B2BFYI #13: The 7 moments where your rebrand goes off the rails

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B2BFYI is written by industry veterans Chris Bennett (Strategy), Geoff Bretherick (Creative) and Philip Bennison (Tech), and published weekly. You can sign up here to get issues straight to your inbox.

There are a million ways a rebrand can go wrong.

In my experience, most of them happen in the same seven moments.

I've sat in enough rebrand kick-offs, creative reviews, and post-mortems to know that the disasters aren't random. They tend to cluster. The same failure points appear again and again, at the same stages, for the same reasons - usually a combination of unclear ownership, assumptions disguised as “internal alignment”, and the creeping dread of upsetting someone important (read: the boss).

The frustrating thing is that none of this is inevitable. These problems are entirely predictable. Which means they're preventable, if you know where to put your guard up.

This issue of B2BFYI maps the seven moments where B2B rebrands most often go sideways. Not as a some neat framework or theory, but as a practical heads up from someone who's watched them happen in slow motion over a 17-year career.

When I say "rebrand," I mean anything from a full strategic repositioning with a new name and visual identity, down to a significant refresh of an existing brand: new look, new messaging, new direction. Not a logo tweak or a new colour palette.

The moments I'm describing apply across that spectrum. The stakes are just higher at the full end.

Right. Let's get into it.

Every agency will tell you their discovery process is thorough. Some of them are right.

But what often happnens is the discovery phase surfaces a lot of interesting information: internal interviews, customer research, competitive analysis etc. At the end of it, everyone sits in a room and nods along. "Yes, that's us. That feels right." Or something like that. The agency writes it up and the deck is emailed around. Everyone is happy.

The problem is that nobody actually tested whether the people in that room meant the same thing when they agreed.

The CFO might think innovation means “cost-efficient delivery”, the CTO “cutting-edge”. These are not the same brief. And they will collide loudly at the creative presentation.

The fix isn't more research. It's sharper questions during the discovery phase. Ask people to describe what success looks like in concrete, specific terms. Not "we want to be seen as a leader." What does that actually mean, anyway? Who needs to think that? By when? What would they do differently if they did?

Force specificity early. It's uncomfortable, but do it anyway. Makes everything better downstream.

The brief is where rebrands are won or lost. It's also where the most diplomatic fiction gets put down into a Word document.

A good brief is specific enough to be argued with. A bad brief is vague enough to be approved by everyone. Guess which one most rebrands start with?

"We want a brand that reflects our values, resonates with our target audience, and positions us for future growth."

This brief could describe literally any company on the planet. Your agency will now make educated guesses about what you actually want, present them as strategic decisions, and the first creative review will be the moment everyone discovers they had different pictures in their heads all along.

The brief needs to answer the challenging, uncomfortable questions. What are we willing to leave behind? Who are we not for? What would we never say? What's the one thing we need people to think when they encounter this brand? Not five things. Just one!

It also needs to define what "done" looks like. Outcomes as well as deliverables. How will we know this rebrand has worked? In what timeframe? Against what measures?

If your stakeholders can't agree on the answers to those questions before the agency starts work, you don't have a cohesive brief. You’ve really just got a vibe. And that won’t survive contact with whoever has to sign-off the budget.

This is the moment most rebrands start to quietly die.

The agency has done their work. They've interpreted the brief, explored the territory, made strategic + creative choices, and they're presenting the first concepts. And then someone in the room pipes up with "I'm not sure about X."

And just like that, the conversation shifts from “does this solve the strategic problem” to “do I personally like the aesthetic choices”. The can of worms is officially open.

It's not entirely anyone's fault, either. Visual work invites subjective reaction. This isn’t performance marketing, or accounting, after all. People are more comfortable saying "I don't like the blue" than "I think this fails to differentiate us from Competitor X because it relies on the same rational messaging architecture they've used for three years." The second sentence requires having done the thinking. The first just requires having eyes.

The result is that feedback tips toward the personal, and creative teams start optimising for approval rather than effectiveness. This is really bad. The work gradually drifts toward the lowest common denominator and, over a short space of time, becomes something nobody loves but nobody can argue against.

Congratulations. You’ve achieved a mediocre brand.

To fix this, you need a structured feedback framework, and you need to set expectations before the presentation, not after. Feedback should be anchored to the brief - always. Does this express the core positioning? Does it differentiate us from the competition in the way we agreed? Does it feel credible to our audience?

Personal aesthetic preferences are not invalid, but they need to be flagged as preferences, not strategic objections. There's a difference between "this doesn't feel right to me" and "this doesn't solve the brief." Both are worth hearing, but only one should change the actual work.

At some point between the agency finishing the work and the brand going live, the rebrand will need to be approved by people who had no involvement in creating it. That’s just how this goes.

This is where projects go to spend six months getting incrementally worse (and often more expensive - both in fees + opportunity cost of late delivery).

The internal review process in most B2B organisations is broken by design. There's no clear decision-making framework, and everyone with a title above a certain level somehow gets a veto. Feedback rounds are unlimited. New stakeholders are introduced late in the process with strong opinions and no real context.

The work that emerges from this process is rarely the work the agency created. It's a negotiated compromise between that work and the collective discomfort of a group of people who weren't involved in the strategic process and are now being asked to approve its output.

The solution to this mess is good governance, and it needs to be agreed at the start of the project, not improvised under pressure. Who has input? Who has influence? Who has the final decision? These are three different things and they need three different lists of names.

The best solution is to appoint a single project champion. They might not have final approvals or sign-off, but they can shape, guide and collate it.

Equally important is being clear about what can’t be changed after a certain point. Locking down the strategy and positioning before creative work begins means that late-stage feedback simply becomes scope creep, and you can push back on it with evidence.

Most decent agencies are happy to allow for scope-creep, just as long as you pay for it + agree to additional time.

Nobody enjoys talking about this one. Including me. But here we are.

Legal and compliance review is consistently the thing that gets scheduled last and causes the most last-minute chaos. The new name turns out to be trademarked in three markets. The tagline is too close to a competitor's registered phrase. The image library has licensing issues (I’ve seen organisations get fined £££ for this before, so be careful). The domain names are fifty times more expensive that you expected. The list goes on and on.

None of these are blockers to the core project, but all of them are significantly easier to deal with early in the process than the week before launch. It all comes down to time.

Trademark searches need to happen as soon as you have a shortlist of name options, not after you've chosen one and fallen in love with it. Domain availability, social handle availability, and basic conflict searches take days, not weeks. Do them early!

In regulated industries, like financial services, healthcare, legal etc, compliance review of messaging and claims needs to be built into the creative process, not thrown in at the end. Involve your compliance (or legal) team from the brief stage. Yes, it's annoying. No, it's not as annoying as pulling a campaign three days before launch because major regulatory issues were missed. Again, I’ve seen this happen enough times to caution against it.

By the time you reach the build phase (website, collateral, sales materials, templates, the entire system of brand expression etc) the project is usually running late, over budget, or both.

So things naturally start getting cut.

The brand guidelines get simplified into a short PDF that is so diluted that it’s basically not helpful to anyone. The icon library gets half-built, and the bespoke ones go out the window. The website launches with stock photography because the shoot got pushed to next month. The email templates get done, but the sales deck doesn't, so the sales team keeps using the old one.

Yikes.

The brand system is only as strong as its weakest touchpoint. And in B2B, the weakest touchpoint is usually the one that touches the most prospects: the sales deck, the proposal template, the pitch document. The kind of things the commercial team use to win business.

So, before the build phase begins, map every touchpoint your brand actually appears on, in order of commercial importance. Build the high-impact, high-frequency ones first, to full quality. Accept that some of the lower priority items might have to be phased.

You've made it! 🎉 The new brand is ready, the site goes live, the social channels update. The press release goes out.

And then that’s when you see questions pop up from various parts of the business. “Oh, I didn’t know we were rebranding.”

This is not a hypothetical. A version of this happens on almost every rebrand I've ever been close to. The internal communication plan tends to be treated as an afterthought, something to sort out once the real work is done. The result is just a chaotic, unprofessional rollout where different parts of the business are presenting different versions of the company at the same time.

Launch day is not a comms event. It should be treated as a change management event. And it needs to be planned with the same clarity and precision as the creative work.

Who needs to know what, and when? What does the sales team need to do their job with the new brand from day one? What's the message to existing customers? What do you do about the three months of sales pipeline that already has the old brand stamped all over it?

The internal launch, I’d argue, matters more than the external one. Your customers will give you a grace period on brand transition. Your sales team won’t. If the new brand is harder to use than the old one, they'll quietly keep using the old one.

If you're heading into a rebrand, or you're already in the middle of one and recognising some of these moments, here’s an honest summary:

Most rebrand failures aren’t creative failures. The agency didn't produce bad work (as long as you picked a competent, high-quality partner, that is). The strategy likely wasn't wrong, either.

The problems are almost always organisational. That means hazy ownership, unresolved conflict, ego-drama, poor governance, and a launch plan that ignore the rest of the business.

The good news is that none of this is particularly complicated. It just requires deliberate choices (made early) and a willingness to have those uncomfortable conversations before the pressure of a live project makes them impossible.

I strongly recommend you build the governance structure before you brief the agency. And then include it in the brief. Define decision rights before the first concept comes through. Get legal/compliance in the room from day one. Plan the internal launch with as much care as the external one.

And if you're already in the middle of a rebrand and you've recognised two or three of these moments? Don't panic. Just identify which stage you're at, name the specific risk clearly, and deal with it now. The longer you leave it, the more expensive (and difficult) it gets. And that’s a cost often paid for in lost time, budget and political capital.