Despite Active Rebranding, Why do Brands Deteriorate Over Time?

Brands need time to grow, evolve, and be recognised. Every time you change something about your visual identity or messaging, you’re setting that process back. Staying consistent in your visual language and messaging doesn’t mean you can’t evolve or innovate.

Brand management can be tough—the process is long, and people are always tempted to change things up constantly, which can cause the identity to deteriorate. But the trick is to resist that urge and stay disciplined. Here’s how to do it.

1. Keep your Vision and Purpose Locked in

When you first set out to build your brand, you probably went through a lot of work to define your strategy, your purpose, and your values. These elements should act as a solid foundation for every decision that comes your way. It’s easy to lose sight of them over time, especially when new people join the team or leadership changes. However, your brand’s purpose and values should never be altered unless there’s a really compelling reason to do so. They’re the only thing stopping people making decisions based on personal opinion.

2. Stay Consistent, and Evolve Slowly (Even when you’re getting bored)

It’s natural to get bored of your brand. You’ve been living with it day in and day out, and after a while, the visuals, the tone of voice, and the messaging can start feeling stale. But here’s the thing: your audience hasn’t fully engaged with your brand yet. You get bored of your own brand WAY before your customers do. 

Think about Marmite. They’ve been using “Love it or Hate it” since 1996 — it’s been going strong for almost 30 years. Are you bored of that? Changing up campaigns, messaging and your brand too much can have a real knock-on effect on brand recognition, trust and loyalty. Give people time to get emotionally invested.

Brands need time to grow, evolve, and be recognised. Every time you change something about your visual identity or messaging, you’re setting that process back. Staying consistent in your visual language and messaging doesn’t mean you can’t evolve or innovate. It just means you should resist the urge to make drastic changes too soon. My old tutor used to say that a good brand should be like looking in the mirror— day to day, you don’t see loads of change. But if you look at a photo of yourself from 10 years ago, you’ll notice that slowly but surely, you’ve evolved with the times.

Over time, you might find that your audience changes, or that your business needs to adapt to new market conditions. The trick is to keep an eye on these shifts and make subtle adjustments as needed.

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Don’t rush to overhaul everything. Instead, make adjustments that feel natural to the brand. By staying disciplined and following your strategy, you’ll avoid the common mistakes that lead to brand deterioration. Your brand will remain strong, relevant, and trusted for years to come.  

3. Focus on Both Strategy and Identity

Brand deterioration isn’t just about visuals. It’s also about the underlying strategy. If your core values and messaging aren’t being applied consistently throughout the organisation across every department, you’ll quickly see the brand falter. This happens when teams start making decisions based on personal opinion rather than brand-specific guidelines.

Consistency should go beyond the creative team. If everyone in your organisation understands and applies the brand strategy, from recruitment to internal culture, you’ll see more alignment in how the brand is represented internally and externally. Without this alignment, you risk weakening the brand’s identity.

4. Establish a Framework for Decision-Making

One of the biggest mistakes companies make is relying on personal opinions and arbitrary decisions when it comes to brand management. Without a clear framework in place, different people will make decisions based on what they think is best, leading to inconsistency and confusion.

Having a well-defined brand strategy and clear guidelines for visual identity, messaging, and tone of voice ensures that every decision made within the organisation is aligned with the brand. From marketing campaigns to recruitment, every touchpoint should reflect the brand’s core values and strategy.

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