebrand or just a slight change in strategy—is to always have your eye on what your customers really want, because it may be different from what the brand originally provided.

The only way to do this effectively is to know and understand your marketing data and to monitor it regularly. You need to know who your customers are, where they come from and what they like and dislike.

Check out who is coming to your website and what they are doing there. Check your social media channels and monitor your sales figures. You should know your customers inside out, so if their behaviour starts to change, your brand can change with them.

Guidance for building adaptive brands

It’s all very well saying a brand needs to evolve and adapt, but how exactly do you do that in real life? After all, you can’t realistically change your logo or product line every time customers start buying things differently.

Here are a few common themes which explain how brands can endure by staying relevant and competitive:

Know what your customers want

It is really important that a good brand knows its customers thoroughly. You need to be constantly sourcing information about your customers’ thoughts, desires and behaviours so you can see where your brand is meeting those needs, and where it is failing.

It’s no good relying on gut instinct – you need to know exactly where your brand is engaging with customers and where it needs adapting. At Frost Creative we will often work with research specialists to provide this valuable insight for our clients, to make sure the brands we are looking after always have the right information at the right time.

Know your numbers

It’s vital to go beyond just the top level of business figures and to track all of your brand metrics if you want to stay competitive in the market place. You need detailed analysis to see and understand exactly where your customers are in relation to your brand, and to know exactly when it’s the right time to evolve and adapt.

Don’t be afraid to change

Sometimes evolving your brand will mean saying goodbye to familiar and previously popular lines, offers or products and maybe even moving away from old customer groups to allow new ones to experience the business.

It’s important to deal with change from a business perspective and not to be afraid to let things go and try new things. Doing what you have always done just doesn’t work when the market shifts – you need to change with it.

Remain authentic

Deciding the future course for a brand requires an objective mind set – it’s important to read the market place feedback objectively and to navigate any change with clear focus. You are not completely reinventing your brand every time – you need to remain strong to the core values and core objectives, just pivot slightly to meet the changes from the customer.

Be flexible from the beginning

Building flexibility and adaptability into a brand’s strategy from the very outset is the key to a brand’s survival. There is no point trying to grow sales if your brand is no longer relevant, as customers will just go elsewhere. Integrating flexibility and adaptability into your brand will help your business to remain successful well into the future.

As you can see, the days of brands remaining unchanged for decades is long gone – you only have to look at the evolution of some of the iconic big brands over the years to see how they have evolved and changed in time to remain relevant and competitive.

If your brand is looking to evolve and adapt to meet the new needs of 2019 customers then please get in touch with us at Frost Creative to see how our team of brand experts can help ensure your business remains relevant into the future.