New Doesn’t Have to Mean Unrecognisable

Whenever someone’s about to launch something new, there’s this little spike of energy that shows up. It matters more. It feels bigger. And because it feels bigger, the temptation is to make it look completely different.

Not just adjusted. Not just shifted a bit. Completely different.

I get it.

If you’ve always sold to corporate and now you’re putting something on a retail shelf, you don’t want it to look like you’ve just changed the headline and hoped no one notices. You want to show that you’ve moved. That this is intentional.

But this is exactly where it can quietly go wrong. Different slowly becomes disconnected.

The fonts change. The colours get swapped out because you’re bored of looking at them. The tone gets rewritten because it needs to “feel fresh”. And then you step back and realise it doesn’t really look like you anymore.

It looks like a new company. A whole new brand.

When you’ve already built a brand, even a small one, you’re not starting from zero. You’ve built recognition and trust. Maybe not huge recognition, but enough that people know you. Enough that they’ve seen you a few times and feel some level of comfort.

That comfort is doing more work than you think.

Imagine if Kellogg’s launched a smoothie tomorrow and it looked like Kellogg’s, you’d probably trust it without thinking too hard. Not because you’ve analysed the ingredients. Because you know the name. You know the colours. You know the feel.

Now imagine if they launched that smoothie under a completely different identity and called it Gollek. No connection. No visual link. It would have to fight hard for attention and trust in exactly the same way as every other new brand in that aisle.

There's a real life example of this, when Woolworths tried to enter into hardware. They created Masters instead of extending the Woolworths brand. New font, new colours turned into a $3.2Billion failure in only 5 years. Suddenly they weren’t leveraging on decades of supermarket trust, instead they were trying to build hardware trust from scratch in a market already dominated by Bunnings.

That’s not purely a design issue. That’s a brand leverage issue.

And I see smaller versions of this all the time. A business launches a new service and feels like it needs its own look. A sub-brand appears. A campaign swings wildly away from the core identity because it “needs to stand out”. And in doing that, they’ve cut the thread that connects it back to the trust they’ve already built.

I’m not saying everything should look identical forever. That’s not the point. A new audience might need different imagery. The tone might shift slightly. The balance of colour might change. That’s fine.

But there’s a difference between tilting and breaking.

If you change everything just to prove it’s new, you’re not building on your reputation. You’re resetting it. And that’s heavy and expensive work.

So before you decide this next launch needs a completely different visual identity, it’s worth asking a quieter question.

• Are you trying to make it look new?
• Or are you trying to make it credible?

Because credibility doesn’t come from separation. It comes from connection.

New doesn’t have to mean unrecognisable.