There are situations where you should rebrand. Almost none of them are yours.

I've worked agency side and done more than a few brand strategy and identity projects. It pays well. New logo, new name, new visual system, new positioning deck, it's a big invoice and a fun one to work on, and I'd be lying if I said that never nudged the recommendation. Of course you should rebrand, said the person whose fee depends on you rebranding. I've been that person.

The honest version is less exciting and worse for the agency's revenue: there are situations where a rebrand is the right call, and in most of the situations that actually walk through the door, you probably shouldn't do one at all. A tune-up. A change in what you're saying rather than what you look like. A new campaign concept built on assets you already own. That's usually the correct prescription, and it's the one that gets recommended least, because it's the one nobody bills for at scale.

A book launch and an opinion I probably should have kept smaller

I ran into an old client contact at a book publishing event a while back, an executive I'd worked with years earlier. Their company, a large forestry business, was mid-way through a full rebrand, and we ended up talking shop about it for a while, swapping notes on when a rebrand actually earns its cost and when it doesn't.

Their case is a genuinely good one. The company had grown and changed shape enough that the old identity was working against them rather than for them, which is exactly the kind of situation where a full rebrand is the right call, not a nice-to-have. I meant that, and I still do.

But somewhere in the conversation, a couple of drinks too many into the evening, I said the thing I always end up saying eventually: I think most rebrands are actually wasted effort. Not theirs. Most of them. It's true, and it's also the kind of sentence that lands slightly differently when you say it out loud to someone who's currently living inside one, at a party, with a glass in your hand.

Customers don't care about your strategy

Mark Ritson has spent years hammering on a point that most internal brand conversations quietly ignore: the customer doesn't care about your strategy. They're not sitting there evaluating your new positioning statement or nodding along to your brand purpose. Ehrenberg-Bass's research backs this up with actual numbers, salience, being recognised and remembered, accounts for something like 70 to 80% of what marketing does for a brand. The stuff most rebrand decks obsess over, the refined tone of voice, the new tagline, the story nobody outside the boardroom will ever read closely, sits in the smaller remaining slice.

What customers actually rely on are distinctive brand assets, the logo, the colour, the shape, the sound, the handful of cues that let a "cognitive miser" recognise you in a fraction of a second without thinking about it at all. Blow those up in the name of a rebrand and you're not clearing away confusion, you're deleting the exact shortcut people used to find you. Recognition dips. Sales usually follow it down.

What a rebrand actually fixes

A full rebrand makes sense when the brand itself is the problem: you were acquired and need to consolidate under one house, your name means something genuinely toxic now, your category has moved and your old identity is actively working against you, or your distinctive assets never built any recognition in the first place and there's nothing worth protecting. That's a short list.

Everything else on the client's actual list, tired creative, a strategy that never got explained properly, a category that's evolved faster than the last campaign, is a communication problem wearing a branding costume. You don't need a new logo to say something more interesting. You need someone willing to say the less profitable thing out loud: keep your name, keep your assets, fix what you're actually saying with them.

The worst case is still not a case for burning it down

The nightmare scenario people reach for is a name that means something horrifying in another market. Mitsubishi actually lived it. Pajero, their long-running SUV, is a perfectly normal word in Japanese. In Spanish it's slang for wanker. About as bad as a naming problem gets.

And even there, Mitsubishi didn't torch the brand. They didn't redesign the grille, invent a new badge, or rewrite the positioning. They swapped the name to Montero in the markets where it mattered and left everything else, the shape, the reputation, the actual distinctive assets people recognised the car by, completely alone. The fix was surgical, not architectural, even in the one case where you'd have every excuse to blow the whole thing up.

Never change your name even if it's Pajero. Change the one word that's actually broken. Leave the rest of the car alone.