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A Rebrand Is a Decision, Not a Redesign.
Branding · 7 min read · 1618 Media Insights
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The logo is the last thing that should change.
Every few months a well-known brand unveils a new logo, and the internet immediately forms a jury. There are memes, hot takes, a designer explaining kerning on LinkedIn, and a spokesperson promising that everyone will come around.
Most of that debate misses the point. A logo is the visible part of a rebrand the way a front door is the visible part of a house. The real work happens behind it: deciding what the brand is for, who it needs to win over, and what it must never lose along the way.
A rebrand is a business decision wearing a design costume. When it works, the new identity feels inevitable, as if the brand always looked like this. When it fails, you get a very public lesson in the gap between what a company thinks its brand is and what its customers believe they own.
Two recent cases made that gap impossible to ignore. Both came from big, established brands with real business problems and real ambition. Neither is really a story about bad design. Both are stories about memory, sequencing and proof.
Cracker Barrel changed the one thing people were holding on to.
Cracker Barrel, the American roadside restaurant chain, had a genuine problem going into 2025. Sales had stagnated, its share price had fallen sharply the year before, and it was losing ground at dinner time. A refresh was a reasonable response to a brand that needed to bring in new guests.
In August 2025 it unveiled a new logo and began modernising its restaurants. The new logo dropped the familiar figure of an old man leaning on a barrel, a character who had greeted customers for decades, and replaced him with a simple text-only mark. The refreshed interiors also stripped back the antiques and clutter that made the restaurants feel like a country store.
The reaction was fast and ferocious. Within days the share price had fallen by more than 11%, and about a week after the reveal the company announced that it would keep its original logo after all.
The damage did not end with the reversal. On its next earnings call, the chain said traffic had dropped roughly 8% since the date of the logo change and warned that the decline could continue. The CEO acknowledged that the company had underestimated how strongly customers feel about its nostalgic imagery. Only four of its 660 restaurants had been remodelled, and the programme was put on hold.
It would be unfair to blame the logo for everything. The business was already struggling. But that is exactly the point. The real problems were food, experience and relevance to new guests, and the CEO herself pointed to food and guest experience as the areas that needed work. A new logo could not fix those, and it put at risk the one asset that was working: the emotional pull of an old-fashioned, familiar place.
The lesson: before you change anything, find out what people are holding on to. Memory is an asset, and customers feel they own part of it.
Jaguar asked people to believe before it showed them anything.
Jaguarʼs story is almost the opposite. Its ambition was sharper and its logic was easier to defend. The brand wanted to leave behind its identity as a heritage car maker and become an all-electric luxury marque. A change that big needs a new identity.
In November 2024 Jaguar unveiled a complete redesign: a new logo, a new typeface, a bright colour palette and two slogans, “Copy Nothing” and “Delete Ordinary”. The launch film showed models in vivid outfits and no cars at all.
That was the problem. A car brand had announced a new era without a single car to look at. Critics and enthusiasts filled the gap with their own interpretations, and most of them were unkind. Meanwhile the company had ended production of nearly every model in its range before a replacement was ready, so the sales numbers fell for reasons that had little to do with the logo but a lot to do with the timing.
The concept car arrived a few weeks later, and the production car, the Type 01, was only revealed in October 2026, nearly two years after the rebrand. Whether buyers will order it is the real test, and that story is still being written. The strategy may well turn out to be right. But the sequencing gave scepticism a long head start.
The lesson: a big promise needs evidence close behind it. The shorter the gap between the claim and the proof, the less room there is for doubt to set.
Three mistakes hiding inside both stories.
Look past the headlines and the same three errors appear in both cases.
The first is treating identity as the strategy. A new look can express a new direction, but it cannot create one. If the underlying problem is food quality, product range or customer experience, redrawing the logo will not touch it.
The second is underestimating memory. Established brands carry decades of meaning in symbols, colours, characters and rituals. Those things belong partly to customers, who will defend them when they feel threatened. Strategists need to know which parts of the identity are decoration and which are load-bearing.
The third is announcing before proving. People judge a rebrand in an instant, with whatever information they have. If the only thing on show is a logo or a film, the logo or film is what gets judged. The product, the service and the experience should lead, and the identity should follow.
Notice that none of these mistakes is about taste. You could draw a brilliant logo and still make all three.
Four questions to answer before anyone opens a design file.
What problem are we solving, and can a new identity actually solve it? If the honest answer is no, the rebrand may be a distraction from the real work.
What do people love about us that we must keep? Ask customers, not just executives. Then protect those things deliberately, even if everything around them changes.
Who has to believe what, and what will they see as proof? A rebrand aimed at new customers needs to bring evidence that matters to them, not just a new look for existing ones.
What is the worst reaction we could get, and have we tested for it? Show the work to the people most likely to dislike it, and listen to what they say before you go public.
If you can answer those four questions in plain language, the design brief writes itself. If you canʼt, the design will be arguing about taste when the real debate should be about direction.
What a small business can take from this.
You may be thinking that these are big-company problems. A restaurant chain with 660 locations and a car maker with a century of heritage have more to lose than a young studio or startup.
But the logic scales down. A growing business changes its name, its look or its message at some point, and the people who already know it, even if there are only a few hundred of them, carry its reputation. Customers remember the colour, the voice, the little rituals. Changing those without understanding why they matter is how small brands lose the trust they spent years earning.
It also scales the other way. A young brand has the luxury of building a strong identity once, with the strategy settled first. That is cheaper than fixing a muddled one later, and it will never be a headline for the wrong reasons.
Where this leaves you.
The best rebrands rarely feel like rebrands. They feel like a company becoming clearer about who it is, and bringing its customers along for the ride.
The worst feel like a company trying to become someone else and hoping nobody notices.
The difference is rarely in the design. It is in the thinking that comes before it, and the discipline to prove the new direction before announcing it.
Sources
These are for fact-checking and can be removed before publishing.
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Cracker Barrel: https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/?p=201642, https://www.fox13news.com/news/cracker-barrel-ceo-admits-major-missteplogo-change-sales-traffic-plummet, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/logorestaurant-change-backlash-hurt-140539161.html and https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cracker-barrel-stock-drops-chain160934195.html
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Jaguar: https://everything-pr.com/jaguar-copy-nothing-rebrand, https://www.wionews.com/world/jaguars-new-electric-car-divides-internetcompany-says-no-desire-to-be-loved-by-everybody-781175/amp and https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/business/money-report/how-jaguarplans-to-save-itself/3574605/?amp=1
Good ideas are everywhere now. A well-chosen problem, held with discipline, is what turns one of them into growth.
The difference is rarely in the design. It is in the thinking that comes before it, and the discipline to prove the new direction before announcing it.
The difference is rarely in the design. It is in the thinking that comes before it, and the discipline to prove the new direction before announcing it.
The best rebrands rarely feel like rebrands. They feel like a company becoming clearer about who it is, and bringing its customers along for the ride.
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