In this post:
Do you actually need a rebrand?
The most common rebranding mistake we see
Why strategy has to come before design
How to bring your consumers along
Getting your internal team aligned
What a realistic rebrand timeline looks like
What working with Murmur looks like
Rebranding is a pivotal time for a brand. The hope is that you will build on what is working and gain business. But that hope is usually combined with a real fear that by rebranding, you will break what is working and lose business.
That fear can be founded. And understanding why it is founded is the key to making sure it does not happen to you.
Here is the simple version: your brand has commercial value that you have built up over time. That value, often called brand equity, is what you are trying to protect, build on, and ideally increase through a rebrand.
If we want to go deeper, we have to talk about how branding actually works. At the most foundational level, branding works by building memories and associations. When someone thinks “I’m thirsty,” their brain instantly searches its memory for what might quench their thirst, and surfaces a few top-of-mind options. Effective branding makes sure your brand is one of the options that is recalled at that moment.
What makes your brand memorable are its distinctive brand assets, a concept developed by Jenni Romaniuk at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. These are the elements that are recognizably, distinctly linked to your brand: your logo, your colors, your fonts, your packaging format, a jingle, a mascot, or anything else your audiences have come to associate with you over time. Every time a consumer encounters one of these elements, they are reminded of your brand, and you are kept top-of-mind for the right situations.
Therefore, the strength of those distinctive brand assets builds real commercial value for your brand, otherwise known as brand equity. So when we talk about how to rebrand successfully, what we are really talking about is how to create or strengthen distinctive brand assets in a way that increases equity over time without losing or breaking the equity that is already working for you.
For retail brands, there is an additional layer: branding has to work on shelf. When someone is scanning an aisle, they need to quickly notice and recognize your brand as one of the options they like. Memorability and noticeability are two things that have to be considered, and often balanced, during any rebrand.
First question: do you actually need a rebrand?
Not every brand problem requires a rebrand. Before anything else, it is worth understanding which situation you are actually in.
Signs it is time to rebrand
Some situations call for a full rebrand. Your branding may be positioning you in a way that is no longer desirable to consumers. The way people think about your category may have fundamentally shifted, and you are no longer resonating with their needs. A competitor may have entered the space that is significantly more noticeable and memorable than you. Or what used to be distinct about your brand has become category standard, copied, or no longer stands out the way it once did.
These are all situations where the commercial value of your distinctive brand assets is declining, and your brand is losing ground. A rebrand is often the appropriate response.
Signs you might just need a refresh
Sometimes a lighter-touch update is more appropriate than a full overhaul.
A refresh makes sense when your brand’s position is still strong and relevant, but the visual or verbal execution has aged and is losing its impact. Your distinctive assets may still be working and recognized, but they are no longer as noticeable or effective next to newer competitors.
In this case, you are not losing ground strategically. Your visual or verbal style has simply become less effective. Think of it as evolution versus revolution. A refresh is about preserving recognition while updating its feel. A rebrand is about building new distinctive assets.
The most common rebranding mistake we see
When rebrands go wrong, it is typically because people do not understand or respect the equity they have built with consumers.
Branding is a long-term investment, and generally you want to build on the brand assets you have already invested in, not toss them aside. The best way to protect current equity is to conduct a thorough audit of the assets you have invested in and identify which ones are truly distinct in your landscape and recognized by people who buy in your category. Once you know which assets are creating your brand’s memorability, you know what is important to keep and what is open to change without losing equity.
The trick is that this has to come from the consumer’s point of view, not your internal team’s perception. Sometimes rebrands are prompted by an internal team that assumes people want something fresh or have gotten tired of the current look. That impulse can be misplaced if it does not align with actual consumer perception. Consistency can be highly valuable as long as your assets are strong.
Consumer research is a great investment here if budget allows. A qualitative or quantitative study with your target audiences can quickly shed light on where your brand has built equity. It can also help you assess the strength of your existing brand assets and positioning, and determine what the exact goals of a rebrand should be.
Just because your brand has equity does not mean you cannot change it. It just means that if you choose to abandon the assets that make you recognizable, you are effectively starting your brand over. That clean-slate approach is sometimes the right call, particularly for a major repositioning effort or when significant changes are happening in the business or category. But it needs to be accompanied by a real marketing investment in building awareness and memorability of the new brand.
Why strategy has to come before design
Before a designer touches anything, you need a clear reason for the rebrand.
Is the goal to update your positioning in the landscape? If so, what is the new position? (If you are not sure, our post on brand positioning is a good place to start.) Is it to differentiate from competitors who have crept into your visual territory? Or is it simply a slight update to feel more current or premium?
Understanding the goal determines whether the right approach is a light touch or something more involved. Once you know the goal and the problem the rebrand is solving, you can determine what level of change is most appropriate and how to handle the brand equity you have built.
Skip this step, and you risk changing the brand in a way that does not address your original problem, or creates new ones. The strategic foundation has to come first.
How to bring your consumers along
This is the part most clients are most anxious about, and for good reason. How you communicate a rebrand can drastically change your consumers’ reactions to it.
Involving consumers in the process
Consumers do not only belong at the announcement stage. Some of the most useful input comes well before launch, and involving people in the work itself is one of the best ways to protect your equity while you change it.
Before the process starts, focus groups and surveys can reveal what people already recognize about your brand, so you know which assets are worth carrying forward. We touched on this earlier, and it holds here too: the point is to see your brand through the consumer’s eyes, not your team’s.
We also build consumer testing into the design phase. Putting new directions in front of real people, before anything is final, shows which options are strongest and why. It tells us whether the work has stayed recognizable while still solving the problem that prompted the rebrand. That is how we gain real confidence that a new identity will land, rather than hoping it works once it is out in the world.
One instinct worth resisting is gathering this feedback only from your most loyal customers. They matter, but they are not the whole story. Brands grow mostly by reaching new people without losing the ones they have, so potential new consumers are just as important to hear from. A balanced read, loyalists and newcomers together, tells you far more about whether the rebrand will carry the brand forward.
When to start the conversation
External communication should usually happen after the rebrand is finalized and ready to launch, not during the process. Communicating too early creates confusion, because you are asking people to react to something that is not finished yet.
That said, do not just flip the switch overnight. A short lead-up period that signals changes are coming gives your audience a bridge between the familiar and the new. Even something as simple as “we are evolving our look” a week or two before launch helps people feel included rather than blindsided.
For retail brands, the rebrand often first shows up for consumers on shelf. Consumers encounter it rather than being told about it. This makes the distinctive assets conversation even more critical, because the packaging itself is doing the communication work. If you have preserved enough recognizable assets, the transition happens naturally. If you have not, you need more support around the launch.
For direct-to-consumer or service brands with direct consumer relationships, you have more control over the narrative. Use it to frame the “why” in terms of what is improving for the consumer, not just what is changing for the company.
What to say, and what to leave out
Keep it simple. Internal teams spend hours upon hours thinking about the look of their brand. Consumers spend barely any. So when communicating a rebrand, resist the urge to over-explain. Your audience does not need a full walkthrough of your design rationale or strategic thinking.
Lead with what is staying the same. Consumers care most about whether the thing they liked is still the thing they are getting. Reassure them that the product, service, or experience they value has not changed before you talk about what is new.
Frame the change around the consumer, not the company. “We updated our look to make it easier to find us on shelf” lands better than “we felt it was time for a fresh identity that better reflects our evolving mission.”
If the rebrand is more of an evolution, you may not need to say much at all. Consumers often absorb gradual updates without needing a formal announcement. The bigger the departure from what they recognize, the more communication matters.
Getting your internal team aligned before anything goes public
It is very easy to focus entirely on external audiences and overlook your internal ones. That is a mistake.
The people closest to your consumers often have the sharpest instincts about what is working and what is not. Sales teams, customer service, retail reps, they hear things that leadership does not. Leaving them out of the process means missing critical input. Including them means building advocates who can speak confidently about the rebrand when it launches.
Leadership alignment matters for a different reason. Without it, the rebrand can stall or get watered down at the last minute. If key decision-makers were not part of the strategic conversations, they are more likely to second-guess creative decisions late in the process, which can unravel months of work.
Here is a practical test: everyone on the team should be able to explain the rebrand in one sentence before it goes public. If they cannot, your consumers will not be able to make sense of it either.
A rebrand that the internal team does not understand or believe in will show. They are the first ambassadors of the new brand, and their confidence carries into every consumer interaction.
What a realistic rebrand timeline looks like
This is a hard question to answer with a single timeline, because a total clean-slate repositioning and rebrand can take a year, while a light-touch update could take weeks. It really depends on the strategic goal and how carefully the equity piece needs to be researched and considered.
The first phase of every repositioning project is simply designing the process to set the rebrand up for success.
For a rebrand that falls somewhere between a light touch and a clean slate, a timeline might look something like this: two weeks for intake, six weeks for strategic positioning and brand asset audit and recommendations, and six weeks for the initial rebrand design process.
Although clients often think the design phase will be the most time-consuming part, it is usually the rollout afterward that takes longer. Updates to all of your touchpoints have to be considered, potentially alongside a campaign announcing the rebrand, spanning social media, website, business-to-business buyers, packaging, collateral, and more. When working with larger clients, this often takes a phased approach where high-visibility elements are updated at launch and lower-visibility elements are addressed on a longer timeline.
What working with Murmur on a rebrand looks like
We are a brand-focused creative agency, which means we understand and respect how branding actually works to build and grow brands in the real world.
That means we start by genuinely understanding where your brand is in its growth and what the strategic goals of the rebrand are, so we can design the right process for your situation.
We always start with strategy and view everything through a consumer lens. We add consumer testing when possible to ensure decisions are grounded in real information rather than internal assumptions.
The early part of the process is collaborative. Workshops and stakeholder involvement are built in, which creates alignment between our team and yours and builds shared understanding within your organization before anything goes public.
Once we have clarity on direction and how to best maintain your current brand equity, we bring highly strategic design to the process. Design is not decoration for us. It is where strategy gets brought to life, and your brand gets made distinct and memorable.
If you are thinking about a rebrand and not sure where to start, we offer a free intro call. We are happy to help you figure out what you actually need.
A note on our sources
Murmur’s approach to branding is shaped by decades of hands-on experience across categories, along with a wide range of research and frameworks that inform how we think about brand growth. In this post, we drew particularly on the work of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, including Jenni Romaniuk’s research on distinctive brand assets and Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow. If you want to go deeper on the science behind why some rebrands succeed and others quietly erode brand equity, those are useful places to start.
Murmur Creative is a brand strategy and creative agency based in Portland, Oregon. We help brands evolve thoughtfully so they come out stronger on the other side. Contact Us!
