Updating vs rebranding: how to tell which one you need
Last time, we wrote about when — and when not — to rebrand. But there's a second decision hiding inside the first one, and it's the one that trips people up more often. Once you've decided something needs to change, how do you know whether that's a lick of paint or a whole new house? A logo can look tired for a dozen different reasons, and only a few of them actually call for a new one.
An update keeps the promise; a rebrand changes it
The distinction we come back to with clients is this: an update tells the same story more clearly. A rebrand tells a different one.
Mastercard is a good study in what a well-run update looks like, mostly because nothing about it felt like an event. In 2016, the wordmark moved off the circles and the palette was quietly tidied. By 2019, the word “Mastercard” had disappeared from the logo entirely — Pentagram had tested it and found over 80% of people recognised the two overlapping circles without any text at all. That’s not a business reinventing itself. That’s a business that had earned the right, through decades of consistent use, to say less and still be understood. The company underneath didn’t change. The shorthand for it just got shorter.
What actually needs the full treatment
By contrast, Jaguar’s 2024 rebrand is a genuine attempt at telling a different story, because the business itself is genuinely becoming a different thing. The growler badge and the script wordmark are gone, replaced by a minimalist monogram, because Jaguar is repositioning entirely as an all-electric luxury brand — new audience, new price bracket, new category of competitor. That’s precisely the situation a full rebrand exists for: not a company that’s grown bored of its own logo, but one whose underlying offer has genuinely moved, so far that the old identity would actively misrepresent what it’s now selling.
Worth saying plainly, though: the backlash Jaguar got wasn’t really about whether a rebrand was warranted. It was about sequencing. The new identity launched in a campaign with no cars in it, well ahead of any electric Jaguar customers could actually see or buy, which meant the story arrived before there was any proof to back it up. It’s the same lesson from our last post, from a different angle — a rebrand can only carry a story the business is already living. Launch it too far ahead of the evidence and even a justified rebrand reads like a costume.
Image © Jaguar
The mistake in both directions
Gap’s infamous 2010 logo swap is worth revisiting here, because it’s usually filed under “bad design,” when the more useful lesson is about scale. Internally, it was probably conceived as a modernisation — a cleaner, more contemporary wordmark. But it launched with no explanation, no phase-in, and no acknowledgment that the old blue box was doing real work for millions of people who used it to spot the brand from across a shop floor. Customers didn’t experience it as a tidy-up. They experienced it as their brand being taken away and replaced with a stranger’s. The backlash was instant, and Gap reverted within six days.
The takeaway isn’t “never touch a beloved logo.” It’s that people read the scale of a change by how it’s delivered, not by what you intended internally. Treat a genuine update like a rebrand — spring it on people, change everything at once, offer no reasoning — and you’ll get a rebrand’s worth of disruption without ever having decided to have one.
The test we’re actually running
When a client asks us which one they need, we tend to work through a handful of honest questions rather than a mood board. Would someone who knows the brand well, seeing the new version for the first time, still recognise it as you? If the answer’s yes, you’re very likely updating. Has something genuinely true about the business changed since the identity was built — a new audience, a different price point, a category you’ve moved into or out of? If so, you’re rebranding, whether you meant to or not. And is the thing driving the conversation a practical failure — a mark that doesn’t scale down to an app icon, a palette that’s inconsistent across every touchpoint you own — or is it simply that you’ve seen your own logo ten thousand times and you’re sick of the sight of it? The first is worth fixing. The second, as we said last time, is worth sitting with before you act on it.
What it comes down to
Most businesses default to thinking about this as one decision — rebrand or don’t — when it’s really two: whether to change anything at all, and then, separately, how much. Getting the second one wrong is its own kind of costly, in both directions. Commission a full rebrand for a brand that only needed tidying and you’ll spend a great deal of money losing recognition you’d already earned. Try to pass off a wholesale change as a minor refresh and you’ll get the confusion and backlash of a rebrand, without ever having made the case for one.
If you’re weighing up which side of that line you’re on, that’s exactly the conversation worth having before you brief anyone. Get in touch and we’ll help you work out which one you’re actually looking at.