Rebranding

In practice

A visual refresh keeps the equity and updates the expression. A name change spends the equity and starts again. The two are routinely discussed as one project and should not be: they have different risks, different costs and different reasons to be right.

Dunkin' is a clean example of a change kept deliberately narrow. In 2018 the chain announced it was dropping "Donuts" from its name, as part of a move to present itself as a beverage-led, on-the-go brand, and it kept its colours and typeface. The name followed the business, and the visual system carried the recognition across. When Facebook became Meta in 2021, the group took a new name while the Facebook network kept its own, which is the other route: add a name above, leave the established one alone.

In a naming project the first job is to separate the questions: what is changing, what is staying, and what the change has to achieve. What goes wrong is a project scoped as "rebrand" in which the name is on the table by default, and the recognition it carries is not weighed against anything. Decide the name last, after the strategy, and treat it as a renaming with its own case. The full argument is in Brand strategy for established companies, and the name.

Where this sits in the process

The studio treats this as part of a single run rather than a separate service: the category is read, the creative direction is chosen from what the research found, candidates are generated in volume and then cut against criteria that were written down first. See how the studio works for what that produces, or the naming module for the stages themselves.

Related concepts

• Renaming: Naming with something to lose: why renaming needs a stronger argument than naming from scratch.
• Brand strategy: What a brand strategy has to settle before naming begins, and what happens to creative work when it has not.
• Brand architecture: Branded house, house of brands, or something between: how portfolio structure decides what a new name is allowed to do.

Further reading

• Brand strategy for established companies, and the name: Why an established brand needs a strategy as much as a new one, how the name gets out of step with the business, and what to decide before keeping, extending or changing it.