When people say they love your brand, they often mean they like your logo. But a SaaS brand is more than just a logo—it’s the sum total of how customers and partners perceive your business based on all the experiences they’ve had with you. It’s what people think and feel when they hear the name of your company, product, or service. Creating your desired brand perception requires that you periodically evaluate whether your brand is resonating with the right customers and make adjustments when needed.

Many SaaS companies initially establish product-market fit and get traction with SMBs, only to see enterprise customers start buying, too. If they want to reinforce this potentially lucrative buying pattern, SaaS founders and CEOs have a pivotal decision to make. Should they stay focused on serving SMBs or shift their strategy and go upmarket to primarily serve enterprise customers? If the brand that got them here isn’t going to get them where they ultimately want to go from a growth and business valuation standpoint, it might be time for a brand refresh or rebrand.

Brand Refresh vs. Rebrand 

A brand refresh involves creating a new visual brand identity (logo) and style guide for your existing brand or product name and updating your company (brand) messaging and audience messaging. In contrast, a rebrand includes a name change in addition to refreshing your brand story and visual brand identity. Choosing to refresh your brand retains the name of your company and any equity you’ve built into it. Keeping your name and its associated equity can be a good thing if your current brand is attracting the right customers and making the right impression on them. But if your brand is misaligned with your evolving business model or doesn’t resonate with the customers you want to serve long-term, it’s time to consider a brand refresh.

Done well, a brand refresh presents an opportunity to go below the surface, beyond a cosmetic makeover, to rethink and reframe the value proposition of your business and brand. Leaders can use a brand refresh to accelerate profitable growth by taking time to clarify their company’s brand purpose, brand position, brand promise, brand pillars, brand personality, and brand narrative—along with their audience and product messaging. The goal is to reach the right audiences with the right messages, images, and experiences at the right time to create the right brand perceptions across the buying journey. As a result, you can combine the best of brand marketing and performance marketing to build your brand and business at the same time.

Rebrand Example: Consensus Case Study

When our founder, Jed Morley, was working as the head of marketing for Demochimp, it became clear that the business had a viable opportunity to move upmarket and focus on serving enterprise customers when it started closing sales with large companies. Garin Hess, serial entrepreneur and Demochimp’s founder and CEO, named his second startup Demochimp as a playful way to educate the market about the benefits of his demo automation solution. An intelligent demo provides B2B software buyers with an interactive library of reusable demo videos that reconfigure themselves based on the role and interests of each member of a prospective customer’s buying group.

The Demochimp platform provides demo analytics on the backend, giving presales teams, including appointment setters (SDAs, SDRs, BDRs) and sales engineers, new insights into the aspects of an offering that most interest each member of the buying committee based on what they watched and for how long. In addition, you can see who prospective customers shared your demo with and what those individuals watched. With the help of these demo analytics, sales teams learn what matters most to their prospective customers so they can focus their sales efforts on those topics and progress the sales conversation in the most relevant and meaningful way possible, resulting in helping buyers reach a buying consensus faster and higher conversion rates and a better marketing ROI for sellers.

Garin and Jed decided it was time to rebrand the company when they saw that the playful Demochimp company name felt too small for enterprise sales conversations. They decided to rebrand the company from Demochimp to Consensus to better reflect the benefits of the company’s offerings and to better connect with enterprise companies that wanted to make it easier for their customers to buy enterprise B2B software. The new Consensus name suggested what the company does—making it easier for customers to buy enterprise software—and resonated with the enterprise market. After its rebrand, Consensus attracted more attention from industry analysts and customers who saw the new brand as a more legitimate and relevant enterprise offering, even though the core product hadn’t changed much at that time.

Today, G2 ranks Consensus as the leader in the new demo automation category Garin created and made relevant through ongoing content marketing and thought leadership, including his book Selling Is Hard. Buying is Harder. Consensus validated the size and significance of the demo automation category by partnering with industry analysts who used the brand as a case study in support of changes they were seeing in enterprise buying patterns and selling motions. The resulting momentum and sales growth for Consensus led to the company raising $110 million from Sumeru Equity Partners in 2023, indicating they’d discovered and defined a multi-billion-dollar software category.

Brand Refresh Example: Audience Case Study

Co-founders and cousins Brian and Creighton Green worked with Backstory to refresh their brand for Audience, the audience engagement and management platform they built. Audience grew from a promotional campaign Briand and Creighton built on social media to help a local television station engage its audience directly through social media and gain more insights into who they are and the kinds of content and products they’re interested in learning more about from an advertising perspective.

The campaign was so successful that Brian and Creighton built a software platform that creates, executes, and converts audience engagement from quizzes, sweepstakes and surveys. The goal was to help media companies and brands develop their own relationships with their audience members to provide them with more relevant advertising offers based on the first-party and zero-party data they earn with their audience’s knowledge and permission.

Media companies and marketing leaders use Audience to simplify and consolidate their customer data collection tool set, automate custom campaigns, and drive real engagement by making advertising more targeted and personalized in a post-cookie world. Having run millions of campaigns for many of the biggest brands, Brian and Creighton know what works and how to capture, enrich, and activate audience data. With its white glove services, Audience ensures its clients’ engagement campaigns are strategic, compliant, and on-brand to drive measurable results wherever clients’ customers are, including e-mail, SMS, and social media platforms.

As their business grew and added more capabilities to its product portfolio, Brian and Creighton recognized it was time to refresh their brand. Unlike Demochimp, the Audience name was working and would continue to attract the right kinds of customers and suggested what the company did, making every dollar the company spent work effectively for them. They did, however, need to refresh their story, and Backstory worked with them to clarify and communicate their new value proposition.

Defining and clarifying zero-party data was an important element of the refreshed version of the Audience story. With increasing demands from customers for more transparency, it was only a matter of time until advertisers wouldn’t be able to rely on third-party cookies. Besides, brands were looking for new ways to build and cultivate real relationships with their customers without relying on shady marketing practices. Third-party data uses cookies to track customers based on blurry assumptions about who they are and what they want.

As a result, brands chase after customers with offers and ads that don’t match. Audience uses first- and zero-party data to empower brands to personalize experiences based on information customers willingly share in exchange for valuable incentives. First-party data comes from collecting customer information based on their interactions on your site and the devices they use. Zero-party data results from customers who proactively share their information with brands.

In addition, Audience’s client success managers fill gaps by creating effective data collection strategies that span every stage of the customer lifecycle. The Audience team builds out customer journey maps and custom campaigns that support key marketing objectives: acquiring new customers, engaging current customers, building engaging campaigns, and creating brand advocates. Our white-glove service ensures your campaigns are always on strategy and on brand.

Building out a new brand story to go along with their new corporate identity put Audience in a position to capitalize on a major shift in the market away from taking advantage of customers to actively engaging with them.

Let's break down the brand refresh checklist to help you determine if now is the time to refresh your brand.

Align your business strategy and brand strategy.

Refreshing your brand is about reflecting a shift in your business strategy. Sure, your logo, typography and colors will change, but a true brand refresh goes further. It realigns your brand strategy with your changing business strategy, including your positioning, messaging, and creative execution. A brand refresh matches who you’ve become and where you’re going to attract and appeal to the customers you want to serve moving forward.

For SaaS companies, a brand refresh often coincides with growth inflection points or big pivots in business strategy—entering new markets, bringing entirely new products to market, acquiring another company or technology, or adjusting to new customer expectations. Companies that build a brand that scales take a strategic, proactive approach to branding, ensuring that their brand can grow with their business and align with their long-term vision for what their company wants to be when it grows up.

So when does a brand refresh make sense? Here are the most common conditions:

• Market Disruption – When new competitors emerge or industry trends shift, your old positioning may become outdated. A strategic brand refresh can help you stay relevant and stand out instead of letting the market move on without you.
• Company Evolution – Your brand needs to match where your company is today and plans to go in the future, not stuck in the past. If your offerings, audience, or business model have outgrown your original brand thesis, it’s time for a refresh.
• Customer Disconnect – If your brand no longer resonates with your audience, your marketing efforts can feel like you’re shouting into the void. A strategic brand refresh ensures you’re speaking your customers’ language and resonating with them.

The benefits of refreshing your brand.

1. Strengthen your market position.
By refreshing your messaging and visual brand identity, you put yourself in a better position to own a space and become synonymous with an idea that attracts more of your ideal customers.

2. Align your brand with your business model.
As your business model evolves and you pivot your way to success, your brand should evolve alongside it. If your business has outgrown your brand, you need to act now to close the gap.

3. Grow your sales pipeline and accelerate it.
A modern, cohesive brand identity signals credibility, professionalism, and innovation—key factors in earning your customers’ trust, growing your pipeline, and driving funnel velocity.

4. Enhance brand awareness and recognition.
A refreshed brand helps you stand out and cut through the clutter. Refreshing your brand can reignite interest, attract new audiences, and reinforce brand loyalty among existing customers.

5. Increase revenue and business impact.
When your brand aligns with customer expectations and effectively communicates your unique value, you give prospects a more compelling reason to choose your solution over competitors.

Carefully manage the refresh rate of your brand.

A brand refresh impacts your entire business, not just your marketing team. Be sure to bring your employees, customers, investors and partners along with you when you make the change.

Costs – A brand refresh affects all your customer touch points and requires that you invest in a new website, marketing collateral, sales presentations, product UI, and advertising.

Brand Recognition – Change too much, and you risk confusing or alienating existing customers. The key is to evolve your brand without losing the brand equity you’ve already built.

Buy-In – Employees who have been with your company for years may resist change. Including them early on in the process can help to create buy-in.

Longevity – Some companies overreact to a few vocal customers or chase short-lived industry trends. Take time to gather input from credible sources and thoughtfully consider your options.

The best way to mitigate these risks is a thoughtful brand strategy and a well-executed brand rollout and implementation plan.

How to execute a successful brand refresh.

Here’s how to ensure your brand refresh can be a growth catalyst rather than a disruption:

1. Discover what’s working and why – Know where your brand stands today. Conduct in-depth customer interviews, analyze the competitive landscape, and audit your brand’s current performance.

2. Get stakeholder buy-in – A brand refresh is a company-wide effort. Engage leadership, employees, customers, and partners from the beginning.

3. Develop a clear messaging strategy – It’s not just about how your brand looks; it’s what your brand says and does. Clearly communicate brand and audience messaging updates.

4. Create an integrated rollout plan – A sudden, unexplained brand overhaul can confuse customers. Build a transition plan that explains what you’re doing and why ahead of time.

5. Measure and iterate – Get customer feedback before, during, and after your brand refresh to see if your new brand resonates as intended and make adjustments as needed.

Take a strategic approach to refreshing your brand.

Refreshing your brand isn’t about being reactionary or chasing trends. The best SaaS brands are intentional and take time to create and refresh effective brand strategies as their companies evolve and pivot their way to success, iteratively finding their way from product market fit to message market fit. They stay true to their purpose while adapting to changing inputs and opportunities. If your company has outgrown its original brand, if your audience has changed, or if the market has shifted around you, refreshing your brand could be the key to finding your next growth curve.

Building a brand that can grow with your business isn’t easy. Want to make sure your brand refresh is a success? Our team specializes in building brands that scale for SaaS companies. Let’s talk if you’re interested in refreshing your brand. 

In the meantime, check out our expert guide to SaaS branding.