Starting a rebrand can make you (and your team) nervous. It’s normal. But don’t run to the hills just yet.
Get it right and it transforms your future. It breathes new life into your business, whether you’re a multi-national or a leading Scottish law firm (more on this later).
There’s also plenty to add to your ‘don’t do’ list.
Criticisms of the Jaguar rebrand nearly broke the internet. Case in point? Not quite. The uncomfortable truth is that it takes time to understand the true, long-term effects of a rebrand. What will the numbers say in five or ten years?
Was the initial reaction a response to the change rather than the new brand identity? That’s for another day.
To make your rebrand a success, you’ll need a balance of vision, expertise, passion, and creativity. Open and consistent communication, along with controlled messaging, are crucial.
In this guide, we walk you through the signs that tell you it’s time for a rebrand, when it’s not, the timings and the steps you could take to prepare the ground.
But first, some housekeeping.
Firstly, what do we mean by ‘rebrand’?
Rebranding is more than changing your logo. This is a deep-rooted perception change.
We like this definition from Hubspot: ‘The intention of developing a new, differentiated identity in the minds of customers and other stakeholders.’
A rebrand is a calculated move to alter your appeal and relevance. It impacts how you’re perceived and remembered by your customers.
To achieve this perception shift, you’ll go through the familiar brand building steps. But it’s more than a refresh — this is a material change. Seasonal repackaging around Christmas, Black Friday, Halloween, etc., definitely don’t count. Sorry!
Naming: A health warning
You need to have a very good reason to change the name of your brand.
You’re losing recognition. But changing your name can quickly
erode the brand awareness you’ve spent so long building.
There are, however, times when a name change is unavoidable.
- Growth — you’ve evolved your offer or moved into a new market, category or demographic. The name doesn’t encapsulate what you do now or who you do it for. For example, Once Upon a Tuesday rebranded to Good Tuesday. As founders Michelle and Angus explained: ‘It was time to rethink the brand identity to better reflect who we are as a business and be more consistent in our communications’.
- Improve perceptions — there’s a negative perception, the name is confusing, forgettable or it doesn’t translate well to other audiences or cultures.
- It’s indigestible — brand names need to be digestible, memorable and roll off the tongue. If we think about law firms for a moment. The brand name is often a list of partners. SmithJonesPearsonGreene LLP doesn’t roll off the tongue, and it isn’t memorable, is it? You see where we’re going.
- Legal challenges — someone else is using a similar name for a similar offer. You get a letter. Oops!
- M&A hangover — a new name for the new entity.
- No longer founder-led — Huffington Post changed its name after founder Arianna Huffington left the business (the timing was right for a rebrand for a whole host of other reasons — more later).
- Negative associations — your name is associated with past controversies.
Part 1: Signs you need a rebrand
As your business develops and evolves, rebranding is a natural part of the process.
As Forbes recently reported, companies spend 5-10% of their annual marketing budget on rebranding. The scale of change in your branding should match the scale of change in your company.
So, what’s a good reason to rebrand?
Business change
There’s been a shift in the business. Your brand identity and messaging aren’t carrying that shift. You own a local craft beer brewery and want to switch to exclusively non-alcoholic products. You need an outright rebrand to address the imbalance of a positioning built on a legacy product base. The customer has changed, or you’re trying to attract new customer groups.
Your mission, values, or purpose might have changed. A change in leadership or a complex M&A could spell the need for a new, unified identity. You might be lost and need a complete overhaul to create internal alignment.
Perception change
Rebrands also happen when a business wants to alter or influence perceptions.
Your brand identity is what you want customers to think and remember about you. Brand perception is what they actually think and remember about you.
This is your brand image. There might be an acknowledgement that there’s work to do to improve perceptions of your brand or industry.
‘Companies spend 5-10% of their annual marketing budget on rebranding.’
Source: Forbes
Example: Blackadders
Working closely with Blackadders’ leadership team, we created a pioneering, people-first brand designed to set new standards in Scotland’s legal sector.
Our approach was to uncover and articulate the challenges at the heart of the industry. Using these insights as a foundation, we created a brand that communicates the idea of ‘breaking and building’ — breaking away from harmful traditions and building meaningful solutions.
The new brand has built trust, passion and belief across the firm, its clients and future colleagues. By challenging outdated perceptions and removing barriers to progression, the firm has become a ‘destination employer’, harnessing the energy and ambition of an industry destined for change.
The new logo visually expresses this by physically breaking the old approach in two to demonstrate the cultural and operational changes made.
‘The experience has been nothing short of transformative. From the outset, the team took the time to deeply understand how the firm was perceived.’
Emma Gray, Managing Partner
Part 2: When to hold your horses
Rebrands aren’t a catch-all remedy.
As discussed earlier, there are essentially two reasons why a business rebrands — a business shift or you want to change perceptions.
If neither of these apply to your business, consider holding your horses.
Things to weigh-up
• If your logo, symbol or wordmark is outdated — this means refreshing your visual identity. It’s a design project, not a rebrand. This won’t need as much strategic input and can be achieved relatively painlessly.
• If perceptions are already strong — a rebrand will be a costly exercise if your customers already hold positive perceptions. A brand audit will give you clear answers about what your customers need. A rebrand might set you back instead of pushing you forward.
• If you’re struggling with brand awareness — the solution could instead be a new content marketing strategy to ensure cut through. When was the last time you ran an audit or customer research?
• If you don’t have branding expertise — DIY branding will cost you money in the long term. If you haven’t got the team to manage each workstream and deliver change, get outside help or stick with what you’ve got.
• If you’re bored — if you just fancy a change (or you’re bored), just don’t do it.
• New management — new management teams want to make their mark. But as we explained earlier, there has to be a very good reason to rebrand.
• If you recently rebranded — this brings us to the golden question: when is the right time to rebrand? See part 3 for more on that.
‘41% of design-led companies reported greater market share.’
Source: Adobe
Example: The Courier
Revitalising a brand is a delicate balancing act. Throw in centuries of tradition, and the scales become even harder to balance. The Courier‚ an established media brand, has been at the heart of Tayside and Fife since 1816.
We were asked to help them realign internal and external perceptions, placing focus back on their unwavering commitment to the communities they serve. As you might expect, our initial thoughts were of a rebrand. However, as we began to dig into the data, it became clear that the best way to win hearts and minds was to develop a campaign and comms strategy that would connect their stories.
That campaign — ‘Local stories make us’ — flowed from strategy, copywriting and positioning to creative direction and production of their TV commercial and more.
The campaign aims to prompt brand reappraisal, increase audience share, and inspire more digital subscribers. We amplified the brand’s commitment to community journalism, empowered local voices, and continued to build trust — and we did it without major surgery on the brand itself.
‘LBD Studio helped us refine our strategy and translate it into a powerfully emotive campaign that deeply resonates with our audience.’
Carly Gilchrist, Head of Brand Marketing
Part 3: When’s the right time to rebrand?
Oh, if we had some string…
There’s no rule here. You should be making regular tweaks to your design system and messaging to stay relevant and consistent across all platforms.
When should you go for a rebrand? Assuming there’s a strong business need, this depends on how long you’ve been in business, how established and successful your current brand is, how fast your industry moves, whether you’ve got internal buy-in or the finances in place for a major overhaul.
As a rough guide, some challenger brands opt to rebrand once every 7-10 years, but this can also indicate that previous attempts have missed the mark. At the other end of the scale, established brands with strong recognition often opt for an iterative approach rather than a root-and-brand rebrand.
If you’re a small business owner, you might find you need to rebrand sooner. You were finding your feet in the beginning. You weren’t really sure who you were as a brand. You’ve expanded, and your position has evolved.
Three, four, five years in, and it’s probably time for a brand.
How long does a rebrand take?
Depending on the scale of the business and its challenges, a rebrand can take 3 to 18 months to complete.
While this sounds like a long time on the surface, much of the time is spent understanding the operational and emotive hurdles we need to overcome
before offering cast-iron solutions that we’re confident will move the dial.
‘75% of business executives have done work on brands since 2020.’
Source: Hanover Research
Example: E Co.
E Co. is a global leader in climate finance. Working with clients like the World Bank, Carbon Trust, and the Green Climate Fund, it was important to get our timing right. Our approach was to plan their rebrand around COP28, an event that quite literally had the world’s attention.
We worked with the incredible team at E Co. over a period of around 18 months to help them plan and deliver a rebrand that explained their role in delivering climate finance to a global audience. By embedding ourselves in their business and taking the time to understand the challenges they faced, we were able to write a strategy that rooted their brand in the natural world.
Whether partnering with marginalised communities, national governments or the United Nations, the rebrand sees an entirely new communications approach that puts people and planet first while making content accessible to a global audience.
‘You worked so carefully with us over the past year (and then some!) to really understand what we are trying to achieve.’
Mariella de Souza-Baker, Head of Marketing & Comms
Part 4: Prepare the ground
Plan, plan, and plan again.
Successful rebrands are 70% preparation and 30% implementation. A root and branch rebrand takes preparation. And plenty of it.
Make time for research
Without research, you’re working in a vacuum. How do customers perceive your brand? What do they want and need, now and in the future? Run a survey and have those difficult conversations. Research your competitors and market. Without it, will your rebrand have the effect you want?
What’s worked and hasn’t worked before?
There are lots of examples of successful brands and brands that got it wrong. A brand expert with insider knowledge and experience — inside and outside of your industry — will be a huge help here.
‘Design-driven companies drove 32% more revenue growth over 5 years than those that didn’t prioritise design’
Source: McKinsey
Who’s affected by this?
There’s an assumption that customers (who you’ll plan for) are the brand owners, but the people inside the business live and breathe your brand.
Help your team on every floor understand the ‘why’, what it means to customers, and why it’s a positive thing. At this stage, you’re looking for enthusiasm and buy-in.
Do you have strong roots in a local community? Do you use a famous landmark or building in your logo? Are there elements of heritage and history you want to keep?
What’s in the armoury?
This follows from the last point. You won’t want to get rid of everything. What’s in the armoury worth keeping, and what do you want to throw out?
Map the customer journey
How will the change impact customers at every touchpoint — from URL to IRL.
Think about the tangibles
Your logo, website, packaging, offices, retail space, equipment, merchandise, fleet, templates, documentation and beyond.
Then, think about the intangibles
Your true brand power is more than the elements listed above. It’s rooted in the intangible elements like your point of difference, purpose, narrative, culture, IP, processes and more. These intangible elements drive your brand’s personality, differentiation, and emotional connection with consumers.
Four questions to ask yourself
- What’s the one thing that makes you stand out?
- How have your mission, values and purpose changed?
- What’s in it for your customers?
- What messages are you trying to convey?
Here’s a good example. Huffington Post’s starting point for its rebrand was its point of difference.
Example: HuffPost
Huffington Post rebranded seven years ago to HuffPost in a move to ‘become better listeners’ and build up trust with audiences. Audiences that increasingly distrusted news sites and were switched off to politics.
Customers had been calling the site HuffPost for years, and with the rebrand, the news site moved closer to its customers. The name change, new logo, and new website marked the first major rebrand in the site’s 12-year history.
The business started by defining what made it stand apart — its editorial voice. Down to earth, cutting through the noise and getting to what’s real.
This inspired the forward-slash that formed the brackets of the name on its site (it’s also a stand alone logo). The shape symbolised its forward thinking and roots as the first digital-only news brand. As mentioned earlier, founder Arianna Huffington had also recently left the business for other pursuits.
Make meaningful brand guidelines
Guidelines are often seen as a necessary evil used to police creativity.
For us, they’re a creative jumping-off point designed to inspire, not restrict. They inform how your rebrand looks, speaks, and acts, laying a foundation for everything you do day-to-day. Explain the underlying principles behind the rebrand and offer practical ways that these can be used to create marketing materials, campaigns, websites, etc. This helps your people take brand ownership and understand the ‘why’ rather than just the ‘how’.
Part 5: Finally… prepare for a soft landing
Don’t blindside your customers.
People don’t like change. Especially when it’s dropped on them without warning. Get feedback early and often. Engage your customers and create a build-up.
Explain the upcoming change – why you’re doing it and what’s in it for customers. Don’t do it overnight with a ‘tah-dah’. Keep communicating the change after the launch. Almost 50% of marketers say that updating marketing assets is the biggest challenge, while communicating the rebrand comes in a close second at 42%. (Creative alignment comes next at 36%).
‘Explain the upcoming change – why you’re doing it and what’s in it for customers. Don’t do it overnight with a ‘tah-dah’.’
Remember our Good Tuesday example. It explains the rebrand in its meta description: ‘We’ve Rebranded. Goodbye to the magic of Once Upon a Tuesday and hello to GOOD TUESDAY! Read all about our rebranding story here.’ — driving people to its ‘about’ page.
That’s a lot to think about for now.
‘Almost 50% of marketers say that updating marketing assets is the biggest challenge while communicating their rebrand comes close behind at 42%.’
Source: Bynder
Example: The Courier (again)
The Courier surveyed members of DC Thomson’s audience panel the day the campaign launched (10th March 2025) to solicit their feedback, gauge brand perceptions, and collect baseline metrics to understand the campaign’s impact. The post-campaign measure is scheduled for April 10.
To qualify, respondents had to live within Tayside & Fife and have engaged with The Courier in the past 3 months (either via website/app, ePaper, print, newsletter or social). The sample size: 85 respondents (48 subscribers, 9 lapsed subscribers and 28 non-subscribers).
Questions they asked
• The most important benefits to subscribing to The Courier
• The 3 words they would use to describe The Courier
• How well they felt the campaign demonstrated their brand purpose
• How well the campaign reflects its brand values
• Whether they had come across any advertising or marketing campaigns for The Courier recently — aside from subscription pop-ups on the website
• How likely they were to recommend The Courier to a friend, colleague or anyone who asked their opinion (NPS).
What survey questions should you ask as you launch?
