Own one thing people recognize instantly
A color, shape or character that only means you does more work than another logo refresh.
Indie brands redesign constantly. New palette every launch, new mascot every quarter, usually because the founder got bored. Your audience never had time to learn the old one.
Ehrenberg-Bass Institute professor Jenni Romaniuk calls these signals “distinctive assets”: things other than your name, like colors, logos or characters, that point to your brand. To count, an asset has to be unique, so it evokes only you, and famous, so people who see it think of you. Her cautionary tale: Tropicana replaced its “orange with the straw” packaging with a plain glass of juice, leaving the brand barely recognizable. The old image was back in less than a month, and the change is estimated to have cost $26.3m in sales.
Pick one or two assets, like a specific color, an illustration style or a recurring phrase, and use them everywhere, every time, for longer than feels necessary. Your boredom is not your audience’s problem.
The example
- Instead of
- “New year, new look: we’ve refreshed our logo, colors and mascot!”
- Try
- “Same mustard yellow and the same grumpy owl on every post, email and invoice since day one”
Before you flush
List every color, font, logo and character you used this year, then pick the one most unique to you and commit to it everywhere.