The Hidden Cost of Constantly Changing Your Branding

If you’re feeling the itch to change your branding again, you’re not alone. And I’m not judging you for having that urge either. 

I get why it happens. You’re building a business, you’re trying to look more “proper”, you’re seeing other people’s shiny new work pop up in your feed, and then someone makes a comment, sometimes a well-meaning friend, sometimes another designer said it doesn't look professional enough, and suddenly what you have feels wrong.

Is it wrong … or is this simply self doubt?

Most of the time, frequent brand changes aren’t strategic. They’re reactive. It’s self doubt dressed up as “refreshing”. It’s that unsettled feeling that something isn’t quite aligned, and instead of slowing down and working out what’s actually off, the easiest visible thing to change is the branding.

It feels productive. It feels like progress. It feels like you’re doing something.

But it comes at a cost.

Every time you change your branding, you’re asking your audience to start again with you. You’re resetting recognition. You’re wiping familiarity. You’re quietly saying, “Actually, that thing you were just getting used to, forget it.”

Customers don’t usually analyse this consciously, but they do feel it. Familiarity is part of how trust gets built. When something looks consistent over time, our brains relax. We recognise it. We know what it stands for. When it changes too often, that recognition never gets a chance to settle. And that's when the customers will walk away. It's too hard.

In marketing, there’s a well-known example of this with Tropicana. They redesigned their packaging years ago. It wasn’t ugly. It wasn’t badly designed. It was just different. They removed the familiar orange with the straw and replaced it with something more modern, and sales dropped hard because customers literally couldn’t find it on the shelf. The design wasn’t the issue. The loss of familiarity was. And it cost them over $20M. And they ended up reverting back to the old brand again.

Now imagine doing that to your business every few months, or even every couple of years.

Recognition starts the moment you put your brand out into the world. It doesn’t wait until you feel ready. It builds slowly, through repetition and consistent behaviour. A lot of business owners underestimate how long that takes. They think once the logo exists, people will instantly know it’s them, but recognition isn’t instant. It’s cumulative. It builds because you keep showing up the same way, over and over again.

But that consistency can start to feel uncomfortable. Even though the audience almost never gets bored with the look, the the designer and then the business owner often will. The audience is just getting used to your look when you decide you’re tired of it.

Familiarity gets mistaken for failure. You see the same look every day, so it feels old to you. But to your customers, it’s just starting to stick. The simple awareness can take up to 3 months, with actual recognition, upto 9 months. And they're not getting into that trust phase for at least a year or more.

But this doesn’t mean brands should never evolve. They should. Evolving is different to reacting. Refining is different to resetting. A considered shift because your business has genuinely changed is one thing. Scrapping everything because someone said it “doesn’t look professional” is another.

And “it’s not professional looking” is rarely a good enough reason on its own. Often that just means it needs tidying up. Stronger consistency. Better application. Clearer messaging. Not a full identity overhaul.

When someone comes to me mid refresh spiral, the first thing I do is slow them down. I ask what feels off. Has the business changed direction since the original design? Has the personality of the business matured? Or are you just unsure of your direction and looking for a visual fix to settle the feeling?

Because changing the visuals without resetting the thinking underneath usually just creates another version of the same problem.

Constant brand changes are usually a symptom.

A sign the direction was never properly settled in the first place.

So if you’ve been feeling the urge to change everything, pause for a minute. Ask yourself why. Not because someone in the industry suggested it. Not because you feel restless. But because something fundamental has shifted.

If it hasn’t, you might not need a new brand. You might just need to let this one settle, tidy what’s already there, and give your customers the chance to recognise you properly.