When a rebrand is the wrong answer

Rebranding is one of the things I do for a living, so read this with that in mind. It is also, in my experience, the wrong thing to buy more often than it is the right thing, and the tell is usually there in the first ten minutes of the first call.

People rarely arrive saying "our brand is wrong." They arrive saying something feels off, or dated, or embarrassing to hand someone. Those feelings are real and worth taking seriously. They are just not reliable evidence about what is causing them.

Here is what I look for before agreeing that the brand is the problem.

The site is old and the brand is getting blamed

This is the most common one by a wide margin.

An organization looks at its own website, feels the way you feel looking at something built in 2016, and concludes the identity needs replacing. Then you look at what is actually there: a theme that stopped being maintained years ago, a page builder that was heavy when it was new, a stack running on a version of PHP that no longer gets security updates. The type is set in whatever the theme shipped with. The logo is being displayed at the wrong size on a background it was never meant for.

None of that is a brand problem. That is a brand being presented badly by a platform that gave up. Replace the platform and the same logo often looks fine, because it was fine.

The way to separate them is to look at the brand away from the site. Print the logo. Put the colors on a page by themselves. Look at a business card. If those hold up and the website does not, you have a website problem wearing a brand problem's clothes, and a rebrand will cost you a great deal and change very little.

There is already a brand and nobody is following it

I have seen an organization with two different sets of official colors in active circulation, neither one wrong exactly, both in use, one of them published publicly. Their instinct was that the brand needed work.

It did not. It needed a decision, and then it needed the decision to be enforceable by something other than memory.

If your materials look inconsistent, the question to answer first is whether that is because the brand is bad or because nothing makes the brand easy to follow. Those have completely different price tags. One is a design engagement. The other is an afternoon picking a winner, plus building the rules into the templates and tools people actually touch so the drift stops.

Buying a new identity to solve a compliance-with-your-own-identity problem gets you a nicer thing to be inconsistent about.

The organization is mid-change

If leadership is turning over, if the mission statement is being rewritten, if a merger or a fiscal sponsorship or a name question is unresolved, a rebrand now is a rebrand you will do twice.

I understand the appeal of doing it during the transition, when there is energy and a sense that everything is being fixed at once. But the brand is downstream of what the organization has decided it is. If that is still moving, the work has nothing solid to sit on, and the version you approve in March gets quietly abandoned by September when the new director arrives with a different idea.

Wait. It is cheaper to wait than to do it twice, and the interim is rarely as painful as people expect.

The money buys more somewhere else

Sometimes the brand genuinely could be better and it is still not what to spend on.

An organization with a broken donation flow, or a site that falls apart on phones, or a newsletter nobody has the time to send, will get more back from fixing any of those than from a new logo. A better identity does not increase the number of people who complete a form that is hard to complete.

This is a judgment call rather than a rule, and it depends on what the money is competing against. But it deserves to be asked out loud, and the person you are paying for the rebrand is usually not the one who will ask it.

When it is the right answer

To be clear that this is not an argument against the work:

A rebrand is right when the identity actively misrepresents what the organization does now, when it cannot survive the surfaces it has to live on, when there is a legal or naming reason forcing it, or when there is genuinely nothing there and never was. It is also right when the current mark was made for a context that no longer exists, which happens to organizations that grew into something their founders did not plan for.

Those are real and I take that work happily. They are just a smaller share of the requests than you would guess from the way the industry talks.

What I will tell you

If you ask me for a rebrand, I will ask what made you want one, and I will look at the site and the materials before I answer. If I think the brand is fine and something else is costing you, I will say so, and I will tell you what I would do instead even when that is worth less to me.

That is not generosity. It is that a rebrand which does not fix the thing that was actually bothering you leaves us both with a client who is quietly unhappy and cannot say why.

Tell me what feels off and we can work out what it actually is.