Sales are flat. The CEO is restless. Somebody in a meeting says the magic words: “I think we need a rebrand.”
Everybody nods. A rebrand feels like progress. It’s exciting, it’s visible, and it’s a lot more fun than fixing your pricing or your sales process. Six months and a big agency invoice later, there’s a shiny new logo, a new color palette, a 60-page brand guidelines PDF nobody will read… and the same flat sales.
Before you go there, let me tell you about two companies that went there first, so you don’t have to.
Gap: the logo that lasted a week
October 2010. Gap swapped out the navy blue box with tall white letters that had been on its shopping bags for about two decades. The replacement: the word “Gap” in plain black Helvetica, with a little blue gradient square perched on the corner of the “p” like it wandered in from a 2004 PowerPoint template. No announcement, no story. It just showed up on the website.
The internet did what the internet does. Thousands of angry Facebook comments. A parody Twitter account for the new logo. Designers mocking it, customers mocking it, people who hadn’t shopped at Gap since the Clinton administration mocking it. Gap’s first response was to invite customers to submit their own designs. Crowdsourcing! Which is corporate for “we panicked and would like you to do our job for free.”
About a week after it appeared, Gap killed the new logo and brought the blue box back. Gap’s North America president admitted they hadn’t gone about the change the right way. Translation: oops.
Tropicana: the box nobody could find
A year earlier, in January 2009, Tropicana decided its Pure Premium carton (the big orange with a straw stuck in it) needed modernizing. Out went the orange. In came a close-up photo of a glass of juice, a cap shaped like an orange, and the brand name turned sideways in a skinny font. Very clean. Very “we had a lot of meetings about this.”
Here’s what nobody in those meetings thought about: people buy orange juice in about four seconds, half-distracted, with a kid hanging off the cart. They’re scanning for a shape and a color they already know. The new carton looked like every store brand on the shelf, and shoppers said so, loudly. According to Advertising Age’s reporting, Pure Premium sales dropped about 20% in less than two months. That’s tens of millions of dollars, gone, because of a box. By late February, Tropicana announced the orange and the straw were coming back.
“Wait, I thought nobody cares about your logo?”
Fair question. Here’s the thing. Nobody cared about Gap’s logo or Tropicana’s carton because they were pretty. They cared because those things had quietly been there for years while they bought their first khakis or poured their kid’s breakfast. The logo didn’t build that feeling. The experience built it, and the logo just happened to be standing nearby. It became a shortcut in people’s brains, and both companies broke the shortcut.
And in both cases, the logo wasn’t the real problem. Changing the logo to fix the business is like getting a new haircut to fix your marriage. Bold move. Wrong problem.
Should you rebrand? Answer these four questions first
- What problem are we actually trying to fix? If the answer is “we’re not growing,” a logo won’t fix it. Your offer, your pricing, your sales process or your message probably will. Good reasons to rebrand are real ones: you merged with another company, you changed what you sell, your name confuses buyers, or you have a legal issue.
- Have we asked a single customer? Not your team. Not your board. Customers. Gap and Tropicana both found out how people felt after launch. That’s the most expensive research there is. (Here are five questions to ask instead.)
- What are we throwing away? Figure out what customers already recognize about you (a color, a shape, a phrase, a mascot) and protect it. Evolve around it. Don’t blow it up. B2B buyers scan too: for your name in their inbox, your booth on a trade show floor, your company in a list of search results.
- Could that money do more somewhere else? Rebrand budgets get big fast. The same money could pay for customer research, a better website, or a sales team that actually follows up.
If you still need to rebrand after all that, great. Test it with real buyers in real conditions, change things gradually, and tell people why. A new logo with no explanation reads as “we got bored.” A new logo tied to a real change in what you do for customers reads as progress.
Gap and Tropicana learned this in public, with millions of people watching. You just learned it for free from a blog post. You’re welcome. (Still tempted? Read how Jaguar and Cracker Barrel made the same mistake.)
