The Most Costly Rebranding Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)

When business growth starts dragging its feet, there’s something rather tempting about a fresh start.

A shiny new logo, beautiful website, fresh colours and a big marketing campaign to show the world you mean business.

But before everyone gets carried away choosing colours and dreaming up a new identity, there’s one big question we ought to get out of the way first.

What’s actually stopping your business from growing?

Sometimes a brand refresh is all you need. Sometimes a complete rebrand makes more sense. And sometimes the real problem has absolutely nothing to do with your branding.

When things stop growing quite like they used to, businesses can get a little trigger-happy with the changes. New branding, more campaigns, bigger budgets.

Everything but the kitchen sink gets thrown at getting things moving again. The problem? Nobody’s stopped to check whether any of it is addressing the real issue.

And history suggests that’s a rather costly habit to develop.

Tropicana: Don’t throw away what already works

In 2009, Tropicana decided its orange juice packaging could do with a makeover.

Out went the familiar orange with a straw poking out of it. In came a minimalist design featuring a glass of juice.

Very modern. Very sophisticated. One rather large problem.

Customers struggled to recognise it.

Sales of Tropicana Pure Premium fell by around 20% in the weeks following the redesign, with the losses widely estimated at $27 million. Within two months, the original packaging was on its way back.

The costly bit wasn’t the redesign itself. It was losing something the brand had spent years building: recognition.

Customers knew the orange, the straw and the packaging they’d been picking up for years. Take those familiar details away, and suddenly you’ve made choosing your product that little bit harder.

There’s no point reinventing the wheel if the one you’ve already got is doing a perfectly good job.

Tropicana wasn’t the only one to get it wrong

History is littered with brands that got a little carried away with the idea of reinventing themselves. And some of them have gone down in branding history for all the wrong reasons.

Royal Mail became… Consignia? In 2001, one of Britain’s most recognisable names was replaced at corporate level with something that sounded more like a consultancy than a postal service. The change didn’t exactly win the nation over, and by 2002, Royal Mail was back. A reminder that familiarity and heritage aren’t things to casually wave goodbye to.

Leeds United managed to upset just about everyone. In 2018, the club unveiled a new badge featuring the famous Leeds salute. The reaction was, shall we say, less than glowing. Over 77,000 fans signed a petition opposing the new crest, forcing the club to rethink its plans. A rather spectacular reminder that football fans don’t take kindly to people messing with their identity.

JCPenney changed far more than its logo. The American retailer launched an ambitious transformation in 2012, overhauling its branding, marketing and pricing strategy. Unfortunately, shoppers didn’t share the enthusiasm for ditching discounts. Sales fell by around 25% that year, and JCPenney discovered that changing what customers already love about your business can be a rather risky experiment.

There’s a common thread running through all three. In the excitement of doing something new, they lost sight of what made people choose them in the first place.

Burberry: Sometimes the answer is getting back to what you’re good at

Burberry has spent decades making trench coats, scarves and that famous check unmistakably its own.

But after pushing further into high fashion and luxury leather goods, the brand started losing touch with some of the things customers loved about it.

So in 2024, it had a rethink. Its Burberry Forward strategy put the spotlight back on British heritage, outerwear and the products that had made it famous in the first place.

The wonderfully British It’s Always Burberry Weather campaign brought that thinking to life, and by 2025/26, sales performance was showing signs of improvement.

Sometimes getting back on track doesn’t mean reinventing yourself. It means remembering what made people fall for you in the first place.

Currys: Your biggest advantage might be right under your nose

Selling technology is a tricky business when practically everyone stocks the same products.

Rather than getting into a price war with half the internet, Currys played to its strengths. It doubled down on something online-only competitors couldn’t easily offer: knowledgeable people and proper, face-to-face advice.

The ones who know which television is worth buying, what laptop you actually need and why that suspiciously cheap washing machine might not be such a bargain.

Its Beyond Techspectations campaign turned that expertise into a wonderfully funny point of difference.

And with the wider strategy credited with £500 million in incremental revenue over two years, it’s fair to say the thinking paid off.

Sometimes the answer to growth has been standing on your shop floor all along.

Cyan and Casterbridge: Fix the problem, not just the appearance

This is something we see in our own work at Giant Peach.

When Cyan Solutions came to us, there was no need to throw their existing identity out of the window.

The foundations were there. We just needed to make better use of them. So we refreshed the brand, improved the website and made it much easier for customers to understand what Cyan could do for them.

The results? An 80% increase in traffic and 158% more contact form submissions within 90 days of launch, compared with the same period the previous year.

For Casterbridge Wealth, things were a little different. The business had evolved, becoming more modern and people-focused, but its branding hadn’t quite kept up.

We needed to bring the identity into the present without losing the trust and heritage that made Casterbridge what it was.

So we developed a fresh visual identity and digital presence that felt more contemporary, approachable and reflective of the people behind the business, while keeping that all-important sense of reassurance.

Different challenges call for different thinking. There’s not much sense prescribing the same solution to everyone..

Before you rebrand, try a Momentum Reset

When growth slows, our advice is to resist throwing everything but the kitchen sink at it.

Instead, start with four things:

Recognise what’s changed. Are enquiries slowing, opportunities disappearing or customers choosing competitors? Look at the evidence before jumping to conclusions.
Reassess what you know. Have your customers, competitors or ambitions changed? Are you still running your business on assumptions that were true five years ago?
Refocus your efforts. What’s the biggest thing holding you back? Perhaps your brand needs a complete rethink. Perhaps your website simply needs to work harder.
Realign everything. Make sure your strategy, branding, website and marketing are all pulling in the same direction. That’s what we call Strategic Coherence.

You might find that a complete rebrand is just what the doctor ordered. Or you might discover there’s a much simpler fix. Either way, you’ll know you’re spending your money on the right thing.

Don’t change everything. Change the right things.

We’re all for giving a brand a new lease of life. But spending a small fortune on a shiny new identity won’t necessarily get your business growing again.

Especially if the real problem has been hiding somewhere else all along.

At Giant Peach, we prefer to do a bit of digging first. Get to know the business, understand where things have come unstuck and work out which changes are actually worth making.

If that means a brilliant new brand, we’re in. If it means something else entirely, we’ll tell you.

Fancy having a chat? We’d love to hear what you’ve got in mind.