Every few weeks a company announces a rebrand, and every few weeks the internet tells them it looks like everyone else. The logo usually isn't the problem. The problem is the six months before the logo.
Redecorating is not repositioning
Most rebrands start with a symptom: the website looks dated, a competitor raised a round, a new CMO wants a mark on the company. Those are fine triggers. But if the only question in the brief is “how should we look?”, you'll get a redecoration, not a repositioning. And redecorations don't change how customers choose.
Three questions to answer first
- Who do we win with, and why? Not the persona deck. The last twenty deals you closed and the reason the buyer gave.
- What do we want to be known for in three years? One sentence. If leadership can't agree, no identity system will fix it.
- What are we willing to stop saying? Positioning is subtraction. A brand that claims everything stands for nothing.
“The rebrands that work feel inevitable afterwards. That's because the strategy made the decision before the designer did.”
What the groundwork looks like
At Novaris the first four weeks of every brand project produce no visuals. We run customer interviews, read win/loss notes, audit competitors' claims and map the category's clichés so we can avoid them. The output is a positioning statement, a messaging hierarchy and a set of brand principles. Only then does design start, and it starts fast, because the hard decisions are made.
A quick test
Take your new brand and show it to a customer without the name. Can they tell it's you? Can they say what you're for? If the answer to either is no, the logo isn't the problem.
