[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":322},["ShallowReactive",2],{"insight-rebrand-or-not":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"description":12,"extension":315,"meta":316,"navigation":317,"path":318,"seo":319,"stem":320,"__hash__":321},"content/insight/rebrand-or-not.md","Rebrand Or Not",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":302},"minimark",[9,13,16,21,41,44,47,50,54,63,72,87,90,99,103,106,120,123,132,141,144,148,151,154,157,178,187,191,194,197,201,204,207,215,218,221,224,228,231,234,238],[10,11,12],"p",{},"The idea of a rebrand almost always starts inside the company. A founder has grown tired of a logo they have looked at every day for six years. A new marketing lead wants to make a visible mark. A competitor has just relaunched and the board is asking questions. Customers, as a rule, have asked for nothing.",[10,14,15],{},"That origin matters, because the people proposing the change and the people affected by it experience the brand very differently. Before deciding whether to rebrand, it helps to be clear about what you would be giving up.",[17,18,20],"h3",{"id":19},"what-you-already-own","What you already own",[10,22,23,24,34,35,40],{},"Recognition is an asset, and it accumulates slowly. In 1968 the psychologist ",[25,26,33],"a",{"href":27,"rel":28,"target":32},"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Zajonc",[29,30,31],"nofollow","noopener","noreferrer","_blank","Robert Zajonc"," showed that people come to like things more simply through repeated exposure to them, a finding now known as the ",[25,36,39],{"href":37,"rel":38,"target":32},"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect",[29,30,31],"mere exposure effect",". Familiarity produces preference on its own, with no argument attached.",[10,42,43],{},"Every time a customer sees your name, your colors or the shape of your packaging, a small deposit is made. Over years those deposits become the reason someone picks you out of a crowded shelf, a search results page or a list of vendors without having to think. A rebrand withdraws some of that balance. A badly judged one withdraws most of it.",[10,45,46],{},"There is also an imbalance in exposure. Your team sees the brand hundreds of times a day. A customer may see it a few times a month. Fatigue therefore arrives inside the company years before it arrives in the market, and often it never arrives in the market at all. The feeling that the brand looks tired is real. It is usually a fact about the people in the building.",[10,48,49],{},"This is why the most common motives deserve suspicion. Boredom, a new executive's wish to be seen doing something, a rival's relaunch, a change in design fashion: each of these is a feeling inside the company, and none of them is evidence about the customer. Slow sales are the most tempting motive of all, because a new identity looks like decisive action. Growth stalls for reasons of product, price and distribution far more often than for reasons of appearance, and a rebrand commissioned to fix those will leave them exactly where they were.",[17,51,53],{"id":52},"what-it-costs-when-it-goes-wrong","What it costs when it goes wrong",[10,55,56,57,62],{},"In early 2009 Tropicana replaced its long-standing carton, with the image of an orange pierced by a straw, with a cleaner design showing a glass of juice. Unit sales of the line ",[25,58,61],{"href":59,"rel":60,"target":32},"https://adage.com/article/news/tropicana-line-s-sales-plunge-20-post-rebranding/135735/",[29,30,31],"fell 20 percent"," between the start of January and late February, a loss of about $33 million in revenue. The company went back to the original packaging.",[10,64,65,66,71],{},"In October 2010 Gap replaced its blue box logo with a new mark. Within a week, after heavy public criticism, the company ",[25,67,70],{"href":68,"rel":69,"target":32},"https://money.cnn.com/2010/10/12/news/companies/gap_logo/index.htm",[29,30,31],"reverted to the original",", with its president acknowledging that \"we did not go about this in the right way.\"",[10,73,74,75,80,81,86],{},"It would be comforting to file these under lessons learned. In August 2025 the American restaurant chain Cracker Barrel removed the seated figure known as the Old Timer from its logo and replaced it with the name alone. The company lost close to $100 million in market value and ",[25,76,79],{"href":77,"rel":78,"target":32},"https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cracker-barrel-to-return-old-logo-after-backlash/",[29,30,31],"announced a reversal"," a week later: \"Our new logo is going away and our 'Old Timer' will remain.\" Two weeks after that it ",[25,82,85],{"href":83,"rel":84,"target":32},"https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/09/cracker-barrel-restaurant-remodels-logo-controversy.html",[29,30,31],"suspended a program of restaurant remodels"," that had drawn the same complaints.",[10,88,89],{},"The three cases share a shape. The company removed the thing customers used to recognize it and offered no reason those customers could accept. At Tropicana and Gap nothing else had changed, so the redesign looked arbitrary. At Cracker Barrel the restaurants were changing too, in a direction its regulars did not want, and the logo became the symbol of it. An identity is read as a statement about the company, and customers respond to the statement.",[10,91,92,93,98],{},"Research on logo redesigns points to who objects most. Michael Walsh, ",[25,94,97],{"href":95,"rel":96,"target":32},"https://media.psu.edu/expert/karen-winterich",[29,30,31],"Karen Page Winterich"," and Vikas Mittal found that customers strongly committed to a brand rated a redesigned logo more negatively the more it changed, while weakly committed customers responded positively. The people most likely to resist a rebrand are your best customers. A redesign that pleases strangers and unsettles loyalists is a poor trade for most businesses.",[17,100,102],{"id":101},"when-the-business-has-moved-and-the-brand-hasnt","When the business has moved and the brand hasn't",[10,104,105],{},"None of this is an argument for standing still. A brand is a description of a company, and descriptions go out of date.",[10,107,108,113,114,119],{},[25,109,112],{"href":110,"rel":111,"target":32},"https://www.tcd.ie/business/research/the-trinity-centre-for-digital-business--analytics/our-team/muzellel/",[29,30,31],"Laurent Muzellec"," and ",[25,115,118],{"href":116,"rel":117,"target":32},"https://www.smurfitschool.ie/facultyresearch/facultydirectory/marketing/professor-mary-lambkin-coyle.html",[29,30,31],"Mary Lambkin"," studied 166 companies that had rebranded and found that the decision was most often provoked by structural change, particularly mergers and acquisitions, which alter a company's identity and strategy at the root. That is the useful benchmark. In the cases that hold up, something real has changed in the business, and the brand is catching up with it.",[10,121,122],{},"The change can take several forms. The offer, the audience or the business model has shifted, and the brand still describes the earlier company. Two organizations have become one, or one has become two. The company is moving upmarket, and the identity that won its first customers now undersells it to the buyers it wants next and holds the price down. The name ties the business to a place, a product or a category it has outgrown. Or, quite often, the identity was never really designed: it accumulated over the years, exists in a dozen versions and cannot be applied consistently by anyone.",[10,124,125,126,131],{},"McLaren's new identity, announced in September 2026, is a good example of a brand catching up with its business. The company now spans road cars and a racing operation that covers Formula 1, IndyCar and, from 2027, endurance racing, and the two sides had been presenting themselves separately. The redesign brought them ",[25,127,130],{"href":128,"rel":129,"target":32},"https://www.mclaren.com/racing/2026/mclaren-announces-evolved-identity/",[29,30,31],"under one identity",". The reason was structural and easy to state.",[10,133,134,135,140],{},"What McLaren left alone is as instructive as what it changed. The papaya color stayed. The speedmark stayed. The new wordmark was drawn from the sign above the family service station in Auckland where ",[25,136,139],{"href":137,"rel":138,"target":32},"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_McLaren",[29,30,31],"Bruce McLaren"," built his first racing car. The company changed its lettering and kept everything a fan would use to recognize it, and it reached back into its own history for the part that was new.",[10,142,143],{},"A damaged reputation can also justify a rebrand, with a serious condition attached. Muzellec and Lambkin observed that employee behavior affects brand equity more than changes in appearance do. A new name on unchanged conduct is found out quickly.",[17,145,147],{"id":146},"how-much-to-change","How much to change",[10,149,150],{},"Rebranding is usually discussed as a yes or no decision. In practice it is a question of degree, and most companies need less than they think.",[10,152,153],{},"At the lightest end, the identity stays exactly as it is and a proper system is built around it, so that it is applied the same way everywhere. Many brands that look tired are simply inconsistent. One step further is a refresh, in which the existing elements are redrawn and updated while everything people recognize is kept. Done well, customers sense that the company looks sharper and cannot say exactly why. Sometimes the problem lies in the message, and the answer is to change what the company says and to whom while leaving the visual identity largely alone. Replacing the name or the identity outright sits at the far end, and belongs to the cases where the existing brand is wrong or unusable.",[10,155,156],{},"The discipline is to choose the smallest intervention that solves the actual problem. That depends on knowing which elements carry your recognition, and here insiders tend to guess badly.",[10,158,159,160,165,166,171,172,177],{},"Instagram's 2016 redesign shows one way to find out. The original icon was a detailed drawing of a vintage camera, and the first attempts to simplify it fell flat. So the design team, led by ",[25,161,164],{"href":162,"rel":163,"target":32},"https://medium.com/@ianspalter/designing-a-new-look-for-instagram-inspired-by-the-community-84530eb355e3",[29,30,31],"Ian Spalter",", asked colleagues across the company to ",[25,167,170],{"href":168,"rel":169,"target":32},"https://www.dezeen.com/2016/05/11/instagram-new-logo-graphic-design-camera-rainbow/",[29,30,31],"draw the icon from memory"," in five seconds. Almost everyone drew the same three things: the rainbow, the lens and the viewfinder. The fine detail of the old camera had not stayed with them. The new icon was built from those three remembered elements and nothing else. It drew ",[25,173,176],{"href":174,"rel":175,"target":32},"https://www.creativebloq.com/design/branding/rebrand-revisited-instagrams-controversial-2016-redesign",[29,30,31],"loud complaints"," in its first week, and it is still in use ten years later.",[10,179,180,181,186],{},"The exercise is worth borrowing because it separates what a brand contains from what people actually hold in their heads. ",[25,182,185],{"href":183,"rel":184,"target":32},"https://marketingscience.info/staff/professor-jenni-romaniuk",[29,30,31],"Jenni Romaniuk"," of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute offers a more formal version of the same idea. She suggests measuring each brand element on two counts: fame, meaning how many buyers link it to you, and uniqueness, meaning how many link it to you alone. Anything that scores high on both should survive the redesign. Tropicana's leadership presumably did not think of the orange and straw as the brand. Their customers did.",[17,188,190],{"id":189},"before-you-commit","Before you commit",[10,192,193],{},"A leadership team considering a rebrand should be able to answer a short series of questions, and the first is the hardest: what has changed in the business? If the honest answer is nothing, the case is weak.",[10,195,196],{},"The second is to state the problem being solved without using the word \"brand.\" If that proves impossible, the problem has yet to be identified. From there the questions become practical. What do customers recognize the company by, and what is being kept? Would a new buyer notice a mismatch between what the company is and how it presents itself? And is the company ready to do this completely, with the budget for a full rollout and a willingness to change its behavior along with its appearance?",[17,198,200],{"id":199},"doing-it-well","Doing it well",[10,202,203],{},"A rebrand that goes ahead should start from strategy. The leadership team needs to agree what the company is now and where it is going before anyone opens a design file, since an identity can only express a decision that has already been made.",[10,205,206],{},"Continuity matters more than novelty. Whatever customers recognize should be kept unless it is itself the problem, because it is what allows existing customers to come along.",[10,208,209,210,214],{},"Employees should hear before anyone. Colin Mitchell argued in ",[211,212,213],"em",{},"Harvard Business Review"," that a company has to sell its brand to its own people as carefully as it sells to customers. That applies with particular force to a rebrand, since the staff are the ones who have to make the new promise true.",[10,216,217],{},"The best customers should hear next, and should hear why. People accept change far more readily when they understand the reason and are told directly. Gap's own verdict on its 2010 attempt was about process as much as design.",[10,219,220],{},"The change should also arrive all at once. A rebrand rolled out in stages leaves the company looking like two businesses for months, and signals uncertainty at the moment it most wants to signal intent.",[10,222,223],{},"Above all, it should accompany something customers can experience: a new product, a new level of service, a new direction. The identity then reads as evidence of the change, which is what McLaren's did and what Tropicana's could not.",[17,225,227],{"id":226},"a-brand-should-be-as-old-as-it-is-true","A brand should be as old as it is true",[10,229,230],{},"There is no virtue in changing a brand and none in preserving one for its own sake. The useful question is whether it still describes the company accurately and still serves the people who need to recognize it. When it does, leave it alone and spend the money on applying it better. When it no longer does, change it properly, for a reason you can explain in a sentence to the customers who liked the old one.",[232,233],"hr",{},[17,235,237],{"id":236},"references","References",[239,240,241,254,267,278,290],"ul",{},[242,243,244,245,250,251,253],"li",{},"Mitchell, C. (2002). ",[25,246,249],{"href":247,"rel":248,"target":32},"https://hbr.org/2002/01/selling-the-brand-inside",[29,30,31],"Selling the brand inside",". ",[211,252,213],{},", 80(1).",[242,255,256,257,262,263,266],{},"Muzellec, L., & Lambkin, M. (2006). ",[25,258,261],{"href":259,"rel":260,"target":32},"https://doi.org/10.1108/03090560610670007",[29,30,31],"Corporate rebranding: Destroying, transferring or creating brand equity?"," ",[211,264,265],{},"European Journal of Marketing",", 40(7/8).",[242,268,269,270,277],{},"Romaniuk, J. (2018). ",[25,271,274],{"href":272,"rel":273,"target":32},"https://www.oup.com.au/books/higher-education/business-marketing/9780190311506",[29,30,31],[211,275,276],{},"Building Distinctive Brand Assets",". Oxford University Press.",[242,279,280,281,250,286,289],{},"Walsh, M. F., Winterich, K. P., & Mittal, V. (2010). ",[25,282,285],{"href":283,"rel":284,"target":32},"https://doi.org/10.1108/10610421011033421",[29,30,31],"Do logo redesigns help or hurt your brand? The role of brand commitment",[211,287,288],{},"Journal of Product & Brand Management",", 19(2).",[242,291,292,293,250,298,301],{},"Zajonc, R. B. (1968). ",[25,294,297],{"href":295,"rel":296,"target":32},"https://doi.org/10.1037/h0025848",[29,30,31],"Attitudinal effects of mere exposure",[211,299,300],{},"Journal of Personality and Social Psychology",", 9(2, Pt. 2).",{"title":303,"searchDepth":304,"depth":304,"links":305},"",2,[306,308,309,310,311,312,313,314],{"id":19,"depth":307,"text":20},3,{"id":52,"depth":307,"text":53},{"id":101,"depth":307,"text":102},{"id":146,"depth":307,"text":147},{"id":189,"depth":307,"text":190},{"id":199,"depth":307,"text":200},{"id":226,"depth":307,"text":227},{"id":236,"depth":307,"text":237},"md",{},true,"/insight/rebrand-or-not",{"title":5,"description":12},"insight/rebrand-or-not","B-owWgyMm8Qlvf5zZg1btBTFVrEmHqllHlyth4moxMo",1791201649354]