Your Rebrand Is Probably a Marketing Failure

Marketers love rebrands. There is something enormously satisfying about unveiling a new logo, typography, colour palette, photography style and strapline, particularly when everything is presented beautifully in a launch deck explaining how each design element represents confidence, optimism, humanity and forward momentum. The organisation sees a dramatic transformation, employees receive new templates and the LinkedIn announcement collects congratulations from other people working in marketing and design.

Then somewhere outside the organisation, a customer gives the new identity half a second of attention and wonders who the company is.

The more I have learned about mental availability and distinctive brand assets, the more sceptical I have become about our industry's enthusiasm for unnecessary reinvention. Sometimes a brand genuinely does need to change, and there are perfectly legitimate strategic reasons for doing so. But there is another reason brands constantly reinvent themselves that is rarely acknowledged: marketers become bored with brands far more quickly than customers learn them.

You see the brand every day. Your customer doesn't.

The difference between internal and external exposure is enormous. A brand manager might see the logo hundreds of times every week because it appears on their laptop, presentation templates, email signature, office walls, packaging, reports and creative reviews. They discuss it with colleagues and agencies, inspect tiny variations and spend months immersed in the brand system.

After a few years, the internal team can become completely tired of it. Customers have had a very different experience. They may have consciously noticed the same identity only occasionally, which means that just as the organisation becomes desperate for something new, the wider market may only be beginning to learn what the existing assets mean.

This is why Jenni Romaniuk's distinction between a brand element and a distinctive brand asset is so useful. A logo, colour, shape, character, typeface or sound does not acquire value merely because it appears inside a brand guideline. It becomes an asset when enough people have learned to associate it with the correct brand and, importantly, do not associate it just as strongly with competitors.

Romaniuk describes this in terms of fame and uniqueness. Fame asks how many relevant people correctly connect an asset to the brand, while uniqueness examines whether that connection belongs predominantly to that brand rather than being shared with competitors. Distinctiveness therefore exists in customers' memories rather than inside a design file.

Your new colour isn't distinctive because your board likes it

This is where branding conversations can become dangerously internal. Organisations routinely say things such as “we own yellow”, “everybody recognises that symbol” or “our visual style is iconic”, but those claims are assumptions until they are tested with the people whose memories actually matter.

Remove the brand name and show people the colour, symbol, character, packaging or sonic cue. Ask which brand comes to mind. If people correctly identify the organisation, you have evidence of fame. If a substantial number name competitors instead, the asset may be familiar but not particularly unique.

This matters because distinctive assets have to be learned. The organisation may decide in a workshop what it wants a colour, shape or phrase to represent, but the market does not automatically absorb that decision. Associations are built through reach, repetition, consistent presentation and repeated connection with the brand name, which means valuable brand assets are usually the product of sustained investment rather than one successful launch campaign.

You cannot hold an internal brand workshop on Tuesday and own purple by Friday.

That distinction between intention and perception should sit at the heart of brand management. Businesses can choose the associations and assets they want to build, but customers ultimately determine whether those associations exist in memory.

Marketing has a strange addiction to novelty

Creativity matters enormously, but creativity and novelty are not the same thing. Marketing departments frequently behave as though every campaign must look significantly different from the previous one to demonstrate creative progress, so a new visual world arrives, followed by a new headline style, new campaign device, new line and new treatment.

Internally, this can feel like evolution. Externally, it can resemble a succession of unrelated companies repeatedly introducing themselves. The organisation sees a portfolio of innovative campaigns, while the customer receives fragmented signals that make recognition harder.

The irony is that many of the world's biggest brands behave in the opposite way. They make themselves boringly easy to identify. McDonald's has not abandoned the Golden Arches because the marketing team became tired of them, Coca-Cola has accumulated enormous recognition around red and Nike continues to invest in the Swoosh. Their executions evolve constantly, but recognisable assets persist long enough to accumulate memory.

Those assets should be thought of as real marketing capital. Every year of consistent usage potentially adds recognition, and replacing a strong asset therefore involves an opportunity cost. What looks like an exciting creative reset internally may be the voluntary destruction of years of accumulated learning externally.

Wear-in should frighten marketers more than wear-out

One of the most useful ideas in the effectiveness material I have been reading is the warning that marketers often worry too much about wear-out and not enough about wear-in. We assume the customer is tired of an advertisement or creative platform because we have watched it dozens of times during internal meetings, creative reviews and presentations.

The customer may have noticed it once while making a cup of tea.

That difference matters because memory requires repetition. Recognition requires repetition, distinctive assets require repetition and associations with buying situations require repetition. Internal exposure is therefore a terrible proxy for market exposure, yet organisations routinely kill creative platforms just as they are beginning to accumulate public recognition.

They then create something completely new and start the learning process again. The comparison I keep coming back to is teaching someone a language but changing the meaning of the vocabulary every few months because the teacher has become bored. The learner never gets the chance to build fluency.

Consistency is therefore not the enemy of creativity. A strong brand system should give creative people a recognisable world within which they can constantly produce new work, rather than requiring the world itself to be rebuilt every time a campaign changes.

Byron Sharp makes this even more important

Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow argues that one of the fundamental requirements for growth is mental availability: the probability of the brand being noticed or coming to mind in relevant buying situations. That is much richer than awareness because somebody can know perfectly well that a brand exists but never think of it when entering the category.

Marketing therefore needs to build and refresh memory structures. Distinctive assets help make sure those memories are correctly attributed, which is crucial because advertising can be entertaining, emotional and memorable without necessarily building the advertiser's brand. An advert could become famous while viewers struggle to remember who actually paid for it.

From an entertainment perspective, that might be a success. From a marketing perspective, it represents an expensive attribution problem.

Branding is therefore not decoration applied to an advertisement once the creative idea has been developed. It is part of the mechanism through which communication becomes linked to the correct brand in memory. Colours, shapes, characters, typography, sounds, packaging and recurring creative devices can all help the brain recognise who is speaking before somebody even consciously reads the logo.

Distinctiveness is not differentiation

This debate occasionally becomes unnecessarily tribal. Sharp's work has challenged marketing's historic obsession with meaningful differentiation by showing that competing brands often share customers and are perceived as more similar than marketers like to imagine. That argument has sometimes been simplified into the claim that differentiation does not matter and only distinctiveness matters, which I think goes too far.

They solve different problems. Differentiation asks why somebody might choose us, while distinctiveness helps somebody know that it is us. A meaningfully superior or relevant product that nobody recognises has a problem, but an unmistakably distinctive brand that offers customers nothing they value also has a problem.

There is no prize in marketing for ideological purity. Where meaningful differentiation exists and can be supported by evidence, it can be strategically valuable. Distinctive assets then help ensure that customers correctly connect those benefits, messages and experiences with the brand that created them.

The ideal is not to choose a camp. It is to build something worth choosing and make it unmistakably yours.

Long-term brand building needs memory

This links neatly with Les Binet and Peter Field's The Long and the Short of It. Their work distinguishes between short-term sales activation and long-term brand building, demonstrating that the two operate differently and should not simply be measured in the same way. Activation converts demand that exists now, while brand building creates effects that accumulate over longer periods.

The famous 60:40 average from their IPA analysis is often repeated too mechanically. It was never intended to mean that every organisation in every category should allocate precisely 60 per cent of its budget to brand and 40 per cent to activation. The more important lesson is that long and short-term activity perform different jobs, and a business that optimises everything for immediate response can weaken its ability to generate future growth.

Long-term brand building also depends heavily on memory, and memory benefits from consistency. If the brand continually changes how it looks, sounds and behaves, the task becomes harder. That does not mean producing identical advertising forever, because a good creative platform can contain enormous variety while retaining recognisable characters, codes, colours, sounds, structures and brand signals.

The best analogy is probably a successful television programme. Every episode can tell a different story while remaining unmistakably part of the same world. Brands should be capable of doing exactly the same thing.

Rebranding has an opportunity cost

There is another reason marketers should be cautious about rebranding: it consumes enormous organisational energy. Research, agency fees, design, guidelines, templates, websites, signage, packaging, presentations, launch campaigns, internal workshops, uniforms and physical environments can all need to change. Even relatively simple identity projects spread far beyond the design department.

Every pound and hour invested has an alternative use. Perhaps that money could have increased reach, improved distribution, developed a better product, strengthened the customer experience or made the existing brand assets more famous. This does not mean a rebrand is never worthwhile, but it raises the standard of evidence that should be required before one begins.

There are genuine strategic reasons to rebrand. Businesses merge, brand architecture becomes confusing, international expansion creates difficulties, an existing identity may perform badly in research or an asset can become legally, culturally or commercially problematic. Sometimes the current identity genuinely fails to create recognition and a better system can improve the situation.

“It's looking dated”, however, deserves considerably more interrogation.

Dated to whom? The marketing department, the design agency, the board or customers? If customers recognise an identity quickly and uniquely, what marketers describe as dated might be what a finance director should describe as an asset.

Test before you destroy

One of Romaniuk's most practical contributions is the idea of evaluating assets using fame and uniqueness rather than internal taste. Instead of beginning a branding exercise by asking whether people like the current identity, start by understanding what the market has already learned.

Remove the brand name and test the strongest potential assets. Show people the colour, shape, character, packaging, line or sound and ask what comes to mind. Then examine incorrect attribution as carefully as correct attribution because an asset that is famous but equally associated with three competitors is far less useful than the organisation may believe.

This creates a much more disciplined brand conversation. A relatively unknown but highly unique asset may deserve investment because it has the potential to become distinctive over time. A well-known but non-unique cue may require much stronger direct branding, while an asset with high fame and high uniqueness should probably be protected aggressively.

Creative judgement still matters, of course. Branding will never become purely mathematical, nor should it. But evidence provides a healthier starting point than the subjective opinions of the people who have spent the most time staring at the current logo.

The best rebrand might be no rebrand at all

Perhaps one of the smartest decisions a marketing team can occasionally make is to finish a brand review by deciding to keep what already works. Keep the colour, keep the character, keep the line, keep the visual device and continue using them until customers have had far more opportunity to learn them.

The money that might have been spent reinventing everything could then be invested in making those assets more famous. Increase reach, create better advertising, improve distribution, strengthen the customer experience and ensure the brand appears consistently wherever people encounter it. This may not produce the dramatic before-and-after slide beloved by brand presentations, but marketing does not exist primarily to entertain marketing departments.

It exists to influence markets, and markets have memories.

Every time we unnecessarily throw away something customers have learned, we erase a little of that memory and pay to start teaching them again. So before approving the next rebrand, ask a brutally simple question: are customers genuinely tired of our brand, or are we?

The answer could save an enormous amount of money. More importantly, it could preserve something that takes years to build and only moments to destroy: recognition.

Sources and further reading

This article draws on my interpretation of Jenni Romaniuk's Building Distinctive Brand Assets, Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow, Les Binet and Peter Field's The Long and the Short of It, Les Binet and Sarah Carter's How Not to Plan, Scott Lerman's Building Better Brands and Mark Ritson's teaching on positioning, differentiation and distinctiveness. The strongest lesson across these sources is not that brands should never change, but that accumulated customer memory deserves to be treated as an asset rather than an inconvenience.