profile

The Saturday email your competitors hope you never find. (One coffee. Zero fluff.)

#163: Why most rebrands fail before they start.

Published about 2 months ago • 1 min read

Issue #163

Reader

Most companies treat a rebrand like a fresh coat of paint or a new shade of lipstick.

Then six months later, they wonder why nothing has changed.

Sales are still sluggish.

Customers still treat them like a commodity.

And leadership wonders why their "six-figure makeover" did not move the needle.

Here is the unvarnished truth:

A logo change is not a rebrand. It is an expense unles you know this:

Real rebranding is strategic surgery. It is the deliberate decision to change what your company means in the mind of the market.

Over the years, after guiding turnarounds that generated billions and watching hundreds of others self-destruct, I mapped out the exact 5 types of rebrands companies actually go through.

Some brands need a subtle evolutionary tune-up.

Others need an emergency rescue before the market buries them.

And a rare few need to invent an entirely new category from scratch.

The lethal mistake is applying a Type 1 solution to a Type 4 problem.

It's why I just published the complete breakdown showing all 5 types, how to diagnose where you actually stand, and the exact steps to turn a rebrand into exponential growth.

Read the full breakdown.

See which category your brand is in right now.

Have an amazing weekend.

David

P.S. Don't know which type your brand is? I do an UNdiscovery Call — just you and me, nobody else. No junior strategist. No gatekeeper screening you first. It's a Brand Assessment to isolate exactly where you're leaving money on the table. Not a pitch. A diagnosis. [Schedule yours here.]

The Saturday email your competitors hope you never find. (One coffee. Zero fluff.)

by David Brier, Bestselling Author and Rebranding Expert

I'm David Brier—the guy CEOs call when they've burned so much cash on marketing, their spouses think they have a coke habit. I'm like rehab for your brand, except instead of getting you clean, I get you profitable. Think of me as the Betty Ford Clinic of branding, but with better ROI and no group hugs. (Explains why I wrote the bestseller Brand Intervention that Daymond John calls "Genius.")

Read more from The Saturday email your competitors hope you never find. (One coffee. Zero fluff.)

Issue #170 Reader Frank Zappa once described improvising a guitar solo like this: He didn't know what he'd play. He knew how long he had to do it. In his words, "You have a piece of time, and you get to decorate it." That's branding, in one line. Except instead of a piece of time, I'm handed an opportunity for change. The first thing I do is question everything we've been told that opportunity is supposed to look like. Which is exactly the move that separates a brand people remember from a...

4 days ago • 1 min read

Four rebrands that grew revenue, from symptom to outcome, explained. Issue #169 Reader Rebranding Gets a Lot Easier When You Stop Thinking in Logos During a recent session with Mark Schaefer’s community, Matt Wilkinson, author of The Buyer in the Loop, asked a great question: "What's your favorite brand intervention you've done recently?" I couldn't answer immediately. Not because I don't love the work. Because there isn't one favorite. A handful have floored me well after the discovery...

11 days ago • 6 min read

Today's edition is completely different. Issue #168 Reader Ten questions. Ten minutes. One point each, no partial credit. Score yourself honestly, because nobody else is watching, and the market already knows your number. 1 THE AI TEST (20 seconds, do it before you read item 2). Want to see your brand exactly the way a buyer sees it? Open ChatGPT. Type: “What makes [your company] different from its competitors?” Read what comes back. Generic, wrong, or could describe three of your rivals?...

18 days ago • 4 min read