What makes a rebrand actually stick

Most rebrands fail quietly, not loudly. Nobody announces it. The new mark goes up, the deck gets archived, and a year later half the company is still sending the old template, because the old template was easier to find.

So before we touch a single pixel we check three unglamorous things.

First, who makes the brand every day. Not the person who commissioned the work, but the salesperson building a quote at eleven at night and the manager printing a sign for the door. If the new identity is harder to use than the old one, they will keep using the old one, and they will be right.

Second, what people already recognise. There is usually one element carrying the recognition, and it is often not the one anyone is proud of: a colour, a shape, a word. Replacing it feels like progress and spends the only equity there was.

Third, what breaks on the day of the switch. Signage, invoices, the favicon, the banner someone printed two years ago. A rebrand that ships without that list is a design project wearing a rebrand’s name.

Sticking is mostly logistics. The pixels are the easy part.