Rebranding without breaking things

Rebranding is usually proposed as a solution to the wrong problem. Before anything else, it is worth separating the cases where it is the answer from the much larger set where it is an expensive distraction from a positioning problem.

When it is actually warranted

• The name is legally unusable, or conflicts with somebody who has a stronger claim.
• The name describes something you no longer do, or boxes you out of what you now sell.
• The name does not work in a market you are entering, for language reasons.
• The business is genuinely different now: different customer, different offer, not a refreshed version of the same thing.
• The existing identity is actively costing you, as in unreadable, unusable at small sizes, or indistinguishable from a competitor.

When it is not

When sales are flat. When you are bored of the logo. When a competitor launched a nice site. When somebody told you the business needs to look more premium. In each of those the underlying problem is positioning, pricing or product, and a new identity makes the same problem better-looking while costing a quarter.

The diagnostic: write down what will be different for a customer after the rebrand. If the honest answer is that it will look different, the problem is somewhere else.

What actually breaks, in order of expense

1. 01Search. If the domain changes, every link anybody ever made points at the old one. Redirects handle this if they are one-to-one and permanent, and are usually set up in a hurry and partially.
2. 02Email. Addresses on the old domain have to keep receiving for a long time, because customers, suppliers and banks will use them for years. Turning off the old mail is the mistake people make at month three.
3. 03Accounts and listings. Payment processor, advertising accounts, marketplace listings, invoices, the register. Each is a small job and there are more of them than anybody estimates.
4. 04Printed and physical things. Packaging, labels, signage, vehicles. The long tail, and the reason old names persist in the world for years.
5. 05Recognition. The expensive one, and the only one you cannot work through with a list.

Doing it with the least damage

1. 01Keep the domain if you possibly can. A visual change on the same address costs a fraction of a name change, and most rebrands are actually visual changes.
2. 02If the domain must change, map every existing URL to its new equivalent one-to-one, as permanent redirects, and keep them indefinitely. Redirecting everything to the homepage throws away every position you held.
3. 03Keep receiving mail on the old domain for years, not months.
4. 04Change everything on one day rather than gradually. A gradual rebrand is a period of looking like two businesses, which is worse than either.
5. 05Tell customers what happened in plain words, before they encounter it. The explanation is cheap and the confusion is not.
6. 06Keep a written list of everywhere the old name exists, and work through it. It will be longer than you think.

And decide in advance what would tell you it went badly: traffic from search, direct orders, support messages asking whether you are the same company. Measure them before, so the comparison exists.

The option nobody considers

Rebranding is treated as one decision and it is four: the name, the domain, the mark, and the way you talk about what you do. They can be changed separately, and almost all of the cost sits in the first two.

So the cheap and usually correct version is to keep the name and the domain, and change everything else. New mark, new colours, new typography, rewritten positioning, rewritten pages. The customer experiences a business that has sharpened up. Nothing breaks: no redirects, no mail migration, no re-registration, no lost recognition, no period of looking like two companies.

That covers most of what people actually want when they say the brand needs updating. The full version, including the name, is for the five situations at the top of this article and not for the feeling that things look dated.

A useful way to decide: list which of the four you want to change, then ask what each one costs on its own. The list usually collapses to two, and the two are the free ones.