A is any deliberate change to how a company looks, sounds or is named, and the word covers very different amounts of change. A redraws and tidies what is already there, and most customers never notice. A redesign keeps the central mark and rebuilds the identity around it. A new name is the far end, and the most expensive. Mastercard shows the careful end done in public. Pentagram redrew its overlapping circles in 2016, and in January 2019 the company dropped the word from the symbol newsroom.mastercard.com on cards, in shops and in sponsorship, citing research that more than 80 per cent of people recognised the circles without it. So name the kind first. Each kind puts a different share of what the company already owns at risk, so each has to be judged against a different standard.
The good reasons to rebrand are few and concrete. The business has changed, so the name or the look describes a company that no longer exists. Dunkin' Donuts became Dunkin' in January 2019, when drinks already made up about 60 per cent of its sales, and it kept its pink and orange and a typeface it had used since 1973. Two companies merge, or one buys another, and somebody has to decide what customers will see. The identity cannot do a job it now has to do, such as reading clearly at the size of an app icon. Sometimes the law decides. Andersen Consulting had to stop using the Andersen name after an arbitration ruling in 2000 and became Accenture on 1 January 2001, and its annual report for that year put the cost of the name change at $147 million.
The bad reasons are more common. A new marketing director wants something visible in the first year. The people inside the company are bored of a logo they see all day, while customers see it for a second or two a week. Sales are falling and the real cause is price, product or distribution, none of which a new logo touches. A competitor has just rebranded. Jenni Romaniuk's research on at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute is the check to run here, because it treats the colours, shapes and characters people use to recognise a brand as memories built by consistent use over years. A rebrand that throws them away sends the brand back to the start of that work, and pays again for recognition it already had.
Real evidence comes in four kinds. Sales and market share come first, set against the whole category over the same months, so that a rising market is not credited to a new logo. Recognition comes next, measured by showing people the new assets with the name hidden, which is how Mastercard justified dropping its word. Cost includes everything the identity has to be applied to, signs and vehicles and packs and uniforms, and not only the design fee. Last comes the fate of the distinctive assets people used to find the brand. Tropicana's carton of 2009 is the textbook failure on that count, and "Rebrands that were reverted", later in this module, tells it in full.
Launch week tells you very little about any of this. The first reaction comes mostly from designers and the loudest part of the internet, it judges a logo on a white background, and it is nearly always hostile. Airbnb's symbol, the Bélo, was mocked widely when DesignStudio's identity launched in July 2014, and it is still the company's symbol more than a decade later. Gap went the other way. Its Helvetica wordmark of October 2010 was withdrawn after a week csmonitor.com of angry comments, before anyone could learn whether its customers minded at all. Read launch reaction as a verdict on how the change was explained and shown, and wait a year for the evidence.
Waiting also guards against the opposite mistake, which is blaming an identity for numbers it did not cause. In April 2025 Jaguar registered 49 new cars in Europe, against 1,961 a year earlier, according to figures from the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association, and much of the coverage tied the fall to the rebrand it had launched the previous November. Jaguar had already stopped building most of its old models ahead of an electric relaunch, so dealers had almost nothing to sell. The number tells you nothing yet. Whenever sales move after a rebrand, list what else changed in the same months, such as prices, products, distribution and supply, before you give the logo the credit or the blame.
Reading a rebrand properly means doing the work the launch did not do for you. Collect the old and the new identity in use, on a pack, a sign, an app icon and an advert, and put them side by side at the size people meet them. List what was kept, what was changed and what was dropped, asset by asset. Write down the problem the company said it had, then decide whether an identity could ever have solved it. Look for the evidence a year on. Only then give a verdict, and say which evidence would change your mind about it.
Try this
Judge one rebrand in ninety minutes
Choose a rebrand from the last three years that you already have an opinion about, and write that opinion down in one sentence before you start. Collect the old and the new identity in use, on packs, signs, the app icon and advertising, and set them side by side at the size people actually meet them. Then work through the points below, one short paragraph each, and finish with a verdict and the evidence that would change it.
Time: 90 minutes. You need: Before and after pictures of the identity in use, the company's own announcement of the change, any sales, share or recognition figures published since.
Look for
- Whether the problem the company named is one an identity can solve, or a matter of price, product or supply.
- Which assets were kept, which were changed and which were thrown away, including colour, shape and sound.
- Whether you can still pick out the brand at app-icon size and from across a street, with the name covered.
- What the rollout cost beyond the design fee, and whether it was phased or done at once.
- Sales or share a year on, set against the whole category over the same months.
- Anything else that changed at the same time and could explain the numbers.
- How much of your first opinion survived, and what changed it.
The words, in plain language
- Refresh
- A redraw of the existing identity. Done well, most customers never notice it happened.
- Rebrand
- Any deliberate change to a company's name, look or voice. The word covers a tidy-up and a new name alike, so ask which one is meant.
- Distinctive asset
- Anything people use to recognise a brand without reading its name, such as a colour, a shape, a character or a sound.
- Recognition test
- Showing people an asset with the name hidden and counting how many can name the brand.
- Confound
- Something else that changed in the same months and could explain the numbers.
- Rollout
- Putting the new identity onto everything the company owns and prints. It usually costs far more than the design.
- Reversion
- Going back to the old identity after launching a new one. Gap did it within a week in 2010.
Why it matters
Judging rebrands well matters because sooner or later you will be asked to design one, defend one or talk a client out of one. The usual mistakes are easy to name. People judge the logo alone on a white background, when customers only ever meet it as part of a whole system in use, on shelves, on screens and in the street. They confuse better design with better recognition, and a company lives on the second. They treat the launch-week reaction as the verdict. And they credit or blame the identity for results that came from product, price or supply.
Each of those mistakes has a price. Gap's withdrawn wordmark cost the design work and a week of coverage the company did not want, and because it was pulled so fast, nobody learned whether shoppers would have minded. Throwing away a working asset costs more, because recognition built over decades has to be rebuilt with media money, and some brands end up bringing the old asset back years later. The is usually the largest bill of all, since every sign, vehicle, uniform and pack has to change, and a rollout that stops halfway leaves old and new side by side for years.
The safest rule is to change the least that solves the problem. Keep the assets people find you by. Change one thing at a time, so that recognition carries over instead of starting again. Show the new identity in use on the first day, on the pack and the sign and the app, never as a logo on its own. When a company does all of this, launch week is usually quiet, and the evidence arrives a year later.
The rest of this module reads real cases with these questions in hand. Five are argued in full. They are an Indian airline after its sale to Tata, an Indian food app that turned into a delivery business, a British fashion house that swapped its knight for a typeface, a search engine redrawn for small screens, and a soft drink that put its name back inside its circle. After those come the rebrands that were reversed, the ones that worked without anybody writing about them, and the moments when a whole category changed its look at the same time.
Elsewhere
Reading
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