When to Rebrand.

Cold open

It's 2009, and a new carton hits the shelves. January 8th, 2009 specifically.

The old carton had a straw in the middle, straight through the orange, and it had been there for decades. The whole brand was built around it. Arnell, a branding agency, took it off and put a glass of orange juice there instead. New type, cleaner design, a new cap designed to look more like orange juice. They spent over thirty-five million dollars pushing it.

A lot of people liked it. People were sick of the old design. The work was clean and modern, and it won the pitch.

Then it hit the aisle. People walked past it thinking it was the house brand, a generic product. Some bought Minute Maid instead. They did not think it was Tropicana.

From January 1st to February 22nd, unit sales dropped twenty percent, which cost them over thirty million dollars. On February 23rd, six weeks after launch, they reverted to the old design.

Here is the thing. Nothing was wrong with Tropicana. It was the category leader. It sold more orange juice than anybody. Seven hundred million dollars in that line. No crisis. No significant drift.

It was a company tired of looking at its own packaging. They mistook that feeling for a strategic problem. And they cut into the one thing the brand could not afford to lose: the thing people remembered them by. The distinctive brand asset.

Welcome

I'm John Luke. Welcome to Position to Win. There are two types of brands, the ones that accept their position in the market and the ones that challenge it. This show is for the challengers, and for the founders and CMOs responsible for making that change happen.

This is episode 13, the last of season one. So we are going to talk about the question I get asked most often. When is a good time to rebrand?

Four different operations, four different costs

Rebrand splits into four buckets, with different operations, risk and cost. A refresh, a repositioning, a total rebrand, or a new brand.

In episode six we covered brand identity and its core touchpoints: the name, the verbal identity, the visual identity, the experience, and the behavior. That is the full stack.

A refresh is when the visuals change only. The positioning holds. The language stays. Everything you know about the brand stays, and a modernization is taken.

Repositioning is what we talked about last episode. The meaning moves. The name stays, but the mental slot moves in people's heads. Old Spice is the example. Wieden+Kennedy found that sixty percent of body wash was bought by women, after decades of talking to men in the shower. The positioning stopped addressing the user and started addressing the buyer. The product did not change. The name did not change. The person being addressed did.

Notice that a repositioning includes a refresh, and there are graphical implementations to it. But the way people see the product changed completely.

Then there is a rebrand. A rebrand cuts into the name. It changes the name and the architecture. This is the most expensive work, because you are losing some of the core brand equity you built. You do this after a crisis, or on a potential expansion, or when the name no longer fits. It is the first thing people say, and it is not often what they mean.

And then there is the one people forget. The new brand. Lexus in 1989 was a different brand, a different marque, its own name and logo, built to address luxury buyers Toyota could not reach. Rather than dilute Toyota with a premium line, they created a separate one. Ford did the same thing with Mustang, keeping the Ford name behind it.

We went deeper on this in episode four, on brand architecture. A new name lets you go somewhere the parent brand cannot go on its own without diluting its equity. Sometimes the parent cannot credibly go where a sub-brand can.

Permission, reason, proof

A refresh does not need permission. You do not need permission to get a haircut. You just get it and improve how you look.

A repositioning needs a reason. You are changing how you address people because the current way is not working.

A name needs proof. That is a significant change, so you need evidence the current name is not working.

Every rebrand is a decision about what you want to change, what you want to keep, how deep you want to go, and how uniquely you want to be positioned. What are people remembering you for. Where is the appeal. Those are the questions at the table.

When the business has already changed

This is the most obvious condition, and the most common.

Apple Computers came out with the iPhone, and dropped the word Computers.

In 2013, Paul Carbone, the CFO of Dunkin' Donuts, told investors: we are a beverage company. The annual report said fifty-seven percent of sales were tied to beverages. By 2018 it was sixty percent. Dunkin' was a coffee business with a donut in the name for five years.

In August 2017 they said publicly they were considering dropping Donuts. Across eight thousand five hundred US locations, they tested it in a handful. A mile from a flagship, they opened one simply called Dunkin', to see how people experienced it. They found that linguistically, people were already abbreviating it themselves. It worked, and they still waited a whole year before going live.

Coca-Cola found the same thing when people started shortening Coca-Cola to Coke, so they launched Coke as a brand name.

Dunkin' Donuts did not teach America the new name. America was already calling it Dunkin'.

Their own announcement said so. The customers had already done the rebrand. The company was the last one to make it official. And they kept everything iconic: the pink, the orange, the 1973 sans serif. They removed one word and left every other recognizable part standing. That rebrand was simple, and it worked.

When it is costing you quietly

A name can limp along for years while sales fail to grow. Maybe you are having trouble trademarking it, or getting the domain. You can point at the revenue it is costing you.

Look back at episode five, on naming. You might find your name is too generic, that you are paying too much to earn the slot in people's minds, and that there is more market potential in a name that is actually memorable.

When the name is hard to pronounce, or when you search for it and find your competitor or just a category term, that is also worth considering.

And separately, when there is a crisis event and you need to abandon assets that associate you with an image you no longer want. That is a chapter you do not want to continue. That is a time to start from a blank page.

Most rebrands come from boredom

This is what Tropicana had, and it is a big problem.

You see your logo every day. Maybe ten thousand times. Every store, every invoice, every signature. Your buyer has seen it twice, and one of those times they were not paying attention. A crowded aisle, walking past, clicking through a commercial.

They are not experiencing the same boredom you are. And that internal fatigue can feel like an insight.

So before you touch anything, find out what you would be destroying. What do people remember, and what do they love about it?

What is load bearing

Coca-Cola understood this very early. In 1915, facing a shelf full of imitations, they ran a design competition to make the bottle shape the most distinguishable asset out there. They wanted it recognizable by feel in the dark with the lights off, and recognizable lying broken on the ground.

That is the definition of a load-bearing asset. Take the name off, turn the lights off, and it is still Coke.

In episode ten we covered distinctive brand assets: color, shape, sound, character, layout. We talked about the smash test.

So what is load bearing? If you cover your name, do people still know it is you? Tiffany Blue. The contour of the bottle. The orange with the straw. Or is it a neutral element that people recognize but is not specifically yours, that you can change freely? Or is it working against you, reminding people of the version you are trying to leave behind, or of the category when you are trying to be a category outlier?

A lot of companies decide this by opinion. Somebody says the logo feels outdated, look at these competitors, this is boring.

Mastercard did it with confidence in 2019. A daring move: remove the name entirely and keep two overlapping circles. The nerve it takes to say those two circles alone are Mastercard.

It took twenty months of global research first. They found that eighty percent of the time people recognized the two circles without the word, and already associated them with the brand. Only then did they know the name could come off.

Now look at Tropicana. They removed a distinctive asset, the orange and the straw, and they never did that research. People bought the competition instead. They lost a core customer base and had to revert.

Both companies took elements away. Both simplified. Taking elements away tends to make a brand more memorable, and improve recall. But without the research, without knowing what you are actually remembered by, you will not know what you can safely remove. You can subtract a distinctive element and get the opposite outcome.

The order of operations

Positioning is always first. If you cannot say what slot you are taking and from whom, you still need to work on your positioning. It is what makes you different in your market.

Then the name. Then the verbal identity, and inside that the belief, the voice and the tone, the pyramid we covered in episode seven.

Then the visual identity, which is where most companies start. And that is why most rebrands produce a nicer version of the same problem. The logo feels more modern, the positioning is still unclear, and the result is not ownable.

Then experience: the onboarding, the invoice, the hold music, the follow-up, the pleasant surprise.

Then behavior, which matters because it is what your brand stands for, does, and explicitly does not do. You can commission a name, a color, an identity system. Nobody can commission how your team handles a refund at four o'clock on a Friday when they are trying to sign off for the weekend.

Behavior is the only surface a branding agency will not provide for you. You decide that one.

How rebrands fail

I like learning from failures more than successes. Rebrands fail in two ways: the loud way and the quiet way.

The loud way is the scariest, and it is actually the better one. A clear drop in sales. Press complaining. Customers complaining. It makes noise, you understand what they are complaining about, and you can change it. It is survivable and it is legible. For Tropicana it cost six weeks and a lot of money, and then it was over, and they got to relearn.

Then there is the quiet way. No cliff. Nothing measurable breaks. You erased something. The recognition, the cue that let people remember you, the differentiator that led people to you in four seconds. Now you blend in. You may look modern, and you look like everything else that looks modern right now.

The business becomes slowly easier to ignore. You do not stand out. Over time you are just forgotten.

My concern with the quiet failures is that when there is no revolt, it shows there was never enough attachment to revolt over. If somebody is revolting for your brand, they are passionately attached to what you have. Instead you find out years later that you are not converting the same, you do not have the same loyalty, and you are blending in.

Everyone hates the loud failures because they are obvious and embarrassing. But loud failures give you real feedback, and with real feedback you can do something. Quiet failures give you a false sense of security and nothing to improve from. That is the most dangerous one, and it is the one everybody approves and nobody remembers.

So the question worth asking: is your brand recall improving or decreasing? Is your net promoter score improving or decreasing? Those are two core measures that tell you which direction things are going.

Closing season one

That wraps the first season. Thirteen episodes. We started with what a brand actually is and how positioning works, how differentiation works, then the name, the language, the identity, the archetypes, persuasion, memory, and how to diagnose a brand when the numbers go soft.

Brand strategy is not the art of changing things. It is knowing what deserves to change and what has earned the right to stay.

Knowing what to choose is essentially brand strategy. Thank you for spending the first season with me. Next season we open up real files. Real engagements. What the company looked like when they came to us, what we found, what we changed, and what happened.

Look forward to seeing you next time.