A client call last week, eleven tiles on the screen, three of them frozen. Twenty minutes in, the new marketing lead said the sentence I have now heard on four video calls this spring: we think we need a rebrand.
So I asked what was broken. The answer came back in two parts. The logo feels dated. And sales are down.
Those are not the same problem. They are not even related.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, and the rebrand request almost never arrives as a strategy question. It arrives as a feeling. Somebody scrolled a competitor's site, felt a small hot flush of embarrassment, and translated that feeling into a scope of work. Then an agency, which is paid more for bigger scopes, agrees enthusiastically.
A rebrand is a change of meaning. A refresh is a change of expression. Almost everyone who asks for the first one needs the second.
The test is not visual. Ask what the company promises now that it did not promise three years ago. If the honest answer is nothing, you have an expression problem. Your typography aged, your palette went muddy, your photography looks like a stock library from 2014. Fix those. That is a refresh, and it is not a lesser project. Mailchimp did not become a different company in 2018. It got louder, weirder, more itself, and the strategy underneath never moved an inch.
Dunkin' dropping Donuts from the name reads like a rebrand and mostly was not. The company had been telling people for years that it ran on beverages. The name finally caught up to a promise that had already changed.
Real rebrands are for real ruptures. You merged. You sold the division that made half your revenue. You are entering a category where your name is a liability, or leaving one where it was your only asset. Weight Watchers going to WW was a genuine attempt at new meaning, and the confusion that followed is instructive. Changing what you mean costs you the people who liked what you meant before. Sometimes that trade is right. It is never cheap.
Somebody scrolled a competitor's site, felt a small hot flush of embarrassment, and translated that feeling into a scope of work.
The expensive mistake is surgery when the patient needed a haircut. You spend nine months rebuilding meaning that was working fine, and you come out with a beautiful new wordmark and the same sales problem, which was a distribution problem the entire time.
There is a restaurant on my block that repainted the front in May and taped the menu in the window. Same name, same owners, same braised everything. It looks like it intends to still be here next year. That is the whole job.