Nobody Asked for a New Jaguar

If you work in or around branding, you saw it happen in real time.

Jaguar, one of the most storied automotive names on the planet, dropped a rebrand in late 2024 that stopped the internet cold. Not in the good way. A sleek, abstract new logo. A brand film full of neon-painted models in avant-garde fashion with no cars in sight. Taglines like "Copy Nothing" and "Delete Ordinary." The comments were immediate, merciless, and almost universally the same: Where are the cars? Who is this for? What happened to Jaguar?

The brand had spent decades building equity on a very specific set of associations — British craftsmanship, heritage, a particular kind of restrained elegance. And in one campaign, all of it was placed in a pile and lit on fire in pursuit of something that felt borrowed from a different brand entirely.

You probably have your own list.

Cracker Barrel quietly dropping "Old Country Store" from its signage, then reversing course after customer backlash.

Gap's logo disaster in 2010, walked back in a week. The decades-long string of sports teams, airlines, and consumer brands that paid agencies enormous fees to fix things that weren't broken, and came out the other side with something their own customers didn't recognize.

No wonder "rebrand" lands like a threat for a lot of business owners. No wonder the gut reaction is defensive. If those are the reference points, skepticism isn't irrational. It's earned.

So let's name the thing directly: A lot of bad rebrands happen because the wrong question gets asked at the start.

The wrong question is "what should our brand look like?" or "how do we feel more modern?" or "what would resonate with a younger audience?"

Those questions put aesthetics and aspiration at the center, and when aesthetics and aspiration lead, the result often has nothing to do with who the company actually is. You get a brand that looks impressive in an agency presentation and lands with a thud in the real world because the people who have actually believed in this company for years don't see themselves in it anywhere.

The right question is simpler and harder: What problem are we actually trying to solve?

Sometimes the answer to that question is a full rebrand. The company has genuinely drifted from who it needs to be. The market has shifted. The identity no longer reflects the reality, or the aspiration is real and the distance between where you are and where you need to go is significant enough to require a full reset.

But a lot of the time, the answer is something smaller. A sharper articulation of what was already true. A visual adjustment that modernizes without erasing. A messaging shift that reaches a new audience without abandoning the existing one. A clarity intervention, not a personality transplant.

The failure mode isn't rebranding. The failure mode is rebranding when the problem didn't require it, or rebranding in a direction that had nothing to do with who you are.

The best rebrands you've never heard of are the ones that felt inevitable.

Nobody wrote breathless think pieces about them. No one's customers staged an uprising. The change happened, it felt right, and life continued. Because whoever led it asked what was actually broken, identified the smallest effective intervention, and made a change that moved the brand toward clarity rather than away from identity.

That's not a lack of ambition. That's wisdom. Knowing the difference between a brand that needs to evolve and a brand that needs a complete reinvention is half the work. And it requires someone willing to tell you the truth rather than sell you a scope.

Zoom Out →

Here's a concept worth introducing: Brand Risk Tolerance.

You know it from investing. Every investor has a risk profile – how much volatility they can stomach, how far they're willing to let things swing in pursuit of a bigger return. Some people are built for aggressive portfolios. Others sleep better with something conservative and steady. Neither is wrong. What's wrong is putting a low-risk investor in a high-volatility portfolio, or leaving a high-risk investor in something so cautious it never moves.

Brand works the same way.

Some companies have high brand risk tolerance. They're built to push, to provoke, to send strong signals that position them as something genuinely different. Think Liquid Death turning canned water into a heavy metal lifestyle brand. Think Oatly, whose packaging reads like someone's rebellious internal monologue.

Those brands stand out because they were built by people willing to alienate some audiences in order to deeply connect with others. That's a choice. And for the right company with the right leadership and the right market, it pays off.

Other companies have lower brand risk tolerance, and that's not a weakness. It's self-knowledge. Maybe you've built deep trust over decades and the equity in your consistency is real and valuable. Maybe your customer base doesn't want to be surprised – they want to be reassured. Maybe the most powerful thing your brand can do is be exactly what it's always been, just more clearly expressed.

A lower risk tolerance doesn't mean settling. It means understanding what your brand is actually built on and protecting it while you sharpen it.

The problem happens when a high-risk brand approach gets applied to a low-tolerance company. That's the Jaguar. That's the Gap logo. That's what happens when an agency falls in love with its own vision and forgets to ask whether the company can actually live in it.

Risk tolerance isn't discovered in a brief or a mood board. It comes from honest conversation about what you're willing to lose, what you can't afford to lose, and what the actual goal is – not the aspirational goal, the real one.

The Big Picture

Branding isn't cosmetic surgery. At its best, it's more like a very good conversation with someone who sees you clearly and helps you articulate what's already true.

The companies that get it right aren't necessarily the ones who went boldest or spent the most. They're the ones who started with the right question, understood their own tolerance for change, and made moves that felt like themselves on a better day rather than someone else entirely.

If the word "rebrand" makes you flinch, that flinch is data. It means you've seen what happens when the process serves the agency's vision instead of yours. It means you care about what you've built enough to protect it.

That instinct is right. Hold onto it.

What it's pointing toward isn't "never change." It's "change wisely." Know what you're solving. Know how far you're willing to go. Find someone who'll tell you the truth about both. And then make the smallest change that solves the actual problem.

Sometimes that's a full reinvention. More often, it's clarity.

Either way, it should feel like coming home, not like meeting a stranger.