B2BFYI #17: The rebrand waiting room

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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.

You know you need a rebrand.

Leadership knows, your sales team definitely knows and even your new hires can tell something isn’t quite right.

And yet, here you are. Not rebranding 🤔

And it’s not because you're lazy. It’s simply that the timing is genuinely, frustratingly wrong.

Typically, it’s going to be a mix of budget cycles, acquisitions, market instability, or just the ebb and flow of whatever the CEO is interested in.

Or maybe, and this is the one nobody talks about enough, your business is in the middle of a pivot. Could be new services, new markets, a new operating model. There’s a million reasons to pivot. Ultimately, though, you can't rebrand to reflect a future state that hasn't actually happened yet.

Similarly, you can't build a brand around a strategy that's still being executed. The services page can't describe offerings that haven't been fully scoped. The positioning can't speak to a market you haven't properly entered. In this case, the operational reality of the business has to catch up with the strategic intent before a rebrand makes any sense at all.

And so you wait. While you wait, your existing brand gets a little more tired, a little more disconnected and dated every day. The gap widens.

This is the rebrand waiting room. And almost every B2B marketer I speak to has spent time in it at some point in their career.

The good news? You don't have to just passively sit through it.

B2B companies end up here for one of five reasons, though often it’s a combination.

The budget isn't there (yet). A proper rebrand isn't cheap. Strategy, creative, implementation, rollout — it's a meaningful investment, and the money might be coming. It just isn't here yet.

Leadership isn't aligned. You've got the Ops Director on side but the CEO wants to wait. They also didn’t explain why. Helpful! Rebrands need full executive buy-in, and in B2B, that kind of consensus can take months (or even years) to build.

The business is mid-pivot. This catches folks out. Your company is shifting its services or target market, the direction is set, but the actual operational change (all the hiring, building capabilities, landing the first clients in the new space etc) takes time. Rebranding before that pivot is done and ready means building a brand on a foundation that doesn't fully exist yet.

There's too much uncertainty. M&A activity, leadership changes, restructuring. When there’s a flurry of business “stuff” happening, nobody wants to invest in something that might need to change again in twelve months.

You don't have the bandwidth. A rebrand is a massive internal project. If your marketing team is already struggling, adding a rebrand into the mix is only going to end badly.

These are all legitimate reasons. The problem isn't the waiting. It’s what most companies do while they're waiting.

Which, typically, is nothing.

Here's what happens when you sit in the waiting room and accept it.

Your brand drifts. Like Wilson floating slowly away from the raft while Tom Hanks shouts into the ocean. Different teams create their own materials. The sales deck slowly splits into 13 variations. Someone starts to use language that doesn’t match your tone of voice (and soon their whole deparment is doing it). Before you know it, you don't have one brand, you have seven.

In the mess, you watch as your competitors move ahead. While you're waiting, someone in your space is sharpening their positioning, upgrading their website, tightening their messaging. The gap slowly widens.

Your sales team tries to compensate. In the absence of a strong, cohesive brand, individual salespeople build their personal brands on LinkedIn instead of the company brand. They write their own pitch decks (and start using their own templates). They ad-lib on discovery calls. The marketing team lose control of the story.

Not good.

And, worst of all, the internal case for the rebrand steadily weakens. The longer you wait without things completely falling apart, the easier it is for leadership to think "well, it's not that bad." Urgency fades - and that’s never a good thing for a marketing team!

Instead of being a neutral choice, doing nothing tends to instead be an expensive one.

There's a meaningful amount of brand improvement that sits between "full rebrand" and "do nothing." Start with the highest-impact, lowest-effort stuff and work your way down.

The single highest-value thing you can do right now, and it costs nothing but time.

Most B2B businesses don’t have a huge positioning problem. The real problem is how this positioning is executed. Messy, conflicting and generally confusing for prospects.

💡 Write a single sentence that explains what you do, who you do it for, and why it matters. Test it on someone outside your company. If they look confused, try again!

💡 Create a one-page messaging doc covering your core value proposition, key differentiators, and the language you use (and don't use) to describe your services. Share it with every client-facing team. Get everyone on the same page (literally), even if it isn't perfect.

If you're mid-pivot, this is especially important. Messaging that says "we've historically done X, and we're now expanding into Y" is honest, clear, and far more effective than pretending the pivot has already happened (or ignoring it entirely - which is never good).

Here’s a simple example from one of our clients, Carpenter Farraday:

Some quick fixes:

These are the brand moments that build confidence or create doubt. A polished sales deck with consistent messaging does more heavy lifting for your brand than a new icon library could.

You're not ready for a new visual identity, but you can clean up the existing one.

None of this is glamorous. But it will stop your brand looking like it was assembled by committee.

This is the most strategic thing you can do in the waiting room. When the green light comes, you want to move fast. You don’t want to start the conversation from scratch every time.

When a business is pivoting, there's an overwhelming temptation to rebrand as part of the pivot. To use the brand launch as the "big moment" that signals the new direction.

In my experience this is almost always premature.

A brand needs to be rooted in reality. Until a pivot has survived contact with the market, it’s not complete. This is: what you actually do, who you actually serve, how you actually deliver value. If those things are still in flux, your brand will be based on aspiration rather than truth. Prospects can smell aspiration a mile away. And it smells a lot like desperation.

I've seen companies rebrand around a pivot only to find that six months later, the services page describes capabilities they haven't yet built (or worse, can’t fully deliver).

This results in a brand that feels hollow and creates expectations the company simply can't meet. That undermines trust rather than builds it.

The better approach is to let the pivot breathe. Do the operational work. Land the clients. Build the track record. Then rebrand from a position of truth rather than hope.

Sometimes a refresh is exactly right. If your positioning is solid but the visual execution looks dated, a refresh can buy you two to three years at a fraction of the cost of a more extensive rebrand.

If you try and use a refresh as a sticking plaster for a positioning problem, then you might be in for a rough ride. If the issue isn't how your brand looks but what it says and who it speaks to, then no amount of colour palette and typography updates will fix it.

And if you're mid-pivot, a refresh is almost always premature. You'll be refreshing into a state that needs to change again once the pivot “launches”. It’s usually better to do the tactical clean-up work and save the visual investment for when you know where you're heading.

Example of a before and after refresh from one of our clients below:

Here are the signals you're ready:

When these conditions are met, move fast. All that evidence you gathered (messaging documents and perception surveys etc) become your brief. Treat this as a head start so that your rebrand launches in four months instead of ten.

The waiting room doesn’t need to be wasted time. See it as preparation time.