What the Rebranding Process Actually Requires By Leigh Banks, Spinach Branding
Most rebrands fail in the first meeting.
Not the first creative presentation. The first meeting. The one where the brief is discussed, the timeline is agreed, and someone says, "Can we skip the strategy phase and go straight to design?" We know who we are. We just need a new look.
That decision, and the speed with which it is usually made, is the reason so many rebrands produce beautiful work that does not work. The new identity looks good. The website is cleaner. The business cards are impressive. Six months later, nothing has changed commercially. The brief asked for transformation and received decoration, because the process was inverted from the start.
Rebranding is not a creative exercise. It is a strategic one with a creative output. The sequence is not a formality. It is the mechanism by which the investment produces a return. Understand the sequence, commit to it, and a rebrand can reshape how a market thinks about a business. Shortcut it, and you are spending significant money to produce an aesthetic refresh that solves nothing.
This is what the process actually requires.
The Work That Has to Come First
The rebranding process begins not with making things but with understanding them. Discovery is the phase most clients are impatient with, and most agencies allow to be compressed, because it produces no visible output and carries no creative excitement. It is also the phase that determines the quality of everything that follows.
Discovery means understanding the business from the outside in. Conversations with existing customers that go beyond satisfaction surveys into a genuine exploration of what they believe the brand to be, what they would miss if it disappeared, and what they sense is not quite right about it. Conversations with prospective customers who chose a competitor and can explain why. Honest competitive analysis that maps not just what rivals communicate but what territory they have genuinely claimed in the minds of category buyers.
It also means understanding the business from the inside out. Leadership interviews that surface whether the executive team actually agrees on what the brand stands for, because, more often than not, they do not. Employee conversations that reveal the gap between what the brand says externally and what the people delivering it believe internally. A systematic audit of every customer touchpoint: website, sales collateral, physical environments, service interactions. Assessed not against brand guidelines but against a single question: does this feel like the same brand?
When Spinach began the Cowshed rebrand, twenty years had passed since the brand's founding inside Soho House. The brief was for modernisation. The discovery process revealed something more specific. The brand had evolved significantly in those two decades, but its identity had not kept pace. The positioning that emerged, Understated Indulgence, was not invented in a workshop. It was surfaced by listening to the people closest to the brand describe what it had always genuinely been. Discovery did not produce a direction. It produced a truth. Creative work translated that truth into a visual language, with botanical illustrator Katie Scott giving the positioning an identity specific enough to be owned.
The discovery phase typically runs two to three weeks for a focused rebrand and longer for organisations with complex structures or multiple audience groups. The output is a document that tells the brand what it actually is rather than what it thinks it is. That document is the foundation for everything that follows.
Strategy Before a Single Pixel
With discovery complete, the strategy phase translates insight into direction. This is where the decisions are made that the design will later express. It is also where the most important conversations happen, because strategy requires choices that exclude things, and organisations find exclusion uncomfortable.
Brand positioning is the central output of this phase: a clear articulation of the specific territory the brand will occupy in the minds of the people it most needs to reach. Not a vision statement. Not a list of values. A precise answer to the question: for whom, in what category, offering what distinction, supported by what evidence? Every word in a positioning statement does commercial work, or it does not belong there.
Alongside positioning, the strategy phase establishes verbal identity: the tone of voice, the language patterns and the specific claims the brand will and will not make. It also establishes brand architecture, the structural logic governing how a portfolio of products, services, or sub-brands relates to one another and to the masterbrand. Architecture decisions made in this phase determine how much complexity or simplicity the design system needs to carry.
This phase typically runs four to five weeks, including workshops with senior leadership and multiple rounds of iteration. If an agency proposes to compress or skip it to move faster into creative development, that is not efficiency. It is the most reliable predictor of a rebrand that will need to be repeated within three years.
When Spinach repositioned Knight Frank, the strategy phase surfaced a diagnostic that fundamentally shaped the creative work. Empty interiors had dominated the brand's visual language for years. The insight from research was precise: buyers do not purchase square footage; they purchase a life. The shift from property-led to people-led communication was a deliberate decision made before a single image was art-directed. Design could only express it because strategy had first named it.
The failure mode I have watched most often does not involve a bad brief or a weak strategy. It involves a board that commissions the work and then disappears from it.
A large professional services firm engaged Spinach some years ago. The senior executives attended the commissioning meeting in full. They were generous with their time, clear about their ambitions and encouraging about the brief. Then they handed us over to the marketing team and said: Go and do the workshops, start the creative work, and report back when you have something to show us.
What we presented back was rejected. Not once. Routinely.
This is not unusual. It happens more often than the industry admits, and it is entirely predictable once you understand the mechanism. The executives with authority to approve the brand were not present for the conversations that shaped it. They did not sit in the workshops where the positioning choices were made. They were not in the room when the competitive territory was mapped or when the founding tensions in the brief were resolved. When the work arrived, it felt like someone else's interpretation of their business, because it had been built without them. Their instinct was to reject it, and their instinct was not wrong.
The lesson is structural. A rebrand commissioned by the board must be worked on with the board, not presented to them at the end. The executives who will ultimately approve or reject the positioning need to be part of the process that produces it. Not in every workshop. Not reviewing every creative iteration. But present at the moments when the significant strategic choices are made, so that the work that emerges feels like an articulation of their own thinking rather than a proposal arriving from outside.
Alignment is not a soft requirement. It is the condition that determines whether the work survives contact with the organisation that commissioned it.
Creative Development: Translation, Not Invention
When strategy is genuinely locked, creative development becomes a different kind of exercise. The designers are not inventing a brand. They are translating an argument into a visual and verbal language. The brief has real content. The creative choices have a standard by which they can be evaluated: Does this express the strategy?
The creative development phase typically begins with two or three distinct strategic directions, each expressing the same positioning through a different creative approach. The purpose is not to present options for preference but to explore different translations of the same truth before committing to one. The selection is strategic, not aesthetic: which direction most precisely expresses what the strategy requires?
From the selected direction, the complete creative system is developed: logo, colour palette, typography, photographic style, graphic language and iconography. Verbal identity assets are developed in parallel: taglines, naming conventions, and tone-of-voice guidelines, with worked examples rather than abstract descriptions.
The Campari rebrand produced Bitter Sans, a bespoke typeface designed to carry the brand's character across every global execution, market, and language. One owned typographic asset that requires no interpretation and creates immediate recognition regardless of context. The brief for it was strategic, not aesthetic. It needed to carry the cultural weight of Milanese sophistication and the confidence that comes with being bitter as a mark of taste. The design solved a strategic problem.
This phase typically runs six to eight weeks, including concept presentation, direction selection and two to three rounds of refinement. The output is a complete brand identity system and a brand guidelines document specific enough to be applied consistently by people who were not present when the decisions were made.
The Phase Nobody Budgets For
Implementation planning is the phase that most clients underestimate and most budgets under-resource. It is also the phase that determines whether the strategic and creative investment produces a brand that customers actually encounter, or a brand that exists in guidelines documents and approved files while the previous identity continues to represent the business in the world.
The thing most clients underestimate about implementation is its internal dimension. There is a persistent assumption that once the new brand exists, it will somehow propagate itself through the organisation. It does not.
What is the point of a new brand if the CEO cannot explain what it stands for, the finance team is still sending proposals in the old identity, and the person answering the phone on day one of the launch has never been told what has changed or why? One of the most important functions of a rebrand is getting an entire organisation to tell the same story. Not just the marketing team. Everyone who touches a customer, a supplier, a candidate, a journalist, a partner. The brand is not what the guidelines say it is. It is what every one of those people communicates in every interaction, whether or not they are conscious of doing so.
Internal launch is not a soft deliverable. It is a commercial one. Organisations that treat it as an afterthought discover it was actually the point.
A professional implementation plan begins with a complete touchpoint inventory: every context in which the brand appears or could appear, from the website and social channels to sales collateral, physical environments, packaging, email signatures, vehicle livery, uniforms and internal communications. Each touchpoint requires a specific brief, a specific timeline and a specific resource, whether internal or external.
The implementation phase also addresses governance: the systems and responsibilities that will ensure the new brand is applied consistently after the agency has finished its work. A brand without governance decays. The Berkeley Group Digital Brand Hub is the clearest example in Spinach's portfolio of effective brand governance at scale. 30% of design revisions were due to inconsistent asset management before the Hub was built. The solution was structural: real-time access to approved assets for every team in every market, removing the conditions that lead to inconsistency rather than relying on compliance to prevent it.
Implementation typically consists of four to five weeks of planning, followed by a launch period whose length depends on the scope of the rebrand and the complexity of the organisation. A realistic full implementation timeline for a mid-size business with multiple touchpoints runs three to four months after creative approval.
Launch Is Not a Migration
Some clients decide to launch their new brand quietly. No announcement, no campaign, no moment. The new identity appears on the website, the old materials are gradually replaced, and the change is treated as an internal matter rather than a public one. The reasoning is usually caution: not wanting to overclaim, not wanting to invite scrutiny, not wanting the launch to feel like a gamble.
This is a significant commercial mistake.
There are very few moments in a business's life when it has a genuine story to tell, an audience with goodwill to receive it, and the conditions for earned media attention that does not require payment. A well-handled rebrand is one of them. The new positioning, the reason for the change, the vision for what the brand is becoming: these are exactly the ingredients that journalists, industry commentators and potential customers find genuinely interesting, precisely because most brands never change and the ones that do rarely explain themselves with clarity and confidence.
The brands that treat their launch as a moment rather than a migration capture something that cannot be bought later. Goodwill, attention and the narrative advantage of being the brand that made a bold, explained choice. That window does not stay open. Use it.
Post-launch, the first 90 days require active monitoring of brand consistency across touchpoints, customer and stakeholder responses, and internal adoption. The issues that emerge in this period are almost always implementation issues rather than strategic ones, and addressing them quickly prevents the fragmentation that compounds over time into a brand nobody can quite describe.
The Budget Conversation Worth Having
The budget question comes early in almost every rebrand conversation, and the answer from the prospective client is almost always one of two things: we do not know yet, or we want to compare quotes before committing to a number.
Both answers are understandable. Neither is particularly helpful. When Spinach asks about the budget, the purpose is not to determine the fee amount. It is to understand what the client has available so that the work can be shaped around achieving the project's objectives as effectively as possible within that reality. A client who is open about budget allows the agency to help them prioritise: what must be done, what should be done, and what can follow later. A client who withholds it forces both sides into a guessing game that rarely produces the best outcome for either.
The best clients understand this instinctively. They share what they have, explain what they are trying to achieve, and trust the agency to build a programme that delivers the most important things first. That conversation produces better work than any competitive pitch process, because it starts with honesty rather than positioning.
A comprehensive rebranding programme for a mid-size London business, covering discovery, strategy, creative development and implementation planning, typically runs three to five months from start to launch. Investment ranges vary by scope and complexity. A focused rebrand for a single brand covering strategy and visual identity with guidelines and implementation planning typically runs between twenty-five and sixty thousand pounds. Larger organisations with multiple divisions, complex brand architecture or significant implementation scope should plan for more. These figures do not include website redevelopment, large-scale print production, environmental design or advertising, each of which carries its own budget.
The hidden cost that most organisations fail to plan for is internal time. Discovery and strategy phases require significant leadership involvement: interviews, workshops, review sessions, and decision-making. A rebrand that has leadership engaged throughout produces a strategy the organisation owns and will defend. A rebrand conducted at arm's length produces a strategy that the organisation tolerates until someone decides to change it.
The Question Worth Asking Before You Start
Before commissioning a rebrand, one question is worth sitting with honestly: is the problem strategic, creative, or both?
A business with genuinely unclear positioning, one that cannot articulate precisely who it serves, what it offers that alternatives cannot, and why that claim is credible, needs strategy first and creative work second. A business with clear positioning but a visual identity that no longer expresses it, or that has evolved beyond the identity it launched with, may need creative development with a lighter strategic foundation.
The most expensive rebrand is the one that answers the wrong question beautifully. Investing in a new visual identity for a brand that does not know what it stands for produces a more elegant version of the same confusion. Discovery and strategy exist to ensure that the creative work that follows solves the right problem.
Rebranding is not a creative exercise. It is a business investment with a creative dimension. When approached in the right sequence, with the right commitment at each phase, it produces brands that earn pricing power, create genuine distinction, and compound in value over time.
Approached as a logo project, it produces a new logo.
Leigh Banks is Co-Founder and Partner at Spinach Branding, a London-based brand strategy and creative agency specialising in premium lifestyle brands across wine, spirits, hospitality, property and luxury. His work with clients, including Campari, Diageo, Soho House, Knight Frank and Berkeley Group, has focused on building brands that create pricing power rather than chase market share. He is the author of The Life Negroni. spinachbranding.com