Most Rebrands Fail Before Anyone Opens a Design Brief
WHY SHOULD I SPEND MONEY ON THIS REBRAND?
The question landed before I'd taken my seat.
A client asked me, as I walked into a boardroom for a rebranding briefing: “So… why should I spend money on this rebrand?”
Such a smack-in-the-head moment. Wasn’t he the one who called me for this briefing?
After a beat, I realized he wasn’t being difficult. He just needed help to explain it internally. Supressing my initial inner defense, I took a deep breath and actually listen to what he was truly asking. Because he wasn't trying to be difficult. He wasn't dismissing the work before it had started. He needed language — a clear, defensible argument he could take back to his stakeholders and his board. He needed to explain the investment, not to me, but to himself.
It is, in fact, the right question. And it deserves a better answer than most branding professionals have historically been prepared to give.
THE REAL REASON REBRANDS FAIL
There is a widespread misunderstanding about what a rebrand is for, and it lives on both sides of the table. Clients often frame it as a visual problem — the logo is dated, the website feels tired, the identity doesn't reflect where the company is going. Agencies too often respond in kind, leading into deliverables before anyone has diagnosed what is actually wrong, because that ties to the revenue.
The result is a rebrand that changes the surface and leaves the problem untouched. A new visual identity applied over misaligned strategy, a fractured team, or a positioning that no longer reflects the market is not a rebrand. It is expensive wallpaper.
Most rebrands fail for exactly this reason. They treat cosmetic changes as the solution when design is not just an expression. Before a single colour is chosen or a typeface considered, the business problem has to be named clearly — and it usually falls into one of three categories: the strategy has shifted and the brand hasn't kept up; the internal team is operating without a shared sense of what the company stands for; or the brand is sending signals to the market that no longer reflect the company's actual value proposition. These are business problems. Design resolves them visually, but it cannot substitute for the strategic work that has to happen first.
TWO REBRANDS THAT GOT IT RIGHT
Burberry in the mid-2000s is an instructive case, because the problem wasn't primarily visual. By 2006, the brand had been diluted through years of aggressive licensing — 23 licensees operating independently across the world, each doing different things with the brand's most recognizable assets. The famous check pattern, once a signal of heritage and quality, had become so ubiquitous and so inconsistently applied that it was doing the opposite of what a luxury symbol is supposed to do. The business problem was a governance problem: a luxury signal that had become too easy to access and too hard to control. ToddhagopianToddhagopian
When Angela Ahrendts and Christopher Bailey took over, the first move was a governance reset — recentralizing creative control, pushing the company back toward its historical core, and making the trench coat the central product and storytelling anchor. The visual identity evolved, but it evolved in service of a strategic repositioning that was already clearly defined. Narrow the product focus. Buy back licenses. Restore scarcity. Make the brand coherent before making it beautiful. The result was one of the most documented luxury turnarounds in recent business history, driven not by a logo refresh but by the discipline to decide what the brand would stop doing. Academia.edu
Airbnb's 2014 rebrand tells a different version of the same story. By that point, the company had grown from a scrappy accommodation-sharing startup into something that its own founders recognized was fundamentally different from what its brand communicated. As Brian Chesky put it: "Belonging is the idea that defines Airbnb, but the way we've represented Airbnb to the world until now hasn't fully captured this." The old brand said: Here is a cheaper way to find a place to sleep. The new brand needed to say: Here is a way to feel at home anywhere in the world. Brandsonify
That is a strategic problem. The Bélo symbol and the "Belong Anywhere" platform were its visual resolution. Internally, the new positioning became embedded in every part of the business — the decision-making lens that steered everything from HR and office design to partnerships and CSR. Externally, it helped propel Airbnb's valuation to $29 billion above its closest competitor within four years. The brand hadn't just been redesigned. It had been redefined — and the design followed from that, not the other way around. Hostaway
THE EMOTIONAL DIMENSION
There is another layer to the "why should I spend money on this?" question that rarely gets addressed directly, and it is the one that makes rebrands genuinely difficult for founders and long-tenured leaders.
For someone who has spent a decade or more building a business, the brand is not a neutral object. It carries the memory of early decisions, early customers, and early struggles. Changing it can feel like revising history, or worse, like admitting that what was built wasn't quite right. That emotional weight is real, and dismissing it as irrational doesn't help anyone.
But brands, like people, are not static. They grow, accumulate experience, and are shaped by the environments they operate in. A brand that looks exactly as it did at founding is not a sign of consistency. In most cases, it is a sign that the organisation's external presentation has stopped keeping pace with its internal evolution. The refresh doesn't erase what was built. In fact, a well-executed rebrand is an act of respect for that history — it takes what was built seriously enough to make sure it is still being communicated accurately.
The makeover analogy is imperfect but useful. The best version of it isn't about changing who you are. It is about making sure how you appear reflects who you have become.
WHAT THE PROCESS SHOULD ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE
The sequence matters enormously, and it is where most rebranding efforts go wrong before they even begin.
Clarity first. Before any brief is written or any agency is engaged, the organisation has to be able to answer a small number of hard questions about where it is and where it is going. What has changed — in the market, in the company's capabilities, in its customer base — that the current brand is no longer equipped to communicate? What is the company's actual positioning, and does the team agree on it? These are strategy questions, not design questions, and they cannot be outsourced.
Alignment second. A rebrand that leadership believes in and the wider team is confused or resistant about will underperform regardless of the quality of the creative work. Internal alignment is not a soft prerequisite. It is a condition for the investment returning anything at all. When Ahrendts re-centralized Burberry's creative direction, she wasn't just making a design decision. She was resolving an organizational one.
Design third, and only once the first two are in place. At that point, the designer's job is not to invent the brand's identity. It is to express, with clarity and skill, what is already true about the business. That is a fundamentally different brief — and it produces fundamentally different results.
IS IT WORTH THE INVESTMENT?
Back to the boardroom question.
The answer is: it depends entirely on whether you are solving the right problem. A rebrand pursued as a cosmetic exercise, a response to competitive pressure, or a way to signal change without actually making any, will not deliver a return. That version of a rebrand is genuinely difficult to justify.
But a rebrand was pursued because the business has evolved and its external presentation has not — one that starts with strategic clarity, earns internal alignment, and then uses design to express what is already true — is not a marketing expenditure. It is a business investment with measurable downstream effects on how the right customers find you, how clearly your team understands what to say yes and no to, and how confidently the organization can grow into the next chapter.
The question is not whether you should spend money on a rebrand. The question is whether the conditions for a successful one are in place. If they are, the investment follows naturally. If they are not, no amount of design excellence will compensate.