Mark Ritson wrote Actions Speak Louder Than Logos in 2010. It is now 2026. Sixteen years on, the lesson remains stubbornly unlearned.
Ritson’s distinction was not complex. It was simply unfashionable. Rebranding changes identity and meaning. Repositioning changes meaning while keeping identity. Brand revitalisation does neither. It returns to first principles, decodes original intent, and reinterprets it for the present day. In other words, it is the unglamorous craft of brand management. The thing the best marketers practise obsessively, and too many self-styled “marketeers” quietly avoid.
Fast forward to today and we are still watching organisations repaint the house without fixing the plumbing, then calling it transformation. New logos. New colour palettes. Earnest launch films. A flurry of press coverage. All motion, very little movement.
The problem is rarely execution. It is commitment.
If a brand genuinely needs to change, then change it properly. Strategy, behaviour, proposition, culture. Accept the risk and the discomfort that comes with real reinvention. If it does not, leave it well alone and do the harder, quieter work of revitalisation. That means recommitting to what made the brand meaningful in the first place, not mistaking novelty for progress.
Sixteen years later, the conclusion is depressingly familiar. Most rebrands are not brave acts of reinvention. They are highly expensive expressions of indecision, weak leadership, and poor marketing judgement.
The justifications are equally familiar.
“But the old brand is tired.” For whom, exactly?
“But it’s our big anniversary.” So what?
As Ritson noted back then, we should also talk about respect. Respect for heritage, provenance, authenticity, and for brands themselves. Brands are not mood boards. They are long memory systems built through consistent behaviour over time.
The data rather unhelpfully reinforces this argument.
Across multiple industry analyses, somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of rebrands fail to deliver the value they were meant to achieve. Depending on how success is defined, around four to six in ten rebrands underperform against either financial return or stated strategic objectives. The louder claims of 70 percent plus tend to come from practitioner polemic rather than transparent datasets, but even the conservative range should give any board pause.
What is striking is not how often rebrands disappoint, but how rarely companies admit defeat. Full reversions to the old brand are vanishingly uncommon. The well-worn cautionary tales, Tropicana’s 2009 packaging fiasco or Gap’s brief logo experiment, are remembered precisely because they are exceptions. In practice, most organisations quietly live with the consequences, tweaking and smoothing rather than openly reversing course. The mistake becomes permanent by default.
Which brings us back to judgement.
If I were a relatively young business approaching a milestone anniversary, competing with long-established rivals whose identities have barely shifted, enjoying far higher brand awareness, while my own awareness and share were slipping, I would not reach for a rebrand. I would double down on who I already am. To rebrand in that context is to create unnecessary confusion and cost at precisely the moment clarity is required.
A fresh lick of paint, as ever, is not a strategy.
Sixteen years on, Ritson’s point still stands because it was never really about logos. It was about seriousness. About whether organisations are willing to do the difficult, unshowy work of managing brands properly, or whether they prefer the theatrical certainty of a launch film and a new colour palette.
If in doubt, leave the logo alone and fix the plumbing.
And if you want a second opinion, you know where We Are Unchained is.