Before you change the logo, find out what people think you do

The phrase “we need a rebrand” arrives with the pleasant suggestion that the difficult work will be visual.

There will be colours. Someone will have an opinion about the typeface. A presentation will show the company looking unusually composed on a tote bag.

The less comfortable questions come earlier.

What do people think this business does? Why do they believe that? What has changed? And is the company asking for a different identity because its capabilities have evolved—or because it would prefer not to discuss the experience it currently provides?

When I think about branding, this is where I want to begin. Not with how a business wishes to appear, but with the distance between its self-description and someone else’s understanding.

A business might have expanded into advisory work while customers still regard it as a supplier. A consultancy might have developed a substantial new capability while its website continues to catalogue its founder’s previous career. A company might describe itself as a partner while making every interaction feel like a transaction.

Some of these are communication problems. Some are operating problems. Most become expensive when the organisation refuses to distinguish between them.

My starting point is recognition: not simply whether people recognise the name, but whether they recognise what the business can credibly do for them.

A reputation can become too small for the business

There is a particular frustration in being known for something you still do well but no longer want to do exclusively.

For an individual, this can mean being introduced through an old job title. For a business, it means customers remember one service so clearly that they overlook everything built around it.

The reputation is not necessarily wrong. It is incomplete.

That distinction matters. An existing association may be the reason customers trust the business in the first place. Treating it as an embarrassment can destroy something useful.

David Aaker’s brand vision model offers a way to resist this impatience. It distinguishes between core and extended elements of a brand and asks organisations to consider themselves through several perspectives: product, organisation, person and symbol. The framework does not reduce identity to a single slogan or visual device.

I find that breadth useful because a business rarely needs to become unrecognisable to become better understood.

It may need to retain a reputation for careful execution while explaining a stronger strategic capability. It may need to preserve the founder’s credibility while making room for a wider team. It may need to communicate that its expertise now applies to a different problem.

The first task is therefore not to decide what should change.

It is to identify what should survive.

Write down the belief you need to change

“More contemporary” is not a sufficiently precise objective for a rebrand.

Neither is “more premium”, “more human” or the remarkably durable “more innovative”. These phrases can describe an intended impression. They do not explain what customers currently misunderstand.

Before developing a new narrative, I would write two sentences:

People currently come to us because they believe…

We need them to understand that we can also…

The second sentence has to be supported by something real. A capability. A service. A different way of working. Evidence that the company can deliver what it now wants to promise.

Consider an illustrative example: a technology services company wants to move beyond being seen as an implementation supplier.

The useful change is not “we want to look more strategic”. It is more specific: “Customers involve us after they have chosen a solution. We want them to involve us when they are still defining the problem.”

That distinction changes the entire assignment.

The website would need to show how the company frames problems, not merely list technologies. Case studies would need to reveal judgement, not just delivery. Sales conversations would need to demonstrate the ability to challenge a brief.

A different colour palette might support that shift. It could not substitute for it.

This is the test I would keep returning to: does the proposed change help someone understand a different reason to choose the business?

If not, the work may be attractive without being strategically useful.

The brand in the presentation is not the brand in someone’s head

Organisations have privileged access to their own intentions.

They know why the service was developed. They remember the difficult decisions behind it. They can explain why the new offer is different from the old one, provided someone has 40 minutes and the correct slide deck.

Customers do not possess this institutional memory.

Kevin Lane Keller’s customer-based brand equity model places the customer’s understanding at the centre of brand building. His 2001 framework describes four connected stages: establishing identity, creating meaning, eliciting responses and developing relationships. These are supported by six building blocks, including salience, performance, imagery, judgements, feelings and resonance.

The practical implication is that being known is not the same as being understood, and being understood is not the same as being valued.

A customer might recognise a business but associate it with the wrong category. They might understand the offer but doubt its quality. They might approve of the company without finding a reason to choose it.

These are different problems. A single awareness campaign cannot be assumed to solve all of them.

For a branding project, I would translate Keller’s framework into a sequence of questions:

• When do people think of this business?
• What do they believe it offers?
• What evidence shapes their judgement?
• What makes them comfortable—or uncomfortable—about choosing it?
• What would give them a reason to return?

These are working questions derived from the framework, not Keller’s own questionnaire.

They help prevent a familiar mistake: asking design to repair a problem that has not yet been diagnosed.

Give the promise an operational address

“Approachable” sounds harmless in a workshop.

It becomes more demanding when someone asks what it means for a proposal, a pricing conversation or an unanswered customer query.

“Transparent” sounds equally agreeable until it reaches the contract.

This is why I would not leave a brand attribute sitting alone on a slide. Each important claim needs an operational address: somewhere in the business where it becomes visible and someone responsible for making it true.

Aaker’s recent writing reinforces this connection. In his 2025 article on the “5Bs” of branding, he describes brand vision as something that should guide programmes and offerings, resonate with employees and customers, and help shape organisational culture. It is not merely a description for external consumption.

My practical translation would look like this:

These are illustrative applications, not a formal Aaker model.

Their purpose is to expose contradictions early.

If a business wants to be known for clarity, the answer cannot be that marketing writes clearly while everyone else continues as before. If it promises partnership, customers need some influence over how the relationship works.

Branding becomes consequential when it reaches these decisions. It also becomes less comfortable, because the conversation can no longer be confined to words and pictures.

The service has to change before the sentence can carry it

There is a temptation to treat language as a kind of advance payment on organisational improvement.

Call the service seamless, and perhaps the seams will become less noticeable. Describe the company as customer-centred, and perhaps its internal processes will eventually adjust.

I would rather separate ambition from evidence.

A rebrand can express a direction the organisation is working towards. It does not have to pretend that every improvement is complete. But the distance between present reality and future promise needs to be explicit inside the business.

That means asking:

• What can we demonstrate now?
• What are we changing before launch?
• What remains an ambition?

The distinction matters especially when a business adopts the language of a new field. A new category label can make the offer sound current while concealing uncertainty about what is actually being delivered.

An illustrative example would be a consultancy adding “AI transformation” to its positioning. The phrase might refer to substantial work across capability, governance and adoption. It might also refer to a few workshops and a revised presentation.

The branding task is not to make those two propositions sound equally impressive.

It is to make the actual offer clear enough that the right client can judge it.

Keller’s inclusion of performance and customer judgements alongside imagery is useful here. What the brand does and how people assess it belong within the same model as how it presents itself.

A better sentence cannot permanently compensate for a weaker experience.

Consistency should make the business easier to understand

There is a version of brand consistency that produces a great deal of checking and very little clarity.

Every document carries the correct mark. Every heading follows the prescribed hierarchy. Meanwhile, the company describes its main service in four incompatible ways.

I would prioritise consistency of meaning before enforcing sameness of expression.

A prospective client should not need to reconcile a LinkedIn profile, a website and a sales presentation to discover what the business actually offers. Different formats can provide different levels of detail. They should not imply different businesses.

Aaker’s distinction between core and extended identity offers a useful basis for this. Some associations need to remain central. Others can add depth or vary with context. The model is multidimensional rather than an instruction to compress everything into one phrase.

For a practical project, I would define three layers.

The first is the stable centre: the problem the business addresses, the people it serves and the basis of its credibility.

The second is the supporting evidence: methods, capabilities, examples and relevant experience.

The third is expression: language, design and format adapted to the setting.

The layers should support one another. Expression can vary without changing the underlying proposition. A short social post does not need to read like a proposal. A proposal does need to make sense as coming from the same organisation.

This is also where a good system earns its keep. It reduces the number of times people have to invent the business from scratch.

Employees need decisions they can use

A launch presentation can explain a new identity. It cannot answer every question that appears when people begin using it.

A sales colleague needs to know which claims are supportable. A delivery lead needs to understand what the new promise changes about client expectations. A recruiter needs to describe the organisation without borrowing language the workplace cannot sustain.

My approach would be to build the internal work around these decisions rather than around enthusiasm for the launch.

The practical materials might include:

• A short explanation of what has changed and why.
• Examples of how to describe the offer in different situations.
• Evidence supporting the principal claims.
• Boundaries around what the business should not promise.
• A clear route for raising exceptions or contradictions.

This is a proposed working method, not a claim about a completed client engagement.

It follows from taking the organisational dimension of brand identity seriously. Aaker’s framework includes the organisation itself—not just the product and symbol—as a source of meaning.

If the company’s people cannot explain the new position without consulting a deck, the work may still be too abstract.

If they understand it but cannot deliver it, the problem is more serious.

Measure the misunderstanding, not just the launch

A rebrand generates things that are easy to count: visits, impressions, reactions, coverage.

Those numbers can be useful. They do not necessarily tell us whether the original problem has changed.

If customers previously misunderstood the offer, the evaluation should include evidence of understanding.

If the business wanted a different kind of enquiry, it should examine the enquiries.

If it wanted existing clients to consider a broader service, it should look for that behaviour rather than treating general attention as a proxy.

I would choose the measures before the identity launches. Otherwise, the organisation risks finding whichever favourable number happens to be available afterwards.

For a service business, useful evidence could include:

• How prospective clients describe the offer in their own words.
• Whether enquiries match the intended work.
• Whether sales conversations require less basic clarification.
• Whether existing clients recognise the broader capability.
• Whether the experience supports the expectations created by the positioning.

These are suggested measures, not universal indicators or guaranteed outcomes.

Keller’s framework helps clarify why several kinds of evidence are needed. Awareness, meaning, response and relationship are connected, but they are not interchangeable. A rise in one does not prove that all the others have improved.

Nor should a branding team claim sole credit for a commercial result shaped by changes in price, service, distribution or demand.

A credible evaluation can admit uncertainty. An inflated one merely creates another communication problem.

A rebrand is a decision about what the business is prepared to be

The most useful outcome of branding may not be the sentence the company publishes.

It may be the decision it finally makes.

Which work does it want to be known for? Which claim can it defend? Which customer problem is important enough to organise around? Which familiar association should it protect? Which contradiction can it no longer afford to ignore?

These questions are less photogenic than an identity launch. They are also harder to delegate.

That is why I would approach a rebrand as a process of clarification before treating it as a process of expression.

Start with the belief that needs to change. Establish the evidence for the new belief. Preserve what already carries trust. Make the promise visible in the experience. Give people the tools to sustain it. Then assess whether customers understand something they did not understand before.

The aim is not to make the business look as though it has changed.

It is to make a real change easier to recognise.

Research underpinning this article

1. David Aaker, The 5Bs of Modern Branding (2025): the relationship between brand vision, customer associations, organisational culture and programmes.
2. Kevin Lane Keller, Building Customer-Based Brand Equity: A Blueprint for Creating Strong Brands, Marketing Science Institute (2001): the four-stage framework and six brand-building blocks.
3. David Aaker’s Brand Vision Model and how it works, How Brands Are Built: an explanatory account of core and extended identity and the product, organisation, person and symbol perspectives.
4. A History of Marketing’s interview with David Aaker (2025): his explanation of brand vision as multidimensional, rather than a compulsory three-word formulation.