To rebrand or not to rebrand?
When is the right time to rebrand? Almost never. But if you must, these rebranding efforts might provide some useful hints.
When a new logo for an organization—whether it’s for a corporation or a municipality like a city—is introduced, everyone will have an opinion about it. Almost always, it’s more negative than positive, and suddenly, everyone is an expert.
The City of New York recently announced its new promotional campaign and updated the much beloved “I ❤️ NY” logo, designed by the legendary Milton Glazer in 1973. The new logo says “We ❤️ NYC” (but reads more like “We NYC ❤️”) with a slightly dimensionalized heart icon and a new typeface.
Within hours, New Yorkers and beyond were all up and arms about the redesign. At this point, it’s no use in piling more hate on it. Instead, I thought I’d take the liberty of selecting a few successful cases of rebranding. I have been around many rebranding efforts in various capacities as a creative in the marketing and branding industry for over two decades.
Having said that, this analysis is subjective and incomplete. Feel free to agree/disagree.
1. Citi
This is a famous one, especially among the branding and graphic design community. In 1988, Citicorp and the Travelers Group merged and became Citigroup. The umbrella mark was a carryover from the Travelers Group’s logo, resulting in somewhat a literal combination of Citicorp’s word mark and the Travelers Group’s umbrella icon.
As the legend goes, Paula Scher, an iconic designer and a partner at Pentagram, sketched on a napkin in the first meeting in 2007.
An executive from the Citi team asked, How can it be that it’s done in a few seconds? Paul Scher replied:
“It’s done in seconds and 34 years.”
The Nike shoe designer Tinker Hatfield similarly said: “Creativity is a function of the library in your head. When you sit down to create it’s a culmination of everything you’ve done and experienced up to that point.” Well said.
Why I love this rebranding:
- Design solving corporate politics: Changing the logo is often a political process, especially in a corporation that’s a merger of two mega-organizations like Citicorp and the Travelers Group. Ms. Scher’s idea elegantly weaves the two companies’ previous identities into one simple and clever visual solution.
Thanks to Ned Dwyer and Billy Oppenheimer from whom I sourced these stories and quotes.
2. Instagram
The original logo was designed by Cole Rise, a photography/designer friend of Instagram’s founder Kevin Systrom in 2010. It was a three-dimensional, tactile icon that provided the right amount of nostalgia for a digital app on a digital screen. According to Business Insider, Mr. Rise only had an hour to design it since Mr. Systrom had to submit it to Apple’s App Store in time. It was based on another icon Mr. Rise had designed that Mr. Systrom had seen and liked on his portfolio site.
When the new, completely flattened, gradient logo was introduced in 2016, NY Times ran an article called “The Great Instagram Logo Freakout of 2016.” Adweek called it “a travesty.” Not the warmest reception to a rebranding effort. Instagram also quietly removed the story it had published about this rebranding from its blog.
Contrary to the harsh reception this rebranding effort might have received, Instagram’s growth didn’t suffer at all. The user base grew from 500 million MAU in 2016 to a whopping 2.27 billion MAU in 2022. The Internet freakout lasted only for a few days and everyone was back to using the app like never before.
Why I love this rebranding:
- Harmony between aesthetics and utility: this rebranding wasn’t just about changing the logo. Shortly after the introduction of the new logo/app icon, the Instagram Stories feature was launched. Around each user’s profile pic in the interface, there was a gradient ring, akin to the logo, indicating a new upload from that user (see the image above). It was a subtle yet clear cue that nudged the user to keep checking more and more. The head of design at the time Ian Spalter, an old colleague/friend of mine, is a digital-native designer who understood the harmony between aesthetics and utility. This rebranding is one of the few cases I can think of that has achieved this harmony so well.
3. Saks Fifth Avenue
With its origin in Washington, D.C. in the 19th century, it was in 1924 that this iconic store opened on Fifth Avenue in New York City. In 2007, Mr. Michael Bierut and his team at Pentagram redesign its identity and resurrected a script typeface from the old era.
In the last few years, multiple high-end fashion brands started to rebrand. All of them chose san-serif typefaces for the word mark in the name of “modern utility,” as explained by Burberry’s Riccardo Tisci. This modernization movement may be the biggest tragedy in the fashion industry of the 21st century thus far.
When I was a fledging designer in my early twenties, I happened to encounter Mr. Bierut in a meeting for a shared client between Pentagram and R/GA, an agency that I was working for at the time. I remember how eloquently he spoke of brand design and that’s when I realized that design was as much about clear thinking and articulation as it was about aesthetics and execution.
Unlike relying on a san-serif typeface to modernize, Mr. Bierut’s team reinterpreted the old script typeface Saks Fifth Avenue used previously in the 1970s.
Why I love this rebranding:
- Being modern isn’t about a typeface: Designers like to use—and argue for—san-serif typefaces for the sake of modernization. It’s an easy argument to make. However, I love the fact that Mr. Bierut and his team didn’t settle for the lazy and obvious utility of a san-serif typeface. They instead went back in time, embraced the brand’s past script typeface, and reinvigorated it in a refreshingly modern way, especially in its various applications. I can only imagine that Mr. Bierut had an eloquent way of articulating the rationale to the client.
Uniqlo
[Disclaimer on this one: Uniqlo has been a long-time client of ours. While we work with Uniqlo closely, Uniqlo’s rebranding happened before my company or I was involved.]
In 2002, Mr. Tadashi Yanai, the founder and CEO of Uniqlo, decided it was time to expand his business overseas outside of Japan. He opened 21 stores in and around London. A few years later, Uniqlo opened in three malls in New Jersey.
The result? A complete and utter failure.
Uniqlo retracted and rethought its approach. Mr. Yanai hired art director Mr. Kashiwa Sato to help him with rebranding Uniqlo for the global market.
The first question Mr. Sato asked Mr. Yanai was whether he wanted to let the world know that this was a Japanese brand. “Absolutely,” said Mr. Yanai. “I want Uniqlo to be the world’s best brand from Japan.”
Mr. Sato responded with a new identity that incorporated katakana, the Japanese alphabet, into the logo. This was rolled out with the launch of Uniqlo’s first global flagship store in Soho, New York in 2006, also overseen by Mr. Sato. That was the first successful footprint for Uniqlo outside of Asia and became a template for Uniqlo’s global strategy. The rest is history.
Why I love this rebranding:
- Business leadership = Design leadership: The close collaboration between a business leader and a designer, when it works out, works well both aesthetically and commercially. One such example is the one between Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, the former head of design and a much-publicized collaborator of Mr. Jobs’s at Apple. Mr. Yanai’s collaboration with Mr. Kashiwa may not be so well known outside of Japan but it sure has been effective and successful.
When is the right time to rebrand?
Having said all of this, the short answer to the question “when is it the right time to rebrand?” is: Never. If you must, though, there are a few triggers that may indicate it might be reasonable to consider rebranding.
1. Change in the business
A clear change in the direction of the business, a merger, or global expansion are examples of a trigger for rebranding. For Citi, it was a merger that warranted rebranding even though it took eight years for them to pull the trigger. For Uniqlo, the ambition for global expansion was the motivation for rebranding.
Rebranding tends to go sideways when the reason is “the new CEO doesn’t like the logo,” or “we have a new CMO.” The change in management is often not a good trigger for rebranding. The decision to rebrand should be made before the work can even start.
2. Change in the product
In the case of Instagram, the product was being updated in a major way. Had the design team rebranded the logo and other surface-level assets such as the typeface only, the rebranding wouldn’t have been successful. Instagram’s rebranding was well integrated into the product and was functionally meaningful, not just aesthetically.
The caveat, however, is that this type of rebranding must be done very selectively. One should not be rebranding every time there is a change in the product.
3. Change in the market
This is probably the most difficult trigger to pull. As in the case of the aforementioned fashion brands, the change was the digitalization of the consumer experience and they all reasoned a rebrand was warranted. The problem is, “the best practice” is an easy trap to fall into. Taking that approach could lead to homogeneity, and that is exactly what branding shouldn’t do.
One company that pulled this trigger at peculiar timing is the company formally known as Facebook. In the fall of 2021, the Facebook Files, as revealed by Frances Haugen and published in the Wall Street Journal, were the perfect storm. Facebook rebranded from Facebook to Meta to divert attention away from its battered image. Whether this was successful or not, I’ll leave it up to you to decide.
I’m sure there are more examples of successful rebranding. I would love to hear your thoughts on other cases that you think are successful.
