Blink Twice
We Changed the Look and Nothing Changed
Why a new logo rarely moves the numbers, and what to fix first.
You spent the money. New logo, new colours, new packaging. Launch week felt great. A quarter later, the numbers look exactly the same.
The design was probably fine. A new look on its own is the same brand in new clothes, and nothing underneath it moved.
The look is one move of eight
A brand world is put together in eight moves. Only one of them, the Signal, is about how you look. The others decide what the look is for: where you sit in your category, the truth only you can claim, the position nobody can follow you into, and the story the whole team can tell.
Skip those and the designer has to guess. The result is a look built from taste. It might be beautiful, but it doesn't say anything a competitor couldn't.
A quick test: put your new visual identity on a competitor's packaging. If it still makes sense, you don't have a Signal yet. You have styling.
Refresh or rebrand
There are two different jobs, and confusing them is expensive.
A refresh keeps the meaning and sharpens how it's told. Burberry did this in 2023. Years of minimal sans serif branding had made it look like every other luxury house, so it brought back the Equestrian Knight and committed to one electric blue. The meaning stayed the same: British heritage, craft, the trench. The brand just started telling that story again.
A rebrand changes the meaning. Kia did this in 2021. The old red oval tied it to budget cars, and that position no longer fitted a company moving into electric. So Kia changed what the brand stood for, then built a new identity to carry it.
Ask whether your brand has drifted or your market has moved. If you've wandered off a story that still works, refresh. If the position itself no longer fits where you're going, rebrand.
What to settle first
Before anyone opens a design file, you should be able to answer four things. What every brand in your category looks and sounds like. What's true about you that no rival can say. Where that puts you that nobody else can follow. And the one line your whole team can repeat.
At Dip, the position came before the packaging. We positioned Dip as the first home wellness brand, and that told us the packaging should borrow from beauty and lifestyle instead of cleaning. We used this method to help Dip scale from £1m to £10m in 24 months.
Brand Eye's To Rebrand or Refresh? goes deeper on telling the two apart.
If you're weighing a redesign, start by finding where the brand actually breaks. The Brand World Score takes two minutes and points to the exact move.