You Don't Need A Rebrand

The brand feels stale. The logo's been bothering you for a year. Competitors just refreshed and suddenly your site looks like the before picture.

So you're circling a rebrand. Collecting agency names. Building the moodboard.

Put the moodboard down for one minute.

A rebrand changes how you look. A repositioning changes what you mean. They cost about the same in money but are nothing alike in consequence. Founders buy a rebrand when they need repositioning … constantly.

The cheap test that tells you which you need:

Say your brand's encapsulating sentence. What you are, who you're for, about five words.

If you can't say it, you don't need a rebrand. You need the sentence. A new logo on an undecided brand is expensive confusion with better kerning. Reposition first: decide what you mean, then see if the look can carry it. Half the time, it can.

If you can say it, and the look actively contradicts it, that's the real case for a rebrand. You outgrew the aesthetic. The category moved. The tribe you serve now isn't the one the old look was built to attract. A rebrand executes a decision. It can never make one.

And if you can say the sentence and the look still fits it, but you're just itchy? That's the third diagnosis, and nobody says it out loud: you're bored.

Founders get bored of their brand years before customers do. You see it every day. She sees it for three seconds a week, and those three seconds are when recognition happens, which is the thing a rebrand burns first. You're bored. She just got here.

The order, always: decide, then dress. Meaning first, logo second. Every rebrand that worked was a decision wearing new clothes. Every rebrand that failed was new clothes pretending to be a decision.

If a brand encapsulating sentence is the problem, that's where I start: RIGHT HERE

If the whole wardrobe needs rebuilding around a decided brand, that's The Conception: LEARN MORE