Coors

The Coors rebrand is an interesting study because their goal was to evolve the public’s perception of their character as well as visually.  With the ultimate goal of cracking into the top 3 or 4 premium beers on an international scale, removing the “light” from Coors light, and adding the blue mountains were just the beginning of their transformation. Their marketing department acted on the results of studies that showed consumers found their new branding “more distinctive and appealing”. Even though the blue mountain adaptation caught some slack for being similar to Evian, it does give Coors an icon to rely on for their mobile and digital presence.

Malcolm Gladwell once said, “There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis”.  While Coors was right to have their marketing department run studies garnering opinions of their new brand, they were also smart to think on a surface level by choosing an Icon that they embedded multiple associations with. On their bottles, Coors created a mountains icon to turn blue when the beer was cold enough to properly enjoy. This is ingenious because now anytime a returning consumer sees the Blue Mountains, it stimulates memories of waiting for the beer to become as “cold as the Rockies”. Now your perception of the company and its brand encapsulates your entire experience of enjoying the beer.

Another dimension of brand evolution that we have seen during this has been their pivot to marketing to express their values in this move also with the Coors Seltzer mission to save America’s rivers. In today’s climate, being able to evolve for the digital realm, visually reflect positive values, and innovate simultaneously, is about all you can ask for in a rebrand.  Lets take a step back and look at what can be learned from this process. One thing to certainly come back to is having a legitimate reason for the redesign. Simply undertaking a rebrand because you become bored and tired of looking at the same logo is simply not a good idea.  It runs the risks of unnecessary spending, unrecognizability, and public backlash with the disadvantage of not being able to defend it. Be careful not to underestimate the emotional attachment that a consumer may have with an old brand logo. The pros for the rebrand, must outweigh those alone. Brand evolutions should be a gradual process that happens naturally as the culture, environment, and public needs shift over time.

Another common trend, was adapting to the desktop and mobile experience. Maintaining brand standards across screens of all sizes is a hard thing to do. And if your logo wasn’t built with that kind of malleability from the jump then it may be impossible without a rebrand. Every company that has an app needs to be recognizable in the form of an icon, and every company with a website has to have a brand identity that is fluent across the largest computers and smallest phones. Often, in order to achieve this the logo will have to undergo some degree of simplification, while maintaining originality.