The Refresh: Realign your brand

Learn how to realign your brand with your evolving business—without the cost or chaos of a full rebrand

Branding plays an integral role in building customer trust, but that goes out the window when your brand doesn’t grow alongside your business. It’s time to make the shift from treating branding as a one-time exercise to an ongoing strategic process.

Instead of defaulting to a full rebrand, a targeted refresh can help realign your brand while preserving its equity. This approach keeps your messaging and visual assets consistent by developing reusable brand tools like shared templates and scalable brand systems. The result is a strong, cohesive brand presence without unnecessary disruption.

What you’ll learn

In this session, we’ll walk you through practical tools to audit your brand, align internal teams, and maintain consistency while evolving with your business.

You’ll leave with actionable strategies to:

• Identify when your brand needs a refresh (not a full rebrand)
• Execute a brand refresh using your existing assets
• Align internal teams to maintain consistency
• Strengthen your messaging, visuals, and customer experience

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Webinar Transcript

Mohamed Hamad: Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the 3rd Wednesday webinar.

Today we are talking to Kelsey, founder of Up & Out, brands strategist extraordinaire. Today is a great topic that is top of mind with everybody. Well, anybody that’s been working in a business, running their own business, or has worked in the marketing department of any team, and it is the brand refresh.

When do you refresh your brand and when do you redo the whole thing? When do you do a complete rebrand? So that’s the topic of the day today.

We’ve got a few people coming in, but just as introductions, Kelsey, you wanna give us a little bit of an intro of your background and—

Kelsea Gust: Yeah, for sure. So as [you] said, I founded Up & Out, we’re a fully fractional marketing and branding agency specifically catered to B2B startups in that growth stage. So a lot of our work focuses on bringing brands up to speed on how their products and software has evolved over the last, be it 2 years or 10 years, whatever their high growth learning period is.

My background way back in the day is in graphic design, so my career has always been in branding, but I transitioned from, uh, graphic design branding specifically to include messaging and positioning, growth marketing and everything under the sun that brand does actually encompass and we’ll get into what a brand includes a little bit later, but that’s a little background for me.

Mohamed Hamad: Yes, branding is a very broad term and a lot of people mostly think of branding as their logo, as colors, their vibe, but branding, as we know it is a huge term and encompasses everything that is perceived by your audience about the organization and what it does, but from your perspective, can we establish what a brand is so that, you know, we have a baseline for this discussion?

Kelsea Gust: Yeah, 100% and I think you’re completely right. Most of the founders that I speak to think about, “oh, I need a new brand,” and what they’re actually talking about is the logo mark and maybe the color palette and the fonts, but in reality your brand is so, so much more than that.

If we were to define it and many people have attempted to do so, but for the sake of this conversation, it’s the overall impression that all of your materials, both internal and external. So that includes your internal branding to your employees and the way that you speak to customers one on one. How those things all come together to create an impression of your brand that affects the way that people feel about your brand. 

So this is, yes, logo and colors and fonts, specifically the use of all of those things, but it also extends to your photography, the way that you tell your story, your tone, your messaging, your content, and then of course how all of those things are applied to your public web presence, your social media, your website, your internal assets, your communications to your customers, the way that your reps speak on a call, it’s all under the big brand.

Which is why the conversation can get so hairy when we talk about rebrands or refreshes because tweaking some things, some people may call that a rebrand, but it truly is not we’ll get to the distinction, but really is that the culmination of all the individual pieces that create an impression.

Mohamed Hamad: Yeah, in a sense, a brand is [how] people perceive you as an organization, from every touch point, from how you look to how you communicate and all the way down, and as you said, it’s internal as well. So when it comes to the conversation about a rebrand versus a refresh, what should be the starting point? 

Where should we begin this conversation because generally organizations like to rethink how they fit in the marketplace every year or so, maybe every couple of years or three. What should the conversation start off [with]?

Kelsea Gust: Yeah, so constant aeration and evolution is very normal. So if I look at the challenge that most of the folks that we speak with who are thinking about this, and they may not have figured out yet whether or not they need a full rebrand or refresh, but they’ve fallen down and realized that things aren’t working in one of two ways.

The goal with your brand is that obviously to create this holistic impression, you want things to be consistent. You want things from the very beginning of your customer journey all the way to the end to create sort of a consistent experience and that’s very challenging for a growing brand that’s also iterating all of the time and adding things to their journey. 

It’s swapping things out, realizing what doesn’t work, evolving what their product actually is fundamentally changing their company, let alone the brand. They’re fundamentally changing who they are and who they’re selling to. So it becomes really challenging to keep things consistent and iterate as a growing marketing team should.

Kelsea Gust: So they’ve either taken the root of constant iteration and change, which is good. It’s a generally very positive thing, but all of that constant iteration results in a very disjointed experience and typically when you take a step back, you’re going to be able to clearly see these distinct kinds of errors of your brand. 

“Oh, that’s when so-and-so was in charge.” “Oh that’s when we were trying to call our product this thing and we realized that nobody understood what that meant.” You’ll look at all of your different decks and you’ll be like,” oh, this is the template from 2022,” “this is the template from this,” or “this is the old how it works diagram.” You’ll be able to really quickly see there [are] all those differences.

Kelsea Gust: It’s a lot easier to do this with fresh eyes, but certainly if you take a step back and you look at things sort of A to Z, you’ll be able to see it internally too, and that’s sort of results in a disconnected experience and also usually results in a convoluted message that’s gonna confuse your customers. So that’s sort of challenge number one. Most people fall into that bucket.

Challenge number two, which is also—can be the result of just a really lean team. It can also be the result of an under-resourced specifically marketing team, if they outsource their original branding. Maybe they went to Fiverr, maybe they got an agency that is extremely skilled at building a brand and built something up in a vacuum and said here you go and then they don’t do anything with it for six months to six years, and they take a step back one day and they realize, oh, that looks nice, but it actually doesn’t reflect at all what we’re doing. 

Um, this happens to me a lot when I have intro calls with the company. I’ll do my homework, do the full sort of read through of the website, and I’m like, “OK, great.” The website’s in a good spot and I feel like I know exactly what they do, and I get on a call with them and I’m like, “OK, so how can we actually help you?”

And they’re like, “yeah, what you read, that’s not what we do. That’s not what we’re selling, that’s not who we’re selling to, it’s like a circa 4 years ago,” and that misunderstanding that I’m having ahead of that discovery call is exactly the same misunderstanding that all of their customers are having and are self disqualifying when they go to their site and they’re like, “yeah, this isn’t for me.”

Mohamed Hamad: Yeah.

Kelsea Gust: It’s a long-winded answer to your question,

Mohamed Hamad: I mean, I feel that pain because in a lot of senses, brands over time just morph, and that’s through internal changes, through teams changing, the product changing, the market changing, perception of the industry, for instance, changing, and you know, your brand.

While it needs to maintain an essence of who the organization is or what the core mission is, everything around it is always changing, so there is that. There needs to be a sense of malleability over time, but—

Kelsea Gust: And it can and it should change, and that’s totally fine. That’s definitely not an error at all. A brand should be flexible, so if we get into sort of the distinction then between, OK, this has happened, we’re in one of those two buckets. I would be curious to hear if people feel like they’re in either of those because they are fairly common.

So this has happened and we’re like, “OK, something’s not working now we need to address it.” Do we want to burn down the whole house? Do we want to do a full rebrand? Do we need a full rebrand or actually 9 times out of 10 what we need is a brand refresh. So the difference there when I’m talking about the rebrand versus refresh, a rebrand.

Let’s start with a refresh because it’s easier: It’s you’re changing the clothes for the season. The season has evolved, you’re upgrading your wardrobe, maybe you got a promotion, you can’t keep wearing sweats to work. You need a new wardrobe, you’re changing the surface level things to make sure that you’re aligning to how you need to solve a problem, how you need to show up in order to really resonate with the people that you’re meeting.

A rebrand is fundamentally different. This is, you’re changing the bones. This is plastic surgery, and it is often expensive and painful, and it is a very convoluted process, not one which companies should get into lightly.

So there is a sort of a fundamental difference there, but to your point, when you have a refresh off of a really solid brand, that brand should have enough inherent flexibility to be super malleable, where you can use all of the same bones. You’re still in the same body, but you can change up the way that you’re putting—to keep with the wardrobe analogy, change the outfits that you’re putting together on a regular basis. 

You’re still using all the same pieces, but you can play quite a bit with how you’re using those things and the story that you’re telling with those things that actually you don’t need the plastic surgery, you’re fine just the way that you want.

So it is something not to get into lightly. The reasons that you may want to do a rebrand are helpful to think about. So, [a] really good reason is your brand’s not scaling and it won’t scale, and that is a very legitimate reason. It happens all the time. So maybe your brand’s super rooted and it looks dated now because it’s rooted in a previous trend, a previous era we are, this is not a whole conversation about rebranding, so I will refrain from all of the advice about how to make your brand scalable, but the quick thing that I will say is:

The fastest route to needing a rebrand in three years is rooting it in the present day in terms of trends or market, and this is maybe a hot take, but our obsession around AI right now is a temporary flux and I strongly believe that we’re, you know, a couple weeks away if we haven’t already gotten there to AI being fundamental table stakes and not a differentiator. 

So all of these companies that are hinging their entire brand around AI. That’s gonna be like hinging your entire brand around software as a SaaS company. It’s like great, your software and so is literally everybody else. Now what? What’s next? What else?

And so, you know, hinging your brand on anything that’s super temporal like that. It is a really quick way to spending a lot of money in a few years on a brand new brand.

So [your brand]’s not scaling, it’s, it’s dated, but maybe it’s also fundamentally the bones that you’re giving are just not sufficient. So to my point about you can, you should be able to really refresh your wardrobe using the same pieces if it’s giving you enough flexibility.

Some brands just inherently don’t have that flexibility and they weren’t necessarily put together with the long-term in mind and then maybe what you need is really just an addition to figure. 

The second very good reason for needing a rebrand is acquisition. I was in a company once where I led three rebrands in three years due to acquisition. It was a very crazy time, but every time it was absolutely necessary we needed to fundamentally change what we were to the rest of the world because we had now joined forces with an entirely different company with its own brand.

That can also be very expensive, but I think that that kind of trauma bonded me to the idea of a solid refresh, because if you don’t need to go through this, absolutely do not. 

So all very, very solid reasons, to do a rebrand, really bad reasons, which we see all the time, is marketing is not performing. OK. Not a good reason to do a rebrand. If your marketing is not performing, I guarantee you there are five other things that you should be looking at before you look at [if] your brand is not working.

Mohamed Hamad: Yeah, cause that’s a very disruptive endeavor. So it’s not like a rebrand can come in, you know, a couple of weeks or anything like that. And if your marketing is not working, then doing a long exercise of six months plus is not going to change the needle.

Kelsea Gust: No, exactly.

So sometimes it is, you have a much smaller company, maybe you just came out. An accelerator and what you’ve been working with for the last six months isn’t gonna stick, then you can maybe go into this a lot more lightly. 

You should go into the process of the rebrand with a lot of intention, but not the end of the world if you’re burning the house down and the house is actually just a tent, but yeah, if you are in any way an established company, it’s not something to be done lightly. 

So marketing [is] not working. OK, well, where is the friction that’s falling down in your funnel? Like, look at your—how are you actually, you know, generating leads, how are you actually speaking to your customers? It’s probably not working in a variety of other ways other than your brand.

The CEO doesn’t like the brand, really bad reason to rebrand. I’m, and I apologize if there’s CEOs on this calls or founders, but I’ll be the first person to say your personal preferences do not matter. The market doesn’t care. So the CEO not liking the brand, really, really bad reason for rebranding. Also, the CEO really liking the brand, really bad reason to not rebrand if needed.

Kelsea Gust: We bumped into that and I’m sure you do, as well. Like brands are hugely emotional things. It’s like people, babies, and sticking with something that is just not working and forcing your team to bend over backwards to make it work just because you really like it and it was your first thing and you wanna stick with it or you spent a lot of money on it, not valid reasons.

Yeah, so lots of reasons to get into it and not to get into it, but we can get back to if you’re gonna proceed with the refresh then. Yeah.

Mohamed Hamad: well, I mean, when it comes to the refresh, I mean we talked about the rebrand, but when it comes to the refresh, how do we actually start to think about refreshing a brand?

Because there’s one thing: how do you identify what part of the brand is not really working, and then how to test that assumption of what it is that’s not working, and then move on from there and iterate till you get something. Maybe we can talk a little bit about that.

Kelsea Gust: Yeah, for sure. So OK, let’s start with; how do we figure out what’s working and what’s not, and data. Data is the answer, but qualitative conversations can be really, really helpful here too.

So, executing a brand audit is your step number one. So running through the entire customer journey we talked earlier about how your brand is truly the entire thing.

Pretending to be a new prospect and this is easier with fresh eyes, but if you’re internal it’s super fine, as well, as long as you have the buy-in of the various people in your company running through from true beginning all the way to the end, including your customer experience, including your quarterly business reviews, whatever other things are interacting with that customer from the brand, reviewing all of it, that’s when the different eras that are gonna start popping out at you.

And understanding what that full framing looks like. So also, this is an auditing process to figure out what are we saying where and what’s working, but also this should be the beginning of your spreadsheet of what actually would need to change if we execute a rebrand or even a refresh. 

So like what’s the legacy that we need to make sure that we’re not forgetting about? So running through that, what I also really love to do as a part of that brand audit is, and this is no shade on a sales team, sales teams are full of people who are very good at getting things done when they need to get done.

And they’re also, as much as we hate to admit it as marketers, they’re closer to the customer than we’ll ever be. So speaking to your sales team and what I really love to do is a materials hand in, so no judgment way for your sales team, your CS team, whatever it may be to pass you the things that they’ve secretly built or modified over the last two years, which you know that they have.

And taking from that no judgment, no hating on them for messing up the brand they built something that they believe is meeting their needs more than whatever it is that you gave them. This is like a super cathartic process for teams to do collaboratively with their marketing team to rebuild that trust, a breakdown of trust between CX and sales and marketing when marketing is operating in a bubble, um, is also a super important stuff and we can have a whole other call about that.

But yeah, doing that hand in and figuring out, OK, if they, if I gave them a 20 slide sales deck and they’ve been consistently presenting four slides, why those four slides? Walk me through your pitch. Why are these the things that matter? Why are all of those things about the beautiful story that we’re telling got stripped out and it’s because nobody cares about the story.

Mohamed Hamad: which this is interesting because there needs to be a continuous loop between branding, marketing, and sales. And that constant conversation is what keeps the alignment strong because at some point, one of the three is gonna deviate because, as you said, something’s working or not working for them.

And if you’re holding on to very strict guidelines that aren’t flexible, this is where you deviate from the brand in general and you have a disconnect. So the key is now that you have these conversations and you brought all of this stuff out, what’s the next step? How do you go down to the core of it and test that out?

Is it still with the sales team or do you change parts of your website or, you know, play around with certain social pieces or something like that? Like, where do you—what’s the easiest piece to swap out?

Kelsea Gust: Yeah, so what you’re after is data, right? We’re—we’ve looked at all of this stuff. It may be very obvious what’s working. And actually, if you listen really closely to your sales team, it will be obvious what’s working or whatever. They know, they know what’s resonating. They know what makes your prospects eyes pop open and what makes them glaze over, but how you’re refining that message still does need to be tested.

How much it needs to be tested depends on which of those original two buckets your company lands in. You may be in the bucket where you’ve been iterating testing for a long time, and you actually have a ton of data. And so digging back into that data, what are the most visited pages on your website where people [are] actually gravitating towards?

What are the blogs that people are reading? What are the blogs that people are absolutely not reading? What are your sort of glamour pages on the website that are getting zero love because nobody cares? Looking back into your keywords and being really strategic about what volume actually exists, it’s all well and good to say, hey, we’ve decided that this is the story we want to tell and we’re gonna go ham after these keywords. If there’s zero volume on those keywords, it’s because nobody’s gonna find you that way.

So gathering all that data, and again if you’re a company that’s been more active for a longer time and then iterating, the wealth of data is there for you. 

So looking at that, if you’re in the other bucket, if you’ve had a static brand for a long time, you know something needs to change and you’re now theorizing on the direction you want to go in and you need data, there’s some really amazing tools. One, and there’s tons of tools like this, but one example that I like to give is Winter.

So Winter is basically marketing research on demand and it’s a site where you can upload like a screenshot of a landing page, you can upload an ad, a graphics something or like a slide from a sales deck, something that sort of encapsulates the message and the graphics and the visual style, the full brand image that you want to test.

And you can select in winter, OK, I want to show this to heads of marketing at brick and mortar retail stores, and then it will go and get 12 of those for you. This is a paid service, but it is absolutely worth paying for, and I promise you doing it this way is cheaper than testing through ads.

It will then get you really rich qualified insights from those 12 marketers who looked at your thing and then [say] like, “actually this is confusing” or “I like this one better” or “this really resonated with me and made me think of XYZ” and doing that rich data. So if you don’t want to run ads, if your company is resistant to it or you just don’t have a budget for it, investing in something like this, so you’re still hopefully making a data-backed decision is helpful.

The $0 way is collaborating with your sales team, giving them two different sales decks. This is also a really great use of BDRs. If you have BDRs who are making 20 calls a day, give them two different talk tracks, see which one sticks, meet with them at the end of two weeks, and just get that qualitative data. 

If you have a plug-in like Gong, having all of those things track as your sales reps, maybe your 80s are testing the different decks, maybe your BDRs are having phone calls and like genuinely putting in the hours to listen to these things and understand what questions people are asking, when there are crickets, when people are like nodding along aggressively and clearly following.

So your sales reps are a wealth of $0 data, and then I would say the final step if you’ve used those two is to go to ads. Ads are obviously a great testing zone. They don’t come for free and they can be really expensive. There are channels like Meta and X that are cheaper for ad testing.

So absolutely using those, but I would be very intentional and cautious when testing through ads. Make sure that you’re testing a specific thing. Maybe it’s just the landing page, maybe it’s just one conversational ad that tells one story and one that tests the other thing, but not just being, OK, we think we have a better brand now. Let’s go. That’s a surefire way to waste a lot of spend.

Mohamed Hamad: Absolutely, yeah, when it comes to testing, it’s always very important to really be focused on what you’re testing out versus let’s try this entire thing out and then you don’t know or you can’t qualify exactly what’s working and what’s not.

It seems like the, you know, refresh really isn’t just something that lives within the marketing team or the leadership. It really has to involve everybody and every touch point, every point where you interact with your customers, your clients, your audience, whatever.

OK. So now, let’s say we’ve gone off and created this rebrand or this refresh. We’ve hit all the targets, you know, we’ve talked to everybody. How do we maintain it without it going sideways very quickly? 

Because, you know, there’s two things here. There’s one, you go off and you create all of these assets, but people fall back on bad habits because they’re used to things for so long. And then how do you keep it going consistently despite changes in the organization over time, like you have new hires, you have new changes going to a new market and keeping that. 

Kelsea Gust: Yeah, 100%. So, I’ll touch on really quickly. You said we have all these assets that we’ve made, [I] really want to highlight your asset library is probably bigger than it needs to be.

Genuinely. So when you do that audit, the materials hand in with sales, CX, everybody, you identify what they really need, what they’re using, and instead of doing a blanket refresh and all of the assets that exist that were valuable at one point and no longer serve anybody, archive, archive, archive, bring your asset library down to what it actually needs to be. 

Make sure all of your materials are playing multiple roles. We live on horizontal screens now most of the time when we’re not on our phones at work, we’re on horizontal screens, your one pagers can be horizontal and play double duty as slides. That is OK. 

There is nothing that says it needs to be an 8.5 and 11 paper sized thing, so bringing it absolutely down to, OK, at the top, middle, bottom of funnel for each of these different teams and each of these different buyers what we actually really need and building out that and refreshing those. 

Archive everything else, and then putting in place tools that inherently protect your brand with which your teams can self-serve. So shameless plug for you on the Third Wunder theme. 

I love working with your um theme because it protects the brand that you’re putting in place. So the fact that it has all these safeguards to say, you know, this is what our brand guidelines are. These are all of the flexible ways that you can use it that will all not allow you to break the brand and then getting out of the way of the rest of your marketing team and in some cases the rest of your sales team. Although, I do hesitate to allow sales to build assets because truly their efforts are better spent elsewhere.

But getting certainly out of the way of your content team and your social media team, giving them tools like Canva templates, definitely giving them a robust theme that they can then self-publish things on the website, but making sure that your design team is now just a strategic force.

So the two sort of timing pieces and as somebody who’s been an in-house designer for a long time, what I really wished would happen was, someone always brings me in right at the jump. Yes, in-house designers are almost always inherently busy, as is everybody else, so there’s a hesitation to bother them and oh well, we’ll get it as far as we can and then we’ll bring them in at the end.

It’s really hard to un-engineer something that’s been worked on and when all this emotion and feedback loops and effort is built into this thing and you don’t want your designer to then like rip it back down. Bring them in at the jump and they’re going to have insights and recommendations on how this can be done strategically with the brand and the design in mind and then let them go away and you or, as [is] more and more often the case now, you as an internal team or AI can bring it to 80%—the really important thing to note though, or 95%.

The important thing to know though is if it’s not a brand specialist internally, you’re not going to get to 100%. So that last 5%, making sure that you’re bringing them back in to close the loop and protect the brand is also super critical. It’s, having a realistic expectation of AI is an important piece and making sure that your designers are coming back in to judge in that little way that only they can.

Mohamed Hamad: Yeah, I think it’s very important to think of design being implemented in your branding process, as you said, from the jump, but also so that you can create design systems right? 

And having a unified design language, because you can expand on that language easier if you have a good foundational system [that] you’ve created, as opposed to just trying have at it and then bringing in your designer to fix it up and hush it up and you’re like, “no, this doesn’t really fit with the visual language that we’re trying to establish here.” 

And that goes again also with, with the text-based communication or any type of communication, if you have a good solid foundation. That works out really well. 

We’re coming in on the half-hour. I wanted to extend out to see if anybody had any questions out there, throw them out in the chat, and we can answer them if we can.

Kelsea Gust: Yeah, awesome. As we wait for those to come in, the last thing I’ll say about brand maintenance is really saying goodbye to the twenty-page brand guidelines document. Breaks my heart to say it, but nobody cares about that document and it is almost instantly outdated. 

Design systems are much better replacements for that like robust reference material. So whether that’s in Figma or whatever tool that you want to use, making sure that the guidelines exist somewhere but not in a static twenty-page document, but instead, creating a brand on a page. That your teams can actually reference, so that’s one page.

If there are three value props that people should be using, what are they in the way that we say them? If there’s one way that we reference our software, one type of thing that we call it, what is that one thing? If there are three ways that you use typography, what are those? So like really restricting yourself to one page can be an interesting exercise and that also opens up a flexibility to use those 3 things times 12.

Kelsea Gust: Um, OK, I have a question from Sam. What are some of your favorite AI support apps for branding?

Um, this is a great question. So, yeah, you wanna start, I’ll go.

Mohamed Hamad: I would say on our side, we use AI to be a brand guard. So we do train certain AI models to embody our brand and be that person, that character that checks every output. And that’s a fun way to do that. Outside of AI apps, there’s obviously things like Candor, you can have your brand kit, you know, our WunderTheme, maintains your brand.

Kelsey, do you have any ways that you can maintain your brand through certain tools like AI?

Kelsea Gust: Yeah, I think AI is still really good at some things more than others. It’s very good, and getting better every day at content.

So, training up AI, I think that might even be on the call who brought me, the use of a lot of content editing tools that are integrating AI and voice and tone, and trains up those tools to really be familiar with your brand and tone. 

You can train AI agents to be familiar with your brand and tone and running everything from sales reps, self-written social posts through something to make sure that they’re not doing any brand faux pas to evaluating content that comes in from a freelancer who may just be less familiar with your brand. 

So really good at content. Transparently, AI is getting there on the design front, but it’s not great. Mo, you and I were talking about this using Canva to expand from one design to 20 versions of that design can be super, super helpful for very quick scale. You still need to bring in your designer for the last 5% of zhuzhing and making sure that things are right.

For example, AI tools that create video snippets. I created one recently where it like snapped out 40 video snippets in like two minutes, which are great. I could use maybe six of them, and that’s still helping me produce six videos way faster than I would have been able to, but understanding that you’re gonna get a lot of junk and so making sure that somebody with a strategic eye is still evaluating all of that junk to make sure that you’re using the things. 

In the last minute, I want to answer Elizabeth’s question because this is really great. I’m also available, if you wanna just email me and ask this, and we can pass that a little bit more.

Making your brand, when you’re building it from scratch, flexible for the future, I would strongly say keeping it simple and it feels easier said than done, but when if you’re building from scratch, you might be building like a brand mark, a logo as well, and one of the quickest ways that those will go out of style or no longer match your brand is when you get too detailed about it.

Starting with the basics of just like logo types, so just the word typed out with some very simple symbol and resisting the urge to put all of the illustrated things of what you do into that logo mark. So just keeping it really, really simple. There’s a reason that the CN logo hasn’t changed in like 65 years, it’s never gonna go out of style. It’s incredibly simple. 

It’s just a line, so making sure that that is inherent in the bones that you want to keep forever, but also building in flexibility with your systems, understanding what areas you may need to be flexible for in the future. Are you in a space that is going to be existing fully online? In that case, your brand is a lot more open to vibrant colors that don’t produce well in print. 

If you’re gonna be attending a lot of events, operating a lot in person, printing a lot of things, you really need to be thinking from the jump about how the colors that you’re choosing, the fonts that you’re choosing, the way that you’re specifically the logo as well if you’re starting from scratch, how those things are reflected in the real world are printed and produced, reproduced in the real world and hesitating to commit to something that when you have a single landing page to try and get, early signups in, and then realizing the first time you have to make a booth that like your, you know, bright sign landing page does not translate to print is a really good thing to watch out for. Hopefully that answers your question.

Mohamed Hamad: Absolutely.

Mohamed Hamad: We’re running a little over time. Just wanted to say, if you do want to connect with Kelsey, you can find her on LinkedIn right there and her website is wearupandout.com. And that’s the LinkedIn company page right there. So if you want to reach out, discuss branding, refreshes, or rebrands, she is more than available, of course. 

In saying that, thank you so much, Kelsey, for your time. This was really insightful. I’m hoping everybody enjoyed that as much as I did. Lots of conversations. We have these conversations back and forth between us anyway, you know, industry veterans here.

But yeah, thank you so much and everybody, thank you for attending and we’ll see you in the next one, Third Wednesday webinar, every third Wednesday of the month.

Kelsea Gust: Awesome. I’ll be there. Thank you, Mo, for having me. It was great.

Mohamed Hamad: Thank you guys.