Rebrand when the business changed, not when you got bored

Most companies that ask for a rebrand need a refresh. The test is simple: a rebrand is for when the business has changed, and a refresh is for when only the execution has aged. If you sell the same thing to the same people under the same name, the job is to keep what buyers already recognise and fix what no longer works. Starting again throws away the one asset that took years to build.

The usual reason for wanting a rebrand is that the people inside the company are tired of the brand. That is a real feeling and a poor brief. Your team sees the logo every working day. Your buyers see it now and then, and most of them are not buying when they do.

Rebrand or refresh: the question that decides it

Ask what has changed about the business, not about the logo. A full rebrand earns its keep when one of these is true:

• You sell something materially different from what the brand was built for.
• You now sell to a different buyer, and the current brand tells them they are in the wrong place.
• Two companies have merged, or you have been bought, and the name or structure has to change.
• The name itself is the problem: confusing, legally awkward, or shared with someone louder.

If none of those apply, you need a refresh. Tighter type, a palette that passes contrast, a logo redrawn so it still works at favicon size, a voice written down properly instead of living in one person's head. That is real work, and it is usually most of what people were hoping a rebrand would give them.

Your team is the wrong audience

Recognition builds slowly because buyers are rarely paying attention. In a Marketing Week piece from 2021, Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo set out the 95:5 rule, drawn from the work of Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute: at any given moment only about 5% of B2B buyers are in market. The other 95% will not buy for months or years.

That changes what a brand is for. Its job is to be remembered by people who are not shopping yet, so that when they start, you are already on the list. Every year your name, logo and colours sit in front of those future buyers, a little recognition builds up. It is slow, invisible and does not show up on any dashboard. It is also exactly what a rebrand resets to zero.

The brand your team is bored of is the brand your buyers have only just started to recognise.

Familiarity inside the building runs years ahead of familiarity outside it. By the time the founder is sick of the logo, the market may only just have learned it.

What it costs to throw recognition away

The famous failures are consumer brands, because consumer brands get written about. They still make the point. In October 2010 Gap replaced its blue box logo on its US website, then scrapped the new design about a week later after an outpouring of comments from customers who wanted the old one back.

In 2009 Tropicana swapped the orange and straw on its cartons for a glass of juice that shoppers found generic. Unit sales fell 20% between 1 January and 22 February, competitors gained, and the original design came back soon after.

Neither company changed what it sold. Both changed how people found them, and people stopped finding them. A B2B company has fewer chances than a juice brand to earn that recognition back, because its buyers return to the category so rarely. The 95:5 rule cuts both ways: recognition is slow to build, and just as slow to rebuild.

When a refresh is not enough either

There is one case where keeping the brand is the wrong call even though the business has not changed: when nobody can say what you do. If a prospect leaves your homepage unable to describe the company in a sentence, redrawing the logo will not help, and neither will a new one. That is a positioning problem, and it is where brand strategy starts. The answer might still be a refresh or a rebrand, but that decision should come out of the strategy, not go into it.

A refresh is also not a small job hiding behind a small word. A brand lives on the website, the product, the sales deck, the invoice and the status page. A refresh that stops at the logo leaves all of those out of step with each other, which is why the website usually belongs in the scope.

Before you sign off a rebrand

Show the current logo to a few customers and ask what it tells them about you. If they get it right, the brand is doing its job, and a rebrand means paying to make them learn you again. If they get it wrong, find out whether the problem is the logo or the business it describes. Only one of those is fixed by a designer.

Boredom is a view of the brand from the inside. Your buyers only ever see it from outside, and from there it may be the most familiar thing about you.