Glossary

Rebrand

A rebrand is a change to how a business expresses itself: name, identity, language, look. It does not necessarily change what the business claims to be.

Rebrands are legitimate and frequently necessary. A brand drafted when a company was five people in a co-working space will eventually stop matching a company of eighty, and expression genuinely does decay.

The failure mode is using a rebrand to solve a problem that is not an expression problem. If win rates are falling, if the pipeline fills with the wrong buyers, or if pricing power is eroding, a new identity will not move any of it. Those are claim problems wearing expression symptoms.

The honest test before briefing a designer: if the visual identity stayed exactly as it is, would the growth problem remain unexplained? If yes, you have a positioning problem and a rebrand will cost you a year.

Often confused with

Repositioning, which changes the claim rather than the expression.

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