When is it time to rebrand?
- 3 days ago
- 15 min read
Here’s when to know the writing is on the wall for a rebrand to be needed and when it’s just a knee-jerk reaction that isn’t needed.
“I don’t like my logo, can you design me a new logo?” is the typical reason for most businesses considering a rebrand. I get why too, as you want to be proud of your branding, to hand over your business card, or direct them to your website. But is that a reason for rebranding? Not really. However it is, when it comes to a brand refresh. So what’s the difference?
What is a rebrand?
Think of a rebrand like knocking down the house and starting again. It’s a full strategy and identity redevelopment from the ground up. It’s not just a new logo, it’s often a realignment or totally new direction of your:
Product/service market fit.
Who you’re targeting.
How you’re positioning your brand to be thought of over others.
What your objectives are to win.
Potentially a brand name change too.
Possibly a brand architecture hierarchy of different brands and parent brands.
The internal identity that is directed by your internal team’s personality and overarching strategic positioning so that the two are aligned.
Then it’s the outward communication efforts of your visuals, your message, your sounds. All the distinctive things that can be applied to your brand touchpoints like a website, packaging, signage, social media, stationery, etc.
You do all of these things in one go so that you find clarity and develop an aligned brand from the inside out, that has a single-minded direction everyone can follow and believe in, which includes your customers. A rebrand is the measure twice, cut once project you hopefully will never need to do in its entirety again.
What is a refresh?
If a rebrand is knocking down the house and starting again, then a refresh is updating the house with new paint, a new extension, updating the kitchen, knocking out a wall, etc…If you follow my metaphor here.
So instead of tearing everything down because you don’t like your logo, there is likely some value in what you have developed already to be able to harness and simply refresh the bits that aren’t working and keep those that are still working.
We of course see a lot of successful brands that have kept the same strategy, messaging, logo and look for decades and some for several generations, having only ever needed to evolve subtly over time. But there also exists a lot of brands that have branding and touchpoints that date severely over time. Now you might get lucky when it comes back into fashion, but more than likely there will come a time where things need to be refreshed to bring them into line with current trends, styles or market expectations and requirements. For example, the messaging we used in the 1950s might be a real struggle to use in the 2020s by today’s standards.
A refresh can often come as a result of revisiting your brand strategy on a cyclical basis, eg. each financial year. Meaning you’re constantly checking whether the strategy is working and you’re looking for ways to tweak things over time to realise the objectives you’ve set. Or if those goal posts need to change because something isn’t working to give you the best chance of success.
In an effort to refresh your brand you’re often simplifying complexity and refining your brand in small ways over time to make it easier to communicate what you offer and for customers to understand it. It’s why you see many brands refine their logos or packaging slightly over time, rather than drastically changing everything about their brand. It’s an effort to make relevant parts of your brand more effective and is often recommended as your business grows.
Here’s when to know it’s time to rebrand
1. You never properly developed a strategy and identity for the brand
Most businesses will start with a product/service and customer in mind, then figure out how to get that product in the customer's hand in the fastest way possible to get the business off the ground. Most know they need the bare minimum like a basic logo, signage, and a website, and often pay peanuts because most businesses start out with barely 2 cents to rub together. I totally get this, especially because I’ve been there myself. It’s the bare minimum and most times you pay for what you get and that initial effort is likely to be less effective.
But there will come a time where you need to get this stuff right and properly invest in a rebrand when you’ve never properly done it in the first place. Because you’ll have learned your mistakes, identified what works, you can see what customers respond to and who is most viable to target. The advantage of this is you have more data points and insights to set your brand in the right direction.
Now you might come to this conclusion on your own as it could have been something on your to do list, or you heard someone suggesting the benefits of properly investing in your brand like it’s a passive sales team. But I’d hazard a guess that the thing kicking you up the arse to do this is going to be your competition, right? They’ve got the bigger market share, more people are buying what they have to offer and your brand isn’t coming to mind, let alone allowing your business to grow, or grow as much as you can see direct competitors growing. So whether or not it’s early days in your business or maybe 5 years down the road, there will come a time when a ‘brand’ will become valuable to your business.
In an ideal world, yes, you want to get a great brand developed from the get go to give you the best chance at early success. While some marketers and branding people do suggest that a proper investment in your branding and marketing isn’t needed until you’re generating an annual turnover in the tens of millions of dollars at least. Look, that may be true, but if you can afford to invest $100,000 into your business to establish your strategy, your brand’s identity, apply it to all your brand touchpoints and set aside a portion of that to market your brand consistently in ads and other marketing efforts in that first year and each year there after, that’s a likely ballpark of what is needed to properly rebrand your small business. You’re not going to rebrand every year, let alone ever again. Remember it’s the measure twice, cut once effort and over time you’ll only need to invest in managing its presence through your marketing and small refreshes over time.
2. Your offering/direction has completely changed
This reason for rebranding is a bit of a line-ball call of whether or not you really need to rebrand. Brands like Yamaha for instance, have grown to sell musical instruments, outboard motors for boats, and motorcycles. And yet they keep the same brand for all market segments based on these offerings.
It’s the wildest example I can give you of a brand that has pivoted into new market offerings, but if there is a core philosophy behind the brand that can span different offerings and still make sense, then this is what I mean by this reason to rebrand being a line-ball call whether you do or don’t rebrand because you want to expand your offerings.
Because in some instances, all that may be required is a refresh of certain elements of your brand, especially the messaging for it to cater to different customer segments. While your brand strategy is unified towards a common goal and positioning that can still connect with different segments based on your offering.
Now if the entire direction of your brand, being the philosophy, purpose, mission, north star, reason for existing (whatever you want to call it) changes and the type of brand you want to be is totally different to what it has been and your offering most likely with it. Then you’re going to need to come up with a very good reason why you’re throwing the baby out with the bath water.
For instance, if the signals are pointing towards business collapse because what has been working is no longer effective, then yes, pivot and rebrand.
Or if there is no desire to continue doing the same thing that has been done in the past and you’d have shut the business down and started something new. You’d want to have some kind of data point or insight that suggests this new direction will be more viable for success.
These can be fairly compelling reasons for change and aligning a brand with that change will compliment that transformation into something else.
If I was to give you an example of a brand that has done this recently, it would be the British car company, Jaguar. They’re effectively a completely different brand now even though they do sell cars. So much so, if they renamed it, then it would 100% have affirmed a complete rebranding. And perhaps because they didn’t rename it, people are scratching their heads as to why they rebranded.
So if now is the time for a complete 180° change, ask yourself if you fully believe change will be more viable for you to succeed and why? Because that’s exactly what I’d be asking you as a brand strategist helping you with this change so that you can communicate it when it launches.
3. You literally look, sound and do everything like everyone else
You might just get unlucky and look-alike brands pop up left, right and centre when they get the whiff of an oily rag, meaning your success. You’ll definitely know what I mean if you were a brand with a product that had been copied by someone like Aldi.
However, if you enter a market and end up doing all the same things that others are, and those efforts are really generic or same-same, rather than being creative to differentiate your brand, or at least make it distinct from others you’re competing with, then this is the time to rebrand.
A rebrand can help you meaningfully differentiate your offer so that there is a compelling reason of value and benefit for a customer to choose you over others. Doesn’t need to be drastically different either, just has to be enough for you to be compared a bit more like an apple vs an orange, rather than just being a bigger orange vs a smaller orange. And then make that offer incredibly distinct in how you communicate that offer vs what others are doing to communicate theirs. That’s a deadly combination if you can achieve that and customers respond well to it.
The problem with this situation is that it usually comes down to business owners not being willing to get out of their comfort zone. It’s often a harsh reality, but so many brands play it safe with soft pastel colours, dainty logos, generic messaging to not offend anyone, or just give off an unintentionally bland personality in the hope they don’t seem unprofessional if they do something too loud, pretentious, or ‘unserious’.
The worst example of this I can think of is conforming to ‘industry norms’ that are often set by the market leader(s) when you enter a market or category as a newcomer. Why do you think you’d win better than them at their own game? This one would be a huge green flag for when a rebrand is needed.
Now this all depends on the industry and the offer of course to measure what is appropriate. But when you work with branding and marketing people, our goal is to make you stand out and be the best choice. When there is hesitation to do so, we end up being stymied in our efforts to help you achieve this.
4. You’re merging with another brand
This is more common when your brand and theirs have likely already grown significantly in equity to see the value in one another to join together. But you’ve found it better to be one brand rather than potentially competing with each other or you’ve acquired another brand that compliments your offering. The conundrum however, can often come as a result of two brands merging together that have an equal (or near equal) level of equity in their market and you decide upon whether you:
Smoosh the brands together, like an ExxonMobil
A parent brand is made and the two brands co-exist, like Meta with Facebook & Instagram
One brand stays, the other one is sunsetted
A whole new brand is made
The last option on this list is the least common thing to do, but does make sense for a whole rebrand if needed. Though my recommendation would be that this only happens when the brands are both younger and don’t have a substantial amount of equity (trust, preference, recognition) in each of their brands. The better bet would be one of the other three options in that list if there was a higher amount of equity in one or both of the brands.
Here’s when to know it’s time to refresh your brand
1. You’re embarrassed to point people to your website or hand over a business card
There’s gotta be a level of pride you have in your brand and how it presents itself, and with the vanity things like the way your brand looks and sounds, these are oftentimes easy fixes for long term gains and don’t require an all-out change to your whole brand.
So for something like your logo that looks like it was designed on Microsoft Paint in the 90s, or a website that was optimised for dial-up speed internet, of course we need to update these things with a refresh. There’s no reason not to refresh these things over time, say, every 2-10 years depending on what needs an update, as long as they don’t stray too far from what you had so that you aren’t losing any equity in what you had. And of course it does give you a bit of a reason to talk about yourself when you have something new to show, especially if it’s going to be of benefit to your customer to recognise, understand and use.
2. Your business has outgrown your brand
When many businesses start out it’s often a single founder or a couple of people at most. So when you end up growing a team of people into the dozens, if not hundreds, it gives reason for a shift in what the brand stands for and/or how it communicates. Even something as simple as shifting from saying ‘I’ to ‘we’.
The same goes for an expansion in your customer targeting as you may now have grown the capacity with which you can reach more segments that can help you grow your business. So it could be identifying new segments to adjust or expand your offer, and/or adding new communication that speaks either more broadly to all customers and/or more targeted communication to each additional customer segment(s).
Overall, this shouldn’t be the reason for a rebrand (unless a proper brand wasn’t developed at some point), as it’s often a better course of action to refresh only the bits that need better alignment with where you’re headed if you’ve reached a ceiling and now is a point of growth.
3. You can’t easily communicate what you do
Many brands in all industries, even those in branding and marketing, have a hard time articulating what they do so they are both clear on what they’re doing each day as a team, as much as a customer being clear to know that the brand can help them.
I get that it can be extremely difficult sometimes to get your head out of the weeds of jargon, or the features and benefits that might be news to a customer. But the goal is to create brand clarity from the inside out. So that everyone in your team from receptionist to the CEO can articulate what the brand does and why it exists to benefit others. If you don’t have that clarity, then it might have nothing to do with how your brand looks at all, right? So we look at your messaging, or purpose to simplify things down into easy to understand language that is memorable and repeatable, but also easy to use.
If it’s of any consolation, I get caught up in what I do to be able to keep things simple. So as a baseline one liner I give to someone who asks what I do, I can say “I help people develop a better brand that will help them be clear about how they will captivate and connect with their customers, to give them the best shot at business success”. And then if they asked what exactly I do, it’s saying, “I develop more than logos. As successful brands need a clear strategy and identity, that can be used to develop and market new products/services that outmaneuver their competition. I help identify their target customers and market positioning, their internal team personality, culture and purpose for why their brand exists, and turn that into an external identity of messaging, visuals and sounds that can be applied to everything their customers engage with so that they are easily recognised, thought of and chosen over others.” It’s a bit longer than the first part I said, but I can use this to develop more single-minded messaging on all my different touchpoints to communicate what I do, how I can help and who I can help.
How to rebrand or do a brand refresh without causing a stir?
Rebranding or even doing something as simple as refreshing your logo can make the walls fall down around you when customers experience this change. Cracker Barrel in the USA unfortunately experienced this heavily in 2025. The difference is always that customers haven’t been privy to why the change is happening and definitely haven’t come accustomed to it for as long as you have until you’ve launched that change.
So you often see brands get figuratively crucified for changing their logo, or their packaging or letting go of something like a mascot. Because no one likes change, as we’re mostly adverse to it as a species. But in my mind there are two ways you can avoid disaster if you rebrand or refresh a part of your brand.
1. Communicate Communicate Communicate
Let people know you’re going to be making a change. Tell them why it’s happening. Tell them why it couldn’t stay the same. Tell them why it will be of benefit to them. And tell them what to expect from the changes and when they’ll see this change. The better you communicate this at the time of launch, or in the lead up, it prepares people for change. But most importantly they also understand the change. They might not like it but if they understand “why”, that is better than them not liking it and not understanding it. Because those same people might end up liking it over time.
2. Slow change rather than abrupt change
There are two schools of thought and approach to a transition away from the old and bringing in the new.
The first is making the change on everything, all at once, overnight. However this is not achievable for many businesses. Additionally, instant change can cause an immediate drop in brand awareness and recognition. As people might not recognise your new logo in their social media feed, or find your product because of updated packaging design on the shelf. So there are some risks in this approach, even though it’ll feel better to do everything all in one hit and press on.
The second approach is implementing that change slowly or sequentially over time. This is typically the way most brands do it as it’s sometimes impossible to update everything immediately. And there are some things you can do in that longer transition period that will soften the rate of change to avoid that loss of brand awareness and recognition.
One way could be to use hybrid communication during that transition. So a bit of the old mixed with a bit of the new. For example, if your new packaging is a big visual shift, introduce an interim version that blends old and new so customers do not miss the change. Or place both designs side by side in the same box so the evolution is obvious and intentional.
Another is to update some touchpoints initially. So you might update your digital assets like your social media, and over time, roll it out onto your shop signage, packaging, etc. Combine this with ways of communicating that change before and/or as it happens and you’ll be better placed.
There are considerations as to why you’d rather implement all the changes as quickly as possible, like avoiding inconsistencies throughout your brand if you were to change with a slow roll out. But at the same time, if you can make more subtle changes that evolve your brand so it’s not losing all of its existing brand equity, the easier this transition will be.
The longer you keep your branding the better
This term ‘brand equity’ that I’ve been throwing around refers to this intangible value your brand can have for your business. It grows over time the more people recognise and think of your brand for the distinctive assets and product/service/experience they get from you. To the point where you take away your product or service, does your brand still have meaning.
So what you ultimately want to do is keep these things consistent (if not better) over time to achieve a greater level of value in your brand. This is why branding and marketing people call brand development an investment in your business rather than a cost. Because your brand will appreciate in value if you manage it well over time, as it helps encourage people to think about your brand, seek it out when needed, and want to choose it when it’s present.
There will be writing on the wall at some point to say something in particular needs a refresh or if you need to rebrand. Whether that’s you thinking it or someone else spotting it and giving you that feedback. But if you come to a branding or marketing person to ask them what they think about your logo, or your messaging, or your internal identity or strategy, be careful in noting what they say. As it’s one thing to say something looks rubbish in their eyes, but it’s another thing to say why it needs that change.
I say this because there is a habit of branding and marketing people that are new on the scene, to want to change things they think should be changed without much of a reason why and put their own stamp on it for a case study. Be it stripping away certain distinctive elements of your brand, creating a whole new ad campaign when the existing one was just as effective, or doing something the competition is doing successfully and moving your brand towards that way of doing things. Without having sat with what you have to work with already, it’s so common to see this kind of change happen. One of which was Burberry where each creative director they’ve had in the last decade or more has changed up the brand they way they see fit.
So if you can, don’t change just for the sake of it and make a knee-jerk reaction. Either to look/feel new all the time, or just to feel like you’re doing something different and not staying stagnant. You can add things, you can subtract things, but changing existing things can have its risks. Oftentimes, it’s better to use what you have developed already to your advantage, to then show up in more places and more often for more customers to be aware of your brand and have the opportunity to buy from it. So you may not need to touch anything of your brand and instead amp up the level of marketing efforts to ensure you get into more customer’s heads and give your brand a better shot at success.
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