Clients rarely arrive saying they have a structural problem. They arrive saying the brand feels tired, or inconsistent, or that it no longer reflects where the business is going.
Sometimes that is exactly what it is, and a redesign fixes it.
Sometimes the design is a symptom, and redesigning it produces a better looking version of the same confusion. Here are four ways to tell the difference before spending the budget.
One: the inconsistency is between entities, not within one
If a single company’s materials look inconsistent, that is a systems problem and guidelines solve it.
If four companies under one owner look unrelated, that is not inconsistency. That is the absence of a decision about how they relate. Designing each of them separately, however well, leaves the group exactly where it started with better logos. This is brand architecture and it has to be settled before any design begins.
Two: nobody can state the proposition the same way twice
Ask three people in the business what the company does and for whom. If you get three answers, the brand is not unclear because of how it looks.
Design can express a decision. It cannot make one. A studio that accepts this brief without flagging it will produce something attractive that the sales team quietly stops using.
Three: the trigger is a transaction
If the reason for the rebrand is a sale, a raise or an acquisition, the design brief is downstream of a commercial one. What a buyer discounts is rarely the logo. It is customer concentration, founder dependency and a proposition that only works when the founder is in the room.
Those take twelve to twenty four months to correct and no amount of identity work substitutes.
Four: the founder’s name is the brand and the founder is leaving
This is the hardest version, because it is emotional as well as commercial. A business named for a person, carrying that person’s reputation, has to become a business that works without them. That is a succession question with a communications plan attached, and the design decision comes at the end of it rather than the beginning.
What to do instead
None of this means the design work is unnecessary. It means the order matters. Structure, then proposition, then identity. Reversed, the identity is rebuilt within two years, because nothing underneath it was decided.
If you are unsure which you are holding, we are happy to look at it and tell you plainly, including when the answer is that you do not need us.
Victor Tavitian is Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Tokyo Design Studio Australia and a partner at Tavitian, Trần & Partners.
