Rebranding

Rebranding is not drawing a new logo. It is an audit of how the brand is seen by customers and by your own people, then new positioning, possibly a new name, a visual identity, communication, and a plan for swapping it all out in the field. The trigger is usually a merger, a new owner, a foreign market, or a name the company has outgrown.

The money is not in the design, it is in the rollout. A manufacturer with four vans, a hall, packaging, certificates, an e-shop and workwear often spends about a third of the budget on the identity itself; the rest goes on replacement. Announce a rebrand three weeks before a fair and you stand in the old booth holding a new business card.

The order of work: an audit with interviews of sales people and customers, positioning, identity, guidelines, and a rollout plan with dates. Three to six months for a mid sized company. We need someone with the mandate to decide, an inventory of every place the current logo lives, packaging stock levels, a reprint budget, and a trademark search before anyone falls in love with a name.

Tell a refresh apart from a full rebranding. A refresh keeps recognisability and is usually the right call. A new name means starting from zero awareness, which is a financial decision rather than a design one. The most common mistake we see is rebranding instead of fixing the real problem. If nobody knows you, a new identity will not make you known.

Before quoting we ask for the list of every place the logo appears, and we count them. It is routinely twice what the client assumed. A habit you can adopt today: walk the building and the yard with your phone and photograph every occurrence, from the rubber stamp to the sign at the gate. That album is the honest rebranding budget.