One of the local gossip magazines carried the story about the Kardashian sisters being obsessed with plastic surgery. The article details how they had been using Botox, fillers, lip injections and nose jobs to transform their facial looks. It’s quite amazing what these young superstars will do to look more beautiful and younger.

What’s even more interesting is that the perception used to be that more mature people would go for plastic surgery but now it seems that young people are obsessed with going under the knife.

The gossip magazine speculates about the reasons for the plastic surgery and even gets a plastic surgeon to provide the magazine with an extensive breakdown of all the procedures undergone by the Kardashians sisters.

I am no expert at facial beauty transfer patients but looking at the succession of facial transformations over several years and what they have led to makes one wonder what these were women will look like in years to come. Even now their pictures show faces that look quite unnatural.

Yet one thing’s for sure and that is that these young superstars have a lot of cash to throw about and can very much do what they want when it comes to changing their appearance. Plastic surgeons must be having a field day because they now have a much younger group of people who wish to emulate the stars and have their facial features transformed.

For the small business owner with a bakkie (small pick up truck) and a few staff doing landscaping or a small convenience store on the main road, a business facelift or makeover would seem absurd. In most cases logo design and branding is left to the local amateur in the print or copy shop who will come up with a “pretty” design and that’s that. But for the more sophisticated small business, competing against sharper competitors in the physical world as well as the electronic or online world, a makeover might just benefit the small business.

When would it be beneficial to undergo a facelift or makeover of your small business’s image?

Unless you have a valid reason or reasons to change your commercial appearance, you could end up just wasting a lot of money. Here are some reasons that might be valid for sharpening your business image:

– A competitor or competitors are encroaching on your market.
– Your business is losing customers because your business image is out of date and “old-fashioned”.
— Your business needs to be more visible and stand out on the roadside or in a shopping centre.
– It’s time that you tie up several disparate elements of your business together into one organic whole that makes sense to your different customer subsets.

One very good example I recently saw of a business that has undergone a facelift is Impala Fruit & Vegetables that trade close to the Northcliffe Corner in Johannesburg. This business has about four separate business entities that have all been doing very well separately but the owner saw a need to combine them into one concept. The four businesses – Impala Flowers, Impala Fruit & Vegetables, Olivia’s’s Coffee Shop and the Impala Butchery/Deli – have all been combined now under the Impala Centre.

The design for these four businesses is fresh and modern looking but smart and bold. A simple but brilliant device has been the colour coding of each business with the four colours appearing in the main parent logo for the sibling businesses.

It just goes to show that with some clever thinking about changing your business identity and branding to make the various components of your business more understandable to customers can be done in a relatively cost-effective and attractive way. But the main point here is that don’t do it for the sake of doing it because you could, like the plastic-surgery-obsessed superstars, become increasingly unrecognisable and unidentifiable to your existing and potential customers.