The CEO of NIRIN Branding Company and the Creative Director of the MEZA 1618 agency share their views on these changes.
Last year, several famous brands opted for a strategic reformulation known as rebranding. Despite being a common movement in the business world, some of these changes surprised the general public who were accustomed to an established image of certain brands.
The most frequent Adnews readers know how much our team admires everything that involves brands, art and design and, as this is a case that combines and transforms these two worlds, we got in touch with the CEO of NIRIN Branding Company, Daniel Skowronsky, and the partner and Creative Director of the MEZA 1618 agency, Marcelo Zampini, to explain these changes and how they impact the market. Here we go?
Starting with Rebranding
To understand what rebranding is, we first need to understand what branding is about. This term is used to refer to all the strategies that a brand applies to connect with its target audience, including positioning, values and visual identity. The latter is very important as it makes the company’s image striking and easily recognized by consumers.
When a brand decides to conquer new audiences, adapt to a new reality or overcome a situation that links the company’s image to a negative or unpleasant situation, it goes through a transformation process known as rebranding.
Repositioning well-known brands
Throughout 2023, many well-known brands went through this process, such as Pepsi, NokiaDeezer, Petz, Johnson&Johnson, Cinemark, Ita and Hopi Hari. While some maintained the most striking characteristics of their logos, others opted for a total redesign, losing several elements that had been enshrined in the popular imagination for years, such as the case of Petz and Deezer.
In recent years, large brands have been eliminating some details from their logos to clean up their identities. These redesigns include reducing shadows, font weight, depth of logos and the return of a 2D visual construction, flatter and easier to read, instead of 3D, more complex and widely used by a generation of designers and companies. The reasons behind these adjustments are diverse. The main factor is the pressure for a design that favors a better brand experience on mobile devices. In this context, the logo and brand identity need to be aligned to be quickly understood on small screens, comments Daniel Skowronsky.
The CEO of NIRIN Branding Company also highlighted that this change is closely linked to the evolution of society, highlighting that brands need to maintain dialogue with their own audiences and, at the same time, be attractive to new generations. In this process, many companies update their narratives to embrace more contemporary business models.
As an example of this, Skowronsky cited three brands that underwent rebranding beyond the visual, such as Pepsi, Cinemark and Nokia. Check out these changes below:
In the case of the soft drink brand, it redesigned its iconic logo to attract a younger generation while reclaiming its roots. To achieve this, Pepsi kept the striking elements, such as the colors blue, red and white, but introduced a more simplified and elegant design.
Cinemark, one of the largest cinema chains in the world, reflected the transformation of the entertainment sector to follow what streaming platforms, such as Netflix, Disney+ and HBO MAX, are doing and present its commitment to offering a unique cinematic experience. . The new logo eliminates several visual elements and adopts a flat 2D version to promote greater clarity
Finally, Nokia, which distanced itself from the popular image linked to cell phones and began to operate in the innovation, technology and connectivity market for B2B (business to business) customers, presents a new logo, to replace the one developed in 1960, which maintains its typographic characteristic, but incorporates modern, minimalist and dynamic angular visual elements.
Brands as living organisms
While Daniel presented the ethics of brands from the perspective that the company itself wants to convey, Marcelo Zampini highlights the change in the consumer’s point of view and how they view these new faces.
According to Zampini: It marks a living organism that dialogues, that issues an opinion and that needs to express itself. It’s very interesting to see everyone’s perception of this. Ask several people, who are not from the communications market, what color Ita’s new brand is and you will be surprised. However, the most important thing is not about being orange or blue. the feeling that the brand change creates from the individual and collective connections it manages to make.
The partner and creative director of MEZA 1618 emphasizes that changes tend to deliver more than just innovation and a vision of the future, but also an attitude of a brand willing to reinvent itself and defend its space.
Rebranding has to be a decision that aims not only to build value, but mainly to maintain active dialogue, redefining intentions and projecting the future, concludes Zampini.
Interview by Ana Beatriz Oliveira/Supervised by Bitencourt
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