Nobody has ever asked me about rebranding in a quarter where sales were good.
That is not a clever observation, it is just a pattern, and it is worth sitting with before you brief anybody. The conversation almost never starts with the brand. It starts with a number that is softer than it should be, and a room full of people who can all feel it and none of whom want to be the one who says the offer is wrong, or the price is wrong, or we are selling to the wrong people.
A logo is a safe thing to change. A market is not.
So the rebrand becomes the available action. It is visible, it feels decisive, everybody can have an opinion about it, and crucially it postpones the harder conversation by four to six months while looking like progress the entire time.
Sometimes a rebrand is genuinely the right call. I will get to those. But first you have to work out which of four completely different things you are actually asking for, because they are routinely discussed as one and they have almost nothing in common.
The four things people call a rebrand
A visual refresh. New typeface, tidied color palette, a logo that works at 24 pixels, photography that is not from 2019. Low risk, moderate cost, no effect whatsoever on who contacts you. Worth doing when the current design is actively undermining you, which usually means it looks cheaper than your prices.
A repositioning. Changing who you are for and what you refuse to do. This is the one that moves revenue, it is mostly writing and deciding rather than designing, and it is also the one the room is trying to avoid. I have argued separately about what a real position actually costs you, so I will not relitigate it here beyond saying that it is free in cash and expensive in nerve, which is the opposite of a visual refresh.
A name change. Genuinely expensive, genuinely risky, and almost never the thing that was wrong.
A forced renaming. A trademark collision, a merger, an acquisition, a name that turns out to be unusable in a market you have decided to enter. Here the decision has been made for you and the only question is execution.
Notice that only one of those four reliably changes business outcomes, and it is the one nobody briefs. If you asked for a rebrand and what you need is a repositioning, you will spend the budget and arrive back here next year with the same number.
The cost nobody puts in the deck
Here is the part I would want on the table before any name change, and I almost never see it costed.
A referral is somebody lending you their reputation. It only works when it is frictionless, which means when they can say your name and stop talking.
Change the name and the sentence gets longer. Now they have to say “they used to be called something else” or “I think they renamed”, and that extra clause is a doubt where there was none. Practitioners describe it as the referrer pausing, and the recommendation dying in the pause. I think that is exactly right.
For a business that gets most of its work by word of mouth, a name change takes your best channel offline for the length of the transition.
I wrote recently about why a referral costs your customer their reputation rather than two minutes, and this is the same mechanism viewed from the other end. You are asking people who vouch for you to vouch for something they now have to explain.
That is survivable. Plenty of companies do it. But it belongs in the business case alongside the design fees, and the mitigation is dull and unavoidable: run both names together for considerably longer than feels necessary, in that order, old name in brackets, everywhere, for a year.
The mechanical costs, briefly
The search side of a name change is largely the same problem as a replatform, and I have written the checklist for that as the redesign post, so go there for the redirect mechanics rather than making me repeat them.
Three things that checklist does not cover, because they are specific to changing a name.
The branded queries you currently rank for effortlessly become somebody else’s to win. Your own name is usually your highest converting keyword and the only one you never had to work for. You are choosing to start again on it.
Your Google Business Profile name is a field Google watches closely, and editing it is one of the routine triggers for a review of your listing. Plan for the possibility that your Maps presence wobbles in the same month your website changes.
And every directory, invoice template, bank record, email signature, domain-based email address and third-party listing carries the old name. None of it is hard. All of it takes somebody three weeks they had not budgeted.
About the statistics you are going to be shown
Somebody will quote you a failure rate. Forty percent of rebrands fail, or thirty eight percent, or four in ten do not reach positive return.
I went looking for the source of those numbers and could not trace any of them to a primary study. They appear on agency pages and statistics aggregators, usually attributed to a large consultancy dataset, with no methodology and no link to anything you can read.
Which is worth noticing for its own sake. The figures about whether rebrands work are circulated mainly by the people who sell rebrands.
So do not use them, and do not accept them. Argue the specific case in front of you instead, which is harder and is the only version that tells you anything.
When it is actually right
Four situations, and I would back a rebrand in all of them.
The name describes something you stopped doing. If you are called something-Printing and you have been a packaging company for six years, the name is costing you every conversation before it starts.
A legal or trademark problem, or a market you have chosen to enter where the name does not work. Decision already made.
A merger where two names cannot both survive, and pretending otherwise produces the hyphenated compromise that pleases nobody and confuses everybody.
And the one people underrate: the name is embarrassing to say on the phone. If your own team hesitates when introducing the company, that is a real tax on every outbound call you will ever make.
What all four have in common is that the name itself is the obstacle. That is the test. Not that growth has slowed, not that the logo looks dated, not that a competitor launched something sharp.
Where I come out
Ask one question before you commission anything.
What would be true in twelve months that is not true now?
If the answer is a description of the website, you are redecorating, which is fine as long as you call it that and budget three weeks rather than two quarters. If the answer is about who buys from you and why they choose you over the obvious alternative, then you have a positioning problem, and you can start fixing it on a document this afternoon without hiring anybody.
The rebrand, if it is still needed, will be much easier to brief once that is decided. Most of the time it turns out not to be needed at all.
If you’d like to pressure test whether what you are looking at is a brand problem or a decision you have been putting off, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp, phone or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat, and my notes on content marketing cover the part that comes after. I’m taking on a small number of contracts at the moment, so I’ll tell you straight whether it’s something I could help with.