Think your brand identity is looking a little out of date? Before you brief your creative agency on a fresh new logo or an updated packaging design, you might want to look at the data. Recorded live at the BAM Marketing Congress, Sarah Claeys, Director of Content Design at Empathy Lab by EPAM, sits down with Professor Jenni Romaniuk, Associate Director at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science and a global authority on brand building. Together, they unpack why the urge to modernize distinctive brand assets often does far more harm than good.
In this episode, Jenni challenges the conventional marketing wisdom that brands must constantly evolve to stay relevant. Backed by decades of empirical research, she explains why changing your visual or auditory assets typically pushes your brand backwards rather than forwards, leading to catastrophic sales drops or expensive reversals. By treating your distinctive assets like precision tools that need to be sharpened rather than replaced, you can build deep, lasting memories in the minds of your buyers. Whether you are navigating new media environments like podcasts or fighting off copycat competitors, this conversation is a vital reality check for any marketer who wants to stop guessing and start building real brand equity.
Get ready to protect your brand identity and stop wasting budget on unnecessary rebrands. In this episode, you'll discover:
The fallacy of modernization
Why research shows that consumers rarely reward ‘updated’ logos or packaging, and how arbitrary design changes can severely damage brand findability.
Assets as strategic tools
How to shift your mindset from changing an asset out of boredom to auditing whether it remains fit for purpose in new media or sales environments.
The rules of asset building
Why strict consistency in form is required to build mental hooks, and why you must establish fame and uniqueness before you can safely experiment with variation in use.
The power of co-presentation
The science of anchoring an asset to your brand name in the exact same temporal space and sensory mode to successfully build long-term memory.
Immortal human fundamentals
Why, despite the rapid rise of AI and new digital environments, the underlying laws of human memory and brand growth have remained entirely unchanged since the 1950s.
Listen to the full episode now to safeguard your brand's identity.
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