Blab #22: Rebrand vs Debrand

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Hello and welcome to another episode of Marketing Labs. For those of you who don't know who I am, I'm Tilly Hayes and I'm the SEO executive here at Marketing Labs. Today we're talking about a crucial decision many businesses face whether to debrand or rebrand their business. We've seen a growing trend of debranding amongst, well-known companies in recent years with 70% of brands undergoing a rebranding effort within 10 years of their founding. Joining me on today's pod is Tom Haslam, our creative director, Emma Nuns, our content marketing executive, and last but not least, our web developer, Josh Stapleton. Today, we'll explore the strategies behind debranding and rebranding and when to use each approach to revive your brand. Let's get started.

So in my mind, there's a significant difference between the two, a debrand I would previously consider as maybe a brand refresh where you're just updating or refreshing the visual identity of the business. So it might be a logo, typeface, colours, and just giving it a new lease life. You might even be simplifying something and a rebrand is where you're completely changing everything. You might be going into a new market, you might be going into a new sector, you might be diversifying your business. New name, new name, yeah, exactly. So there's lots of different ways that you can determine the two, I think.

Yeah, no, that's pretty much how I'd see it. To be fair, and I think it can be kind of confusing because there is some overlap in my opinion. You may agree, may disagree, but you look at, I dunno, Google as an example, they've gone from their regular logo Google, it used to be a bubbly kind of font like, I dunno, early two thousands, and nowadays you look at it and it's just like the G really minimalist and stuff. They're still the same brand, let's say still the same colours and things like that as just simplified. What would you consider that as?

I personally think that Google have just gone through multiple phases of d branding or refreshing their brand, to be honest, because they've never changed their name. They've always been a search engine and they're not that I know of trying to get away from any negative connotations. There might be a few, but that's sometimes another reason why business decide to rebrand their business. But I think they've just gone through visual refreshers as time's gone

On

Recently.

Yeah, so more debranding than rebranding?

Yeah, I

Think so.

I think Debranding iss quite a new term that's been thrown about at the moment, but there might be, I dunno, like I said, when people decide to rebrand, it might be because they're trying to get away from some negative impacts that have happened within their business lifetime. I dunno,

It's almost like refocusing retargeting kind of going after different customers maybe.

I think if you just keep it simple and think Debrand is more of just a visual update, refresh simplification of your visual identity and a rebrand is completely changing it. I think that's the simplest way of describing it.

I was going to ask as well whether there was any specific ways in which you can rebrand, but you've kind of spoken about that already, like the full rebrand, the Refresh, or there's brand merger as well, isn't there? Sometimes?

That's an interesting one because I think merges is you're essentially rebranding two businesses there, so I think you'd essentially rebranding a merge would be a rebrand, in my opinion

Fall under that category. Like

Ee.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think just to chuck in there, it's like a dbrand is like to revitalise. You might have, I dunno, your visual identity might just be getting outdated and you want to just freshen it up a little bit. That would fall under a dbrand or it's either simplifying it or revitalising it.

What do you think of this? Because most people nowadays, as far as I see, I guess considering a rebrand, a dbrand, so most people might want their logo made a little bit slicker, a bit more minimal, some more modern colour palettes or typefaces or something like that. Do you think it's important that people see the difference between the two?

I think it is, yeah, because essentially if they just wanted to refresh their visual identity and they're not changing any of their core values or messaging or business name, then that's not been touched. So you're just freshening up what people see. You can look into messaging and things like that, but I think a rebrand, you'd have a completely different approach. Like I'd approach a rebrand completely differently to what I would do, a dbrand. A dbrand. You already sort of understand the business objectives, the business goals and what they do and how they work. So essentially you're just refreshing the visual side of it to make it look nicer or simplify it or whatever it might be. Whereas a rebrand, you'd really just have to understand why they're doing what they're doing, why they're changing markets or why they're merging or whatever, and then you'd have to take that into account into a creative process to create a brand new visual identity. Really

Just thinking about the differences between rebrand and dbrand, would you say that when it comes to colour and things that Dbrand tends to keep the same colour scheme but simplified, whereas a rebrand could potentially be a whole new colour?

Sometimes you've seen some Debrand cases where they've kept the same colour schemes and things and they've just simplified the logo. We'll go into some examples later, but Starbucks is a good example of that where they've just removed the name from the visual icon

And remove the black as well.

Yeah, yeah. It's just really simple vector graphic of the Green Siren, and that's the main focus of the core brand. Now obviously everyone knows who Starbucks is, so they made a conscious decision to remove all Starbucks wording from the visual identity and logo. There's some other examples that we can chat about in a bit, but that's a good one. That's just really simplifying the logo though. They've still kept the same colours and things like that, but there are a few cases I think, I can't think of one off the top of my head where I think a brand refresh would be its own sort of area. Then when you're changing colours and things, you're refreshing the brand, but it still falls into a, it's not a rebrand I don't think,

But also not a dbrand

Probably. We've probably made a new variation, new category

For refresh.

I used to call it either brand refresh or rebrand, but Dbrand is very much, I guess, simplifying what you've got, debranding it and

You maybe losing a colour from your colour palettes or going more minimal.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Sometimes people just change a font, don't they? If the logo's just text or whatever.

Yeah, exactly. You showed me one the other day actually.

Oh, they are A, B, CA one.

Yeah,

Yeah. Was that rebrand or Dbrand because they've kind of,

I would consider that a rebrand.

Yeah, I would as well,

To be honest. Because they've gone for a completely new visual icon, haven't they? Or like you said, a range of different visual

Icon. Yeah, they changed all the colours too, so yeah, Calvin Klein had done it just a different font, but it actually looks worse in my opinion.

A lot of fashion brands have done

That,

To be honest. You see examples like Burberry and things like that, they'll just go black and white, simple serif fonts and things like that. But R-S-P-C-A-I would class as a rebrand, they've completely changed everything, not recognisable to what they had before, so that is a rebrand. We had a bit of a debate on it. You because like the fact that they use different visual icons with the

Yeah, I mean their little.at the end, it changes depending what animal they're talking on about, which I guess it's not really their logo I suppose, but it is, that's what they've called it. It's

Like an extension of it

And I appreciate the concept of changing the animal so that you can see how many animals they help, but I dunno, for me it was just I didn't like that part of it and I'm also not a fan of the new blue, but it's never been blue before. Have it? Yeah, it was a navy blue. Yeah, scum to quite a vibrant one.

Yeah, it's almost like pure RGB blue, isn't it? Like

It's quite a popping design, isn't it? It definitely catches your eye.

Yeah, I think the core part of their logo is the typeface on the R-S-P-C-A, but obviously like we said, I don't know whether they just stick with one visual icon. Is it just the rabbit?

No, there's like a pig, there's cats, there's dogs, it changes depending wherever they're using it. I think

I don't dislike that though because that means that you can be quite dynamic in the way that you present your visual representation of your brand and things. As long as the typeface stays the same, then that helps people remember it.

So we've spoke about the differences between dbrand and rebrand, so how would you decide what's right for you and when to do it?

I guess if I was going to work with a client on the whole process, I'd try and get a grasp of what their current reputation is as a brand, what the customer perception is, market position, things like that, because if the customer perception is strong, then you probably don't want to suggest a rebrand. You want to just maybe freshen things up a little bit, give it a new lease of life if it's outdated, I guess you've got to identify the core reasons for the change is the negative publicity, is it an outdated image, mergers, acquisitions, things like that. So there's lots of things to take into account, core values, mission, all that sort of stuff as well.

Would you say there's any time where you've seen either a rebrand or a debrand that's just not really worked or

Yep, quite a few.

Tropic did one, didn't

They?

Tropicana, they That

Was awful. They went back. Yeah,

They changed it and then a week later changed it back.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah. They completely changed their brand. It was unrecognisable and I think they lost a lot of sales from it too. I'll have to look that up.

Did you see United when they did it, when they changed their logo?

Did

I You must've done Lees football club. They changed their visual identity completely and all the fans just kicked off royally.

So is it now the hand like

This? No, they tried to change it to that and all the fans properly kicked off saying, what the hell have you done?

Yeah, that's not smart.

It wasn't a good look. It obviously, I can see the reasons why they did, because the Leeds badge emblem is quite old, but they could have done it in a way where they just freshened it up rather than completely changing it to this weird

Fist. Also, a lot of people prefer the football badge or the emblem to be quite traditional if they've been fan for a long time and stuff like that.

Yeah, but you see when Man City did theirs, they changed theirs, but they just freshened it up and give it a really clean sensor font, updated the graphics so that they're really clean vectors and things like that, that you can still do that and it still holds a bit of historic value, should I say?

Yeah, I suppose that's the issue when you're, I guess fiddling with a brand, you can very easily alienate your existing audience, especially if they've been with you a long time and they've always known you one way. Yeah, I suppose it's very easy to lose customers that way.

I think that's what happened with Tropic though, isn't it? People genuinely didn't know who they were anymore, so I guess when they was looking for the orange juice or whatever they was looking for, they couldn't find it and thought I'll get a different brand. I imagine that's what's happened because Tropicana's been around ages. It's a really big, it's a prominent brand in the orange juice, isn't it?

Did they change just their visuals or did they change the name as well? I don't actually remember this happening,

No, it was just the visuals, but when you think Tropic, you see the carton, don't you? But when you look at the visuals, I actually think the design's nice. I don't dislike it, but I can see why people would, I think they just lost their identity through changing it so much.

Yeah, I think another good example of when you would see or even consider a rebrand is when the problems within your customer scope, like my Hermes, they had a really bad negative customer sort of value on them.

Now they've gone to every and they've still got a

Bad revenue. That's another example.

Rebranding

Doesn't fix everything.

It doesn't because you still have to make sure that your processes are correct. At the end of the day, if you've got someone just chucking a box at your house,

When you are looking at reasons to maybe rebrand or Debrand is rebranding, you do look at the whole business. You don't just go, oh, we're going to tweak a few things. It can be your processes internally, it can be your target audiences and stuff

And get feedback from your stakeholders. That's a core thing to consider when you're rebranding for sure, and don't go too far away from a brand refresh that it becomes a rebrand. There's a fine line between just simplifying something

Apart from people not recognising your brand and stuff. Are there any other risks associated with either rebrand or Debrand?

I think there's quite a few risks. Obviously you've got the loss of recognition of your brand completely, especially if you've got a lot of customer loyalty there, you don't want to lose that. Obviously there's the money one, it costs a lot if you're getting it done properly to rebrand, and if that goes wrong, then you've fucked it basically.

Are you talking just money in terms of the actual rebrand or, well, not just when you think of your assets, like your printed media and

Things like that. Well, if you use the example again, they invested in the rebrand, so obviously they get all the visuals done on the computer first and everything like that, mockups, but then if they sign that off and go to print and get all the packaging done, all the cartridges, cartons have orange juice done. They've invested thousands if not maybe even into the millions when it comes to that. So yeah, think about it before you do it. I guess for smaller businesses, the kind of businesses that we deal with, then I think it's still important to consider all of that if you're going to do it and do it for the right reasons. Half the problem is when people start, they don't do it properly from the start, but businesses when you start, if you look at a business when it starts and then five years on, they've changed quite a lot. So that's why you find a lot of businesses change within that first sort of five to 10 year mark.

Yeah, I think a lot of circumstances, like you say, it'll probably make sense because maybe they were just finding the fee at the beginning, didn't know who they were as a brand and can be a lot more fitting. I've actually got a potential negative that we've not discussed. This is more so to do with the change of name, assuming that the brand does change the name is that, I mean, changing the name, you're probably going to change your domain as well, and that could obviously be quite dangerous for SEO. Yeah, it's bringing it back to digital marketing. Yeah, good point. To be fair. Oh

Yeah. And what about if you've completely rebranded and you've changed maybe your target audiences or if you're changing the way that you speak to your customers and in your tone of voice, if you're changing your web content as well, your keywords are all going to change I suspect as well.

Yeah. Maybe even search terms for how customers are actually finding you or looking for you even depending on what they want to see versus what you are giving them.

Not like the My mage one, there's a risk of not actually addressing the underlying issues of why you're doing it in the first place, so you're sort of doing it twice. Like the negative connotations towards my Hermes followed to every, so it was a pointless sort of thing anyway,

Because part of their logo says the new Hermes underneath, so they're still associating it, even if they don't realise it's a rebrand in,

Do

They do that on the

Side? Because I don't remember it ever being such a big thing.

Yeah, I think they tried to leave Herme because it had such a bad rep.

Yeah,

I don't think they did any sort of digital PR or promotion on the change either. They didn't want to bring attention to themselves,

I think as well. Maybe that's something people don't consider is explaining why you've made the decision to either rebrand or debrand, I suppose. That's quite important. Let your customers know that you're still you.

Exactly. Except for Hermes,

They

Didn't want that. Exactly. Yeah.

I was trying to think of any others that have changed their name. I know Amazon weren't originally Amazon, were they?

I didn't know that

Course.

They were cadaver and then they change. When was that?

That was in the mid nineties when they were a bookseller

First off. Interesting fact.

You learn something new every day.

I like that. While we're on examples, a good one where they didn't completely change the name, but they removed one aspect was Dunking Donuts.

Oh, of course.

And they just removed the word donuts

And now they're dunking. Now they're vowel list, aren't they?

Yeah, just dunking. And the reason they did that is because they wanted to focus on an increased product range. Basically. They'd sold coffee and also, which makes sense, but they didn't move completely away from the visual. They just removed a word and freshened it up a little bit.

No, they did. They took the coffee out of it.

Oh yeah.

They had, because I never really understood that. I never understood their logo. It was Dunking Donuts, but with a coffee cup. But you just made it made sense.

Yeah, but that's a good example of why they've just changed the name a little bit, but they've not moved a million miles away that you don't recognise that it's still Dunking Donuts, but they just don't want to focus on the fact that they just do donuts. They do more than that. MasterCard is another good one.

Yeah, I like their new logo as well.

They've just simplified the type of type that they've used, the type of the typeface that they've used, but also the circles before were interlocking like this. No,

They just overlapped,

Don't they? No, it's just sort of like an overlap gradient type thing. You obviously don't read my blog till these examples are all in the

Busted, the one on colours. No, the My bad.

I tell you what would be a good one to talk about. It's not necessarily rebranding, but you've just been to the Olympics. They changed the Olympics logo every year. I guess that's because of location. Jesus Christ. Of

Course they do. Do they?

Yeah.

The logo. Yeah. Not the rings yet. It looks like a woman who's just been to a salon this year.

Didn't you get an nails done?

Dunno, but it looks like Mary j Blige who seen the memes.

No.

Yeah. What do we think the future might hold for brands looking to rebrand or debrand in the world of ai?

I think in the near future it is probably not going to be an issue. I think AI kind of struggles to make a half decent logo as is straws make a good logo as is, especially vectors. So taking into account all the different aspects of a rebrand or a dbrand would be a bit more challenging for it. You might get some good results, but I think it generally needs that human touch to actually understand the reason for it and then to actually put those reasons into something actionable in terms of what you're actually doing for the, or the rebrand.

I think it comes back to AI should be used to assist, not just do. There's always going to need someone behind it check in because at the end of the day, it's not a person. It is quite handy. You can put all your data in or you've already got all the information about your audience and stuff. You could, if you're struggling for ideas or you can't quite visualise what you want to put towards a graphic designer, you could always put in, this is our target audience, this is our demographics, blah, blah, blah, and ask it to give you some rough ideas. I think there is some, they're terrible, but it can give you some ideas on layout for logos and stuff like that.

That's good utility, but I think the human touch is needed with, I mean it's a very thing, if that makes sense. When you look at a brand or a logo or something like that, you're not looking at the data side of it as a consumer.

No, but you are also, when you've got a logo for example, I'm just coming back to that, is you are trying to reach a target. You are trying to, it comes back to colours and stuff, doesn't it? You want to evoke feelings, so I think it does have some data driven behind it when you sort of rebrand.

What I was getting at though is that the ai, whilst it can say those things, may not take those things into consideration while constructing a logo or something like that.

No, but you could put it into the

Prompt, but the AI on its own couldn't do that, so you have to do that handholding. Part of the,

I think coming back to your point on target audiences, I think AI potentially could play a huge part in tailoring brand experiences for different audiences. So you might have different audience segments within a target audience and it might tweak the visual to suit one segment to another. For example, you could use the R-S-P-C-A. I was just going to say that horsey people might want to see a horse, so it shows them the horse, rabbit people, rabbit people, lizard people, lizard people, dog people,

Spider people, people. This is rather those people who modify the body

Sort. Exactly. So that could be a good example how it tailors the brand experience to specific audiences and customers. But you could use it to analyse your customer feedback data as well and pump that into a visual tweaker of some kind. I dunno,

That reminds me, it is kind of different, but it's also kind of the same when you look at Google's suite of different apps and they all follow the same brand guidelines and things like that, but they all have their own unique letter to represent what it does or whatever icon. They also have their animated icons. They kind of follow a similar idea where they're ever morphing changing.

Yeah, that's not a bad idea. I think from a visual perspective I think it's tricky, but I think you can definitely get it to assist in messaging and things like that and how you tweak your messaging for certain ordinances in your visuals. I dunno, you could get it to come up with, obviously you've got to feed it all the right information, but you could get different taglines, ideas from it, things like that. So yeah. How

About tone of voice? Because tone of voice is almost distinct to a brand,

So if

You were to mess with that as part of an AI generated thing.

Yeah, it's a good point. Tone of voice is a tricky one, especially from an AI perspective, but it is certainly getting more sophisticated I think.

Do you think that's a good thing though, is what I mean because a brand, you kind of associate a brand's tone of voice with the brand and if you as a customer and another customer are getting a different tone of voice.

Yeah, I guess it comes down to the customer interests and how it tailors that experience to that customer. If it's feeding the customer the right thing, then does it really matter if it's going to breed the loyalty in that customer as long as you're not going a million miles away from the

Roots.

Yeah. Yeah,

That's good answer. Some good thoughts there. I guess,

Do you know of any AI software that you've either tried out or could potentially work when it comes to design?

Adobe Illustrator has got a baked in AI thing. It's not great. I don't think any visual AI create a tool is great yet. In all honesty. Not for

Like logos.

No. I think we were literally this afternoon playing around with one on canva's magic wand tool thing. Yes. I used Canva. Say it again. Yeah, we were playing around with that. It weren't great, was it? It was okay.

Yeah. I think they're definitely excelling in, what would you call it? Like photorealism kind of stuff, the photo side of things.

Thread photos. Oh god. Photoshop AI is like background replacing stuff like that. Incredibly.

Yeah,

Incredibly. It's incredible.

It is. Yeah. But getting it is kind of hard to get an AI to do minimal and simple because it just wants to apply everything. It is. Got all these tools at its disposal, so it's like yeah, you're having all of them.

Yeah, I wouldn't be for it. I think there's one online. I'll confirm after logo me or something like that and just you give it a load of prompts. What's your business name, what colours do you click? Some examples of logos that you like and then it outputs something really bad,

Really bad. I was going to say that most of the ones I've seen have been either really generic AI nonsense or it's been, they're using AI as a buzzword and it's actually just, here's 500 different icons and 500 type faces, and it's like your name, random icon chosen that kind of matches what your business does.

Yeah. Yeah. Nice.

Thanks guys.

It's all right. Thank you

For having us.

Always a pleasure. Bye.

Thanks for tuning into this episode of Marketing Blobs. We hope you gain valuable insights into the world of debranding and rebranding. Remember, reviving your brand is all about understanding your audience, identifying the need for change, and choosing the right approach for your business. Thanks again to Tom, Josh, and Emma for sharing their expertise with us today. Until next time, I'm Tilly, and this is Marketing Blas. See you next time.