When does a brand need a rebrand?

“We’d like to rebrand” sometimes starts with a feeling. Things look dated, competitors look fresher, the team is tired of looking at the logo. The feeling matters, but on its own it isn’t a reason. Before a rebrand starts, it’s worth saying out loud what has changed and what should stay where it is.

A rebrand isn’t the same as a new brand

A rebrand is a spectrum. At one end there’s a small correction: clearer colours, a new typeface, a simpler logo. At the other end there’s a transformation where even the name changes and everything is rebuilt.

For most brands, the right answer is somewhere in between. Keep the things people recognise you by, and fix the things that no longer work.

When does it come up?

Every brand’s story is different. Still, a rebrand conversation can open with one of these:

The brand says something else now. The company has moved into a new area, its products have changed or it’s speaking to a different audience. The identity still tells the old story.

The identity has scattered. Over the years, several versions of the logo, colours that don’t match and a different typeface for every job have piled up. Nobody knows which one is right.

It’s hitting technical limits. The logo doesn’t read at small sizes, doesn’t work as an app icon, or the typeface doesn’t support the characters the brand needs.

No rules were ever written. There’s a logo, but nobody knows how to use it. In that case what’s needed is sometimes not a new logo but a system around the existing one.

That last one matters. In some rebrand requests, the problem isn’t the logo at all. It’s the lack of any rules around it.

What’s worth keeping?

This is the most delicate question in a rebrand. The recognition a brand builds over the years is valuable. People may link a colour, a shape or a letter with you. Throw those out and you throw that recognition out too.

That’s why we start a rebrand with an inventory of what’s already there. In the analysis stage of our projects we look at how well the logo, the colours and the typeface still work. Some get kept, some get fixed, some get let go.

An example: Taze Sepet

Taze Sepet is an online grocery for natural, regional food. In its mark, a green “t” and a red “s” form a shopping basket. The rebrand kept that idea exactly as it was.

What changed was this: the hand-drawn basket mesh came out, the leaves were redrawn as clean, solid shapes, and the colours moved from neon green and crimson to leaf green and tomato red. Then a system was built around the mark: five colours (Fresh Green, Basket Red, Forest, Cream and Honey), Alegreya Sans as the one corporate typeface in Regular, Medium, Bold and ExtraBold, a leaf-and-wheel pattern, a photography direction, and applications across packaging, stationery, social media and the website.

So the mark isn’t new, it’s simpler, and the system around it was written up in new guidelines that run to 17 pages.

Before you start

• What does your brand say today, and is it the same as what your identity says?
• Which element do people recognise you by most?
• Is the problem the logo, or the way it’s used?
• Will the rebrand only change how things look, or will it set up a system too?

We’ve looked at whether to refresh a logo or start from scratch in a separate post. If you’d like to look at where your brand stands today together, get in touch.