When is a rebrand not a rebrand? Sometimes, because it’s literally not a rebrand, it’s a brand refresh.
But sometimes, to all intents and purposes it is a rebrand – people just don’t want to use the r word.
Several times in the past few months, we’ve received emails about new visual identity projects that came accompanied with the same instructions. Some variation of – please note this is not a rebrand.
Sometimes that was the case, but sometimes it was the term itself that the studio and their client wanted to avoid.
I’ve spoken with various designers who say they don’t use the word rebrand with their clients, especially when it comes to the non-creative/marketing stakeholders elsewhere in the business. These people’s buy-in is vital, and so they need to remain unspooked.
Rebrand, as a word, as an idea, is seems to spook people.
I also spoke with someone connected to a charity that is considering a rebrand at the moment. They told me the word is snarkily thrown around by people who don’t like the plans, a withering shorthand for the current leadership’s wish to make changes.
“A loaded term”
So what the hell is going on?
“The word rebrand has become a bit of a loaded term,” one design leader who will remain anonymous told me.
“It signals wholesale change and often gets linked to bigger business shifts: recruitment drives, layoffs, restructuring, investment. In today’s turbulent climate, it can feel tone-deaf even when the actual intent is positive.”
They understand why clients have become skittish about the idea of a rebrand.
And most of the time, they say, “the need isn’t to start over. It’s about helping a brand stay current and relevant, giving in-house teams the tools to tell new stories across more platforms.
“That’s really an evolution of the design system – expanding its texture, flexibility and range – rather than a total reset. Framing it that way allows the work to move more smoothly through a business without sparking alarm.”
You know who again…
But how did rebrand become such a controversial word? According to Google’s search term history tool, it barely registered up until the start of 2023.
And it seems to have remained a fairly niche design and marketing industry term really until autumn last year, when it suddenly spiked. Rebrands, it seems, entered the mainstream chat.
Oh, autumn last year, lest you have forgotten, was Jaguar.
The idea that the Jaguar furore fundamentally rewired how we think about these seven simple letters is backed up by the related queries Google provides.
The word Jaguar appears time and again, way ahead of the few other brands that make the most-searched list – Pepsi, Facebook and Amazon, among others.
“Rebrand, as a word, as an idea, is seems to spook people.”
Jaguar was one of those incredibly rare moments when graphic design crashes into the mainstream media discourse.
It was all over social media. It was pulled apart in radio phone-ins. Uncles hitherto baffled by what graphic design even is asked designers about it at the family Christmas do.
And in our culture-war age, the debate was electrified by the accusation, in some quarters, that it was a “woke rebrand” – a heritage British company abandoning its stiff-upper-lip decorum for some sort of vegan, pro-trans madness. Fetch me a scotch Maureen, one of the cars is bright bloody pink!
This I think then fed back into the design world. Suddenly this pretty innocuous word became freighted with connotations that no client wanted to contemplate. And then came Cracker Barrel.
Like many Brits, I’d never even heard of a Cracker Barrel a month ago. It sounds like a slightly off-colour term that a man of a certain age might use to describe a woman who wears skirts above the knee. Make it a double Maureen, Rupert’s bringing that cracker barrel home for dinner!
(Someone in the know told me recently that Harvester is perhaps the closest equivalent we have here).
As with Jaguar, “Cracker Barrel rebrand” has become shorthand for an apparent brand design disaster.
A brand is not a logo
It’s an instructive example because, as is so often the case, rebrand here becomes reduced in many conversations to “new logo.” Those before and after images of the Cracker Barrel logo snaked across my social feeds like Japanese knotweed.
Stripped of any context, explanation or sense of strategy, it becomes a simple clarion call – old logo good! New logo bad!
Designers may love saying that “a brand is not a logo” – and to be fair, you do bloody love saying that – but that’s a distinction lost on most people.
And so what happens, as the design leader explains, is the logo reveal “dominates the narrative, putting undue pressure on a symbol instead of recognising that a brand is the sum of experiences.”
It seems incredible to me that two clearly exceptional situations – Jaguar and Cracker Barrel – may have torpedoed “rebrand” as a word people feel comfortable with.
But maybe it shouldn’t. Rebrands only make the news when there is a backlash, and so the word easily acquires unduly negative associations.
But interestingly, treading more carefully when it comes to framing a brand update can also backfire.
Writing about the derisive reaction to Walmart’s subtle brand refresh last year, FutureBrand’s managing Polly Hopkins warned, “It seems that when it comes to switching up your brand identity, no approach is without risk. You’re damned if you do push the boundaries, and damned if you don’t.”
And she pointed out that refreshes are much more common than full-on brand overhauls.
“As an industry we love to work on large-scale reinventions, but total rebrands are rare,” she wrote. “The majority of client briefs aren’t about reinvention, they are about enhancing existing equities.”
But there are times when rebrands “are exactly what’s needed,” the anonymous design leader explains. “When it comes from the C-suite, is rooted in business strategy, and is launched in a way that explains the why, it can be transformative.”
Many people will disagree, but Jaguar’s leadership would argue that’s precisely how its new look was unveiled.
But either way, the way we talk about branding seems to have changed. “The caution we’re seeing now is partly the legacy of high-profile missteps, which have made leaders more wary of the word,” the design leader says.