After twenty-five years of being the second phone call about a rebrand, I have come to think of them not as a single kind of project but as seven different errands, only two of which deserve the name. The other five are useful, sometimes badly needed, but they are not rebrands. Calling them one is the first mistake, and usually the most expensive.
In ascending order of nerve.
1. The Repaint. The logo gets tighter, the wordmark loses a serif, the orange becomes slightly less orange. A new website launches on a Tuesday. Internally, three people argue about the new orange for a week, and then everyone forgets. Outside the building, no-one notices. This is not a rebrand. This is a repaint, and there is nothing wrong with a repaint, provided you call it one.
2. The Apology. Something has gone wrong, a scandal, a lawsuit, a founder who cannot stop tweeting, and the brand is being reset to put distance between the company and its recent past. The new identity is calmer, quieter, more "human." The press release uses the word evolution. This is not a rebrand. This is a funeral, sometimes a necessary one. The job is grief, not strategy.
3. The Inheritance. A new CEO arrives, and within nine months announces a brand refresh. The strategy doc is excellent. The new identity is excellent. Neither has anything in particular to do with the company; they have to do with the CEO. The board approves it because saying no would be saying no to the CEO. This is not a rebrand. This is a territorial marking, and the smartest thing the agency can do is recognise it early and price accordingly.
4. The Reorg in a Wig. Two divisions have been quietly fighting for budget for three years. Rather than resolve it, leadership announces a "unified brand architecture." A naming exercise is commissioned. A masterbrand emerges. The two divisions go on fighting, now under one logo. This is not a rebrand. This is a peace treaty signed by people who are still at war, and you should not bring a typeface to a knife fight.
5. The Acquisition Tax. You bought a company. Now its brand has to die, or live, or be folded in, and you have eight weeks to decide. You will get this wrong at least once. Almost everyone does. This is not really a rebrand either; it is integration work wearing a brand hat. Treat it like an HR project with a designer attached, and you will do better.
So: five of the seven, none of which are really rebrands. Useful, sometimes urgent, occasionally excellent. But not the thing the deck claims they are.
The remaining two are.
6. The Retelling. The company has, quietly and without anyone quite noticing, become a different company than it was when it last described itself. The story it tells is now a story about the company it used to be, and customers can feel the gap, even if they cannot name it. The work here is not visual. It is anthropological, listening to the company describe itself, listening to its customers describe it, and finding the place where those two descriptions diverged. The new identity, when it lands, is not new at all. It is the company finally catching up to itself.
This kind of rebrand is rare. It is also the only kind that ever moves a number that matters.
7. The Bet. The company is, deliberately, deciding to become a different company than it currently is. It is choosing a future that today's customers cannot yet see. The rebrand is a flag planted in ground the company does not yet hold. Almost everyone in the building will hate it for the first eighteen months. About a third of them will leave. Six years later it will look obvious, the way the present always does in retrospect. The board will take the credit. The CEO will write a book.
This is the one I am most often called about, and almost always the one no-one in the room is actually willing to make. So we do a Repaint instead, and tell the press it was an Evolution.
A short test, if you are about to commission one of these. If we did nothing visible, would anyone outside the company know we'd rebranded? If no, you are doing a Retelling. Good. If yes, but only the colour changed, you are doing a Repaint. Fine. Call it that. If yes, and the company itself is about to change, you are doing a Bet. Take it seriously, or don't take it.
Whose idea was this? If a customer's, it's probably a Retelling. If the CEO's, in their first year, an Inheritance. If legal's, an Apology. If M&A's, an Acquisition Tax. If the head of Brand's, six months before their performance review, it is, almost without exception, a Repaint.
What number, exactly, are we trying to move? If you cannot answer this in one sentence, you are not yet ready to brief anyone, including me. Especially me.
There is no shame in commissioning any of the five non-rebrands. There is only shame in commissioning one of them and then being disappointed when it does not do what only the other two can do.
The room often nods at this. Then commissions a Repaint anyway. I come anyway. Sometimes the room is wrong about itself for years, and a Repaint is what the room can bear today. Brands, like people, occasionally have to dress for the day before they can dress for the life.