The Art Of The Rebrand

Nick Carson, chair of judges for CA’s Brand Impact Awards, discusses three key approaches to rebranding with previous BIA winners

- Nick Carson

Rethinking, repositioning and redesigning brands is a staple task for many design studios. Although start-up organisations will always be a blank canvas by definition, it’s fairly rare for an agency to develop a totally new identity system for a client.

As a creative exercise, rebranding poses a unique set of challenges compared to branding from scratch. This is simply because, for want of a better phrase, there is creative baggage attached – and that baggage was often the work of another agency.

In the following pages, we’ll explore three of the most common strategic approaches to the rebranding process, complete with insightful advice from some of the world-class agencies that have triumphed at CA’s Brand Impact Awards in previous years.

These key routes include drawing on a brand’s heritage, and restoring its former glory after it’s lost its way; gradual evolution, refinement, and modernisation of a brand to make it fit for purpose; and finally, ripping it up and starting again, as if branding from scratch.

According to Chris Moody, chief creative officer at WolffOlins, and two-time Brand Impact Awards judge, the biggest challenge of rebranding in 2018 isn’t creative: it’s the wider global climate. “Politically, socially, and technologically we are in times of massive change, and as a result there is a great deal of nervousness and trepidation,” he points out.