When A Rebrand is The Wrong Call, And What To Do Instead

Companies don't reach for a rebrand lightly, but when they do, it tends to be for the wrong reasons. 

The ones announced to great fanfare are where you can see it most clearly. The underlying problems go unresolved while the slate gets wiped clean. Once in a while that clears the way for something better, but far more often it simply makes brand equity disappear, and after the excitement settles the company ends up worse off than where it started.

A rebrand feels somewhat like a big house move, or at least a spring clean. It hands the company a fresh start that is visible and tangible to the people inside it and to the market outside. That feeling is exactly why it gets reached for, and exactly why it is so often the wrong move. The real question is whether a rebrand is the right move at all, and what to do instead when it isn't.

Is the problem even a brand problem?

Any rebrand starts with a trigger event, the thing that prompts a company to reach for one in the first place. Sometimes the rebrand is the obvious answer, because the problem really does feel like a brand problem. Just as often it isn't a brand problem at all, or at least not only a brand problem.

We’ve seen the misleading brand trigger shows up in one of a few ways for our clients, and each one feels like the brand has failed when something else has:

• Sales have slowed and the deck that used to feel sharp now feels tired. It reads like the brand has gone stale, but more often the message has simply drifted from what buyers care about now. The fix lives in positioning and copy, not identity.
• A competitor launched something and took all the attention. It can feel like they out-branded you, when usually they just out-distributed you, turning up in more of the places your buyers look. The solution is to fix your reach.
• Users are drifting and growth has flattened, and the brand is the first thing to get blamed. It looks like the identity has lost its pull, but when the product itself has gone stale, no amount of fresh wrapping makes people stick. That's a product, not a brand, problem.
  
  

A rebrand laid over any of these leaves the real problem untouched and adds the cost of lost recognition on top of it. The company ends up paying twice if it chooses to proceed with a rebrand without fixing the underlying problems.

Where is the pressure coming from?

So how do you confirm that a brand problem really is one? The most reliable tell, in our experience, is the direction the pressure is coming from. It shows both whether the brand is the problem and how much of it needs to change.

A real brand problem reaches the company from the outside. The market has moved, and the brand is the last to know. The audience has moved on, and the people the brand was built for no longer recognize themselves in it. The ideal customer shifted after a new round of funding. An acquisition fused two companies that now need a single story. A product pivot broke the story the brand was built to tell, or the mission itself genuinely changed. In each of these, something outside the company moved first and the brand is simply lagging behind it. That lag is about as close to a clear-cut brand problem as it gets.

A questionable brand problem is the one that comes from inside. It shows up when new leadership wants a mark of its own, or the board has decided the current look feels dated, or a competitor's redesign has stirred up a little envy. None of these is the market saying anything. The call is coming from inside the house, and these are the urges that send companies into rebrands they later regret. When the only pressure is internal, there is usually no real brand problem to solve at all.

Once the problem proves real, the next question is one of size. How far has the market actually moved? 

Refresh, evolution, or rebrand?

These three brand updates sit on a scale from lightest to heaviest, and how far the market has moved is what tells you which level of intervention you need.

Refresh

A refresh keeps the strategy and updates only the execution, such as dated visuals or a sub-brand that needs to be reined in to sit alongside the rest. In this brand update, you keep the bones and tidy the surface. It's the lightest of the three, and it's usually the honest answer when the trigger sits inside the building. Nothing about the market has actually changed, so nothing about the core strategy of the brands needs to change either.

Evolution

An evolution is the systematic update, the one that moves the brand forward while protecting what people already recognize. This is the response to most external triggers, where something genuine has shifted in your market or your audience but your hard-won recognition is still an asset worth carrying. With an evolution, you're growing the brand into a reality that has already moved forward, but you are not getting rid of the brand equity you’ve already built.

Rebrand

A rebrand is the real torch-it version, and it's for one situation only: when the old story has become false. Things that trigger it are very distinctive in the company’s history: a pivot, a merger, a changed mission, a reputation you need to clean up. Here, the continuity that an evolution works to protect has turned into a liability, so you let it go on purpose. It's the right call far more rarely than it's reached for, and it almost always happens when the trigger came from outside.

The cost that isn't in the budget

Before you commit to anything drastic, take stock of what the market already recognizes about you, your brand equity. This could be as obvious as your logo, or as subtle as a specific proof point that customers repeat back to you without being prompted. Whatever its shape, recognition like this takes years to build, and a budget can't quickly buy it back. Yet this is what most internal-pressure rebrands sacrifice.

The cost of brand equity never shows up on the invoice, unlike the design fees or the launch campaigns. So before the rebrand project and its budget get approved, spend some time naming the trigger and identifying the level of upgrade you actually need. If the trigger is internal or the layer that's failing isn't really the brand, a rebrand is just the most expensive way to avoid the work that would actually fix it. 

Sometimes the bravest brand decision is to actually leave the brand alone.