Let me start this week by being somewhat blunt. A rebrand won’t solve your brand problems if you’re solving the wrong problem to begin with. I have sat in enough rooms discussing brand and business development where the discrepancy between what the company now can deliver upon and the market’s perception of it IS the problem at hand. But where a rebrand as in “we will change our brand expression (how the company looks, sounds and behaves) to become someone new” IS NOT the way to go.

I get it though, it is easy to start talking about a rebrand when the urge of changing something grows strong. And quite honestly, if you bring in an agency of any kind, that agency will set you on a path of making their expertise the solution to your problem. (So choose wisely.) Sometimes the conversation is quickly moving towards naming, logo, colours and/or visual identity and the important discussion about whether or not their positioning is right or not to begin with is completely overlooked.

Before we begin today, let’s just settle on what a brand is. This is my way of defining it: A brand is the collective meaning the market constructs from your products, services, communication, behaviour, history and customer experiences.

So the real dilemma here is about
A) Changing what the company means, because the market is no longer supporting your ambitions. This means that you might have to change your positioning to be able to compete for other types of clients/customers, in new categories or on other terms.

B) Change what the market believes you are capable of delivering upon. In this scenario you already have relevant associations and established credibility, but the market is unaware of your full potential, range of offerings, or competence.

In alternative B, you have valuable brand equity worth keeping and further developing.

Both of these alternatives may need changes in your communication and design, but the strategic starting points are very different. They are also not mutually exclusive. As the market starts to believe in your new capabilities, the meaning of your brand may develop as well.

Take an accounting and advisory firm as an example. For the last decade, they have been laser-focused on developing their expertise, hiring new talent and broadening their range of services. What started as a traditional accounting firm has evolved into a company capable of advising clients on much more complex and strategic business decisions.

Inside the company, EVERYONE knows how much the company has changed. It is just unfortunate that it has been kept a secret from the market. And the consequence? The company receives the same types of enquiries about accounting and compliance, is compared with the same competitors and is approached to do the same kind of work as before.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s considerable value in being known for something. But when the market keeps coming to you for the same things it always has, your reputation may be limiting the opportunities you’re even considered for.

Say that this hypothetical accounting and advisory firm is strongly associated with competence, accuracy, knowledge and mastery. Its signals might place it in the Power & Mastery territory of Field of Meaning®. And say that the ambition of its leadership is to be seen as an innovative, transformational, leading-edge company. Then the perception of the company will have to move into the Innovation & Transformation territory, right?

The Field of Meaning® is my proprietary brand intelligence model. By analysing the signals a company sends through its communication, identity, offerings and behaviour, it helps map the meaning the company projects, how that relates to its competitors and where opportunities for stronger positioning may exist.

It depends.

I know this is a very unsexy answer, but it really does depend on the situation. Here’s why. You can either be restricted by the associations from the market to authentically establish credibility within your aspirational category, and if so – you actually need to change your strategic positioning. OR your current competence, accuracy, knowledge and mastery is exactly what makes these innovations credible. And IF SO, it could be much more profitable for you to make this connection more seen and felt than just abandoning your present position for something new and sparkling.

There are basically three risks you have to consider when deciding upon what type of a problem a rebrand would solve for you.

RISK 01 – Changing too much.

What if you have spent a decade or more establishing recognition, trust and distinctive associations. PLEASE do not run from this without a proper analysis. It is so easy to feel like “we need to modernise our look” and then come out on the other side looking generic or too much like your competitors. And even if you don’t, you might end up investing a lot of money into rebuilding that recognition, trust and distinctive associations you already had in the first place. That’s the basic definition of a waste of time and money…

RISK 02 – Not changing enough.

If you need to change how the market perceives you, changing the visual identity might raise some attention to your new logo, new website and new tonality. But if that’s the only thing you change, the people coming into contact with you might not see the difference in your potential performance. You still have to change the signals giving you permission to act in this new capability, or else your commercial limitation will remain intact.

RISK 03 – Promising more than you can prove.

A brand audit may come to the conclusion that the company has a lot of underused potential that they could explore to step up their game and grow. Significantly. It doesn’t mean that the organisation is ready to deliver upon it. Relevant client cases, documented results, demonstrable expertise, operational capacity and/or experience of this new category may be missing.

Say that you want to be perceived as a strategic transformational partner, but you are still only capable of delivering technical solutions. In this case, a rebrand could increase the expectations faster than the organisation develops its abilities to deliver on it. Then you might create a trust problem. And the louder you beat the change drum, the more obvious the gap between your promise and your delivery becomes..

Instead of telling the market you have changed, change the business reality first. Just because the position is strategically attractive doesn’t mean the market will allow you to occupy its place.

So, what decision do you need to make right now? Let me give you the same advice I will be giving a client of mine as soon as my brand audit of their rebrand is presented:

“Start by looking at what existing brand assets are creating value for you today, and which might be holding back your growth. Then choose what to keep, what to strengthen, what to develop and what to change in order for your company to grow.”

You might discover that the most valuable thing about your next rebrand is what you decide not to change.

Read the Signs. Your next chapter may depend on what you decide to bring with you from the last one.

You see, I wore an ASSA key around my neck when I was eleven. Twenty years later, when we bought our house, we installed an ASSA ABLOY lock on our front door. For as long as I can remember, I’ve associated the name with safety and security. So here I was, trusting it again in a hotel corridor in Berlin. I knew nothing about the technology behind that digital key. Apparently, I didn’t need to.

What I didn’t know before writing this article was that ASSA ABLOY had already started testing mobile hotel keys in Stockholm back in 2010. In 2012, Seos was commercially launched. Since then, the company’s solutions have continued to develop across digital identities, electronic access control and automated entrances. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

The technology has changed enormously since I first wore that key around my neck. But the underlying purpose is remarkably familiar: making sure the right people can get through a locked door. And apparently, that was enough for me.

When Reputation Gets There First

Now, imagine that the app had displayed the name of another established company. One that you’d known for years, but for something completely unrelated to security. It could have produced an equally secure digital key, employed equally competent engineers and produced an equally secure digital lock. Would I have felt the same relief on seeing its name? I doubt it.

Plenty of established companies have expanded through acquisitions, developed new services or entered new markets. They’ve spent considerable money acquiring capabilities their existing customers may have no idea they possess. And so their reputation can be excellent, their new offer equally so, while potential customers still don’t think of them when that particular need arises.

The resulting commercial limitation isn’t necessarily a lack of capability.
It may be a lack of perceived relevance.

And for newer businesses, the situation can be even more frustrating. They haven’t yet had the opportunity to establish the associations that make an unfamiliar offer feel credible. You can have exactly what a potential customer needs, and still never make it onto their shortlist. No pitch to lose. You weren’t even invited.

The Reputation Stretch Test

So, how much further could your existing reputation take your business? And what might it be preventing people from seeing? Here’s something to try. Five minutes, a piece of paper and four questions.

1. What are we known for?

Write down three things you believe potential customers associate with your company. Be clear about which are based on actual customer feedback and which are your own assumptions.

2. What else can we do?

Identify one existing service or capability that potential customers may not naturally associate with your company.

3. What gives us permission?

Look at your first two answers. Is there an existing association that could make this additional capability feel credible?
Think ASSA ABLOY: physical locks → secure access → digital keys. And if you can’t find a natural connection, that’s worth knowing too.

4. What’s missing?

What would a potential customer need to know, see or experience to believe you could deliver this additional service?

You won’t know what the entire market thinks after five minutes with a piece of paper. But you may discover something about your business that deserves a closer look.

The Key I Already Trusted

Back in Berlin, the ASSA ABLOY name occupied a tiny corner of my phone screen. It wasn’t even the app’s main brand. I find it rather amusing that a name I first got to know through a metal key around my neck at eleven could make me feel better about waving my phone at a hotel door decades later. The technology had certainly moved on and my trust in the name had come along for the ride.

Read the Signs looks at what companies teach the market to believe about them. Including the things the market keeps believing long after the company has moved on.

A couple of days ago, McLaren Racing told the world that it is changing its identity. Specifically their wordmark. My feed did not wait for any explanation.

The immediate response called it a hotel-look-alike (Marriott). People wondered whether or not McLaren had confused themselves to be in the wine or the fashion brand industry. Someone even asked if they thought they were Ralph Lauren. In other words, they were calling out a generic luxury brand. “The notion of speed is lost” they said. And then my feed continued to fill up with comments about what McLaren had lost.

Until someone stopped reacting and went straight to the source itself.

The new wordmark is in fact not really new. More like re-introduced. It was the sign that hung above the McLaren’s family business (the service station) where Bruce McLaren grew up.

So the feed changed its behaviour. It was now looked upon as a heritage wordmark and all of a sudden “it all makes sense”. I disagree. No, I strongly disagree. But let’s look at what McLaren itself is saying, shall we?

Because not only is the old wordmark back. So is the heritage shield, the speedy kiwi, the papaya, ember, midnight, anthracite and places from Bruce’s history. When McLaren talks about this identity change, it uses words such as question, make, improve, progress, movement, speed, precision and maverick spirit. That is an unusually consistent language, pushing the consistency with its original meaning.

How, then, can people hear these words and still infer boutique hotel?

Well, if we take a closer look at this updated origin wordmark, what we see is less forward movement and less visual aggression. I’d even call it less overall expression, giving way to greater restraint with more composure and authority.

In isolation, without ever hearing anything about the origin story, the wordmark sits a heck of a lot closer to the visual codes associated with the premium and luxury position within the Power & Mastery territory in the Field of Meaning®. What we have here are not random responses. People are reading the new signal perfectly reasonably.

A signal, however, never means anything alone. We have to get the context to be able to read whether or not this new signal will add up to the brand meaning.

The colour papaya still carries visibility and racing history. The speedmark still carries motion. The reintroduction of the Speedy Kiwi brings back personality and provenance. The word “racing” continues to carry energy and performance. “Automotive” carries engineering.

Ok? All I can hear in my head is “why are they throwing everything they’ve got on this origin story about this company?”

Some research later, I realise that there is another piece of context worth keeping in mind. In April 2025, McLaren Automotive was acquired by the Abu Dhabi-based CYVN Holdings. They have an outspoken ambition to “redefine the high-performance and luxury sectors” and expand McLaren into new product categories. There we go.

So, what we are looking at is a brand being redesigned at precisely the moment its owners are preparing to build a much bigger business on what McLaren already means.

After a little more digging I found golf clubs with a price tag of $375/£360 per club. And after looking at it more closely, McLaren Golf looks almost like a laboratory test for the new brand strategy. It would have been so easy for them to just slap on the new wordmark to some expensive golf clubs and go for the old “The choice of the best” (Roger Federer selling the coffee machine Jura back in the day, premium chooses premium if you prefer plain English). But they didn’t. They went for the engineering excellence giving way to precision through the choice of materials that provide performance = McLaren standards.

The people behind this rebrand obviously went looking for what McLaren already means that remains valuable inside the golf category. And then they started to look at other categories for their brand expansion. Could they do a Koenigsegg? Yes. They can build custom-made rarities with their craftsmanship and bespoke mastery. Could they start a fashion brand? Their answer was obviously yes. Could they create McLaren experiences and memberships? It looks like it. Why?

Because McLaren is consciously redistributing the meaning. And for that, the wordmark had to change. The old logo itself did a lot of semantic work. The choice to go back to the origin wordmark (with some modernised updates) is a choice to let the mark do less. Which means that other assets now have to carry more.

When you look at it with no surrounding context it can feel like a hotel. Beside papaya, carbon, the Speedmark and a Formula 1 car it still unmistakably belongs to McLaren racing.

Context isn’t pure decoration. The signal changes meaning depending on what surrounds it.

What we are looking at is a masterbrand that has become calmer, allowing it to operate in premium environments. By choice. Because they already have the ingredients to carry genuine luxury: rarity, mastery, engineering, bespoke craft, provenance, access and extraordinary products. But do they have what it takes to make those luxury signals add up to a version of luxury that could only belong to McLaren?

Well, they have done it before. Just look at the papaya colour. I don’t think Bruce sat down and thought “how can I make this orange colour feel McLaren”. He wanted to stand out. He wanted visibility. And since no one at the time was racing in orange cars, that became his colour. And as with all signals, over time, the behaviour + repetition + Bruce’s racing success loaded it up with meaning.

Can they do it again? The service station typography has immediate provenance, yes. Whether or not it acquires the distinction needed for it to add to the meaning of the new broader McLaren brand, however, depends on what happens next.

The risk, as I see it, is that McLaren has created a wordmark designed to travel further than the previous one. The irony is that the further it travels from cars and racing, the fewer existing McLaren signals are surrounding it.

I’d say that McLaren has made an interesting bet by removing meaning from the logo and asking the public to accept the meaning distribution through the brand.

Read the Signs. The further McLaren travels, the more its meaning will depend on what travels with it

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Lovable is doing something objectively interesting. On their way past $400M ARR with an incredibly lean team, they leaned away from increasingly saturated and expensive distribution channels like paid marketing and organic search and into a strategy they call “Employee-Led Socials”, effectively turning the people inside the company into an organic distribution network.

And I agree – this is an extraordinary distribution asset.

Distribution is however only half of it. Because every employee talking about the brand in social media is also contributing signals about what Lovable means. The brand potential is undeniable, but so is the need for coherence.

If you rolled out the “Employee-Led Social”-approach tomorrow, would your employees collectively strengthen the meaning of your company or would it reveal that nobody inside quite agrees what it is?

Enter the “Fish-vs-Shark” approach.

In a 2010 ad, Accenture shows a school of small fish arranging themselves into the shape of a shark.

For the fish to form the shark, they must somehow know where to swim. Employee-led distribution exposes whether people inside the business genuinely share an understanding of what the company means. And social media just makes that internal condition observable.

You see, no single fish looks like a shark. The shark exists only at the level of the collective. One employee post is just one employee post. But when 45 people consistently post related signals, the pattern begins to outrun the individual parts.

And just because the fish start to coordinate, they do not become more powerful on an individual level. What happens is that their coordination changes the meaning they are sending. Their relationship to one another changes how they are interpreted. The fish cannot declare themselves a shark. Someone looking at them has to see one.

And scale changes this game. The strategy that works brilliantly while cultural knowledge is shared among the few becomes increasingly dependent on an explicit organising principle as the organisation expands. The alignment therefore has to exist before anyone starts thinking about what to post.

When people share a clear enough understanding of what the company means, they can make very different choices about what to say and still move in the same direction. At scale, those individual choices start adding up to something larger. You are decentralising hundreds of small decisions that shape how the company is perceived. What is worth talking about? What do we pay attention to? What feels natural for us to say? What would feel completely wrong? Each decision is made individually, but the meaning they create is collective.

So what I am saying is this: distribution without alignment produces fish, not a shark.

You can give 100 employees audiences, content support and posting systems. If what they collectively signal does not resolve into something recognisable, you have increased the reach of the brand without increasing the strength of the pattern.

The power appears at the level of the pattern.

Read the Signs looks at how individual signals become collective meaning. And what happens when everyone starts sending them.

Have you ever said, or heard someone say, “We’ve outgrown our brand.”

It sounds like a diagnosis. But it isn’t. All it really tells us is that the company and the brand have moved apart.

And that can happen for very different reasons.

The company has grown. New offers have been added, new markets entered, new capabilities acquired and new ideas are probably already brewing that could reshape the business again.

According to PwC’s 29th Global CEO Survey, 42% of CEOs say their companies have started competing in new sectors or industries during the past five years. And among CEOs planning at least one major acquisition in the next three years, 44% expect to make deals outside their current industry. These companies are not simply getting bigger. They are changing shape.

So when the brand starts feeling slightly out of sync with the business, updating it can seem like the obvious next move. I wouldn’t be so quick.

Two things moving apart only tells us that there is now a gap where there previously was none. It says absolutely nothing about whether or not one has moved in the right direction. If either did.

I see at least three possible diagnoses.

01. The obvious one: the brand has fallen behind.

Sometimes this is exactly what has happened. The company has consciously changed the position it wants to occupy. Its strategic centre of gravity has moved. What the business wants the market to understand about it today is genuinely different from the meaning the existing brand has accumulated.

In that case, yes, the brand may be optimised for a company that no longer exists. And the brand needs to move with it.

02. The opposite diagnosis.

But say the company became successful while standing for something unusually clear. Something the market understood. Something distinctive enough to accumulate meaning over time.

Then perhaps the company is the one that moved.

Not because anyone decided to abandon that position. Drift is usually less dramatic than that. The business simply keeps making sensible decisions in response to what happens next. Each one is easy to justify at the time. In fact, that is rather the problem.

But direction can change by degrees. And by the time the pattern becomes visible, the company may already be somewhere nobody consciously chose to go.

This is why I would be careful with a rebrand.

Because if the brief becomes “make the brand reflect everything we are today” the new brand may end up doing something much more consequential: it may turn strategic drift into something that looks deliberate.

Once the brand has been rebuilt around everything the company has accumulated, all those decisions suddenly acquire the appearance of a strategy.

Perhaps they do. Perhaps they don’t.

I know I would want to find out before spending a considerable amount of money making them look coherent.

03. And then there is another possibility altogether.

Perhaps we are expecting the company and the brand to overlap more than they need to.

Really? Really.

A company can become considerably more complex without what it means becoming equally complex.

Every time a company grows, it acquires more things it could say about itself. And at some point, trying to make all of them equally representative starts making the brand less specific.

So here is a somewhat counter-intuitive proposition:

What if the bigger a company becomes, the less of the company its brand needs to represent?

When a company is small, the business and the brand can almost overlap. What the founders believe, what the company sells, how it behaves and what customers understand may all sit very close together.

Growth changes that.

The company becomes capable of being many things at once. The market, however, still has to make sense of it.

Which means the role of the brand may change as the organisation grows. Increasingly, its job is to filter what gets to define the whole. The brand does not need to explain everything the company does. But it does need to be absolutely clear about what the company as a whole is supposed to mean. Inside the organisation. And outside it.

That would give the brand a very different role in growth. Not to keep expanding every time the company expands, but to become increasingly selective about what all that growth is allowed to mean.

Growth gives a company more things to say.
It doesn’t necessarily give the brand more things to mean.

Read the Signs looks at the signals companies accumulate as they grow. And which ones get to define the whole.

Because companies do not make branding decisions in isolation. They make business decisions. They change pricing. Launch products. Restructure offers. Enter markets. Hire people. Change sales processes. Improve customer experience. Rewrite websites…

And every one of those decisions says something about the company.

After my last entrepreneurial endeavour, I had the privilege to take a sabbatical and think about what I wanted to do next. My tipping point came when I gave myself permission to deep dive into one of my true work passions: semiotics.

Briefly, semiotics is the study of how signs create meaning — and, in branding, how everything a business says, shows and does is interpreted by people and gradually builds a position in their minds.

The second work passion of mine is psychology. So if semiotics explains the how, psychology gives us the why.

Why people understand. Why people trust. Why people remember. Why people buy.

So I set out to research whether the how could help explain the why.

It may have been a dark January day outside, but inside the lamp of diligence shone brightly. With the help of AI, I started digging through research from multiple disciplines looking for answers.

Did I find what I was looking for? No.
I found something better.

I found a way of understanding how the signals surrounding a company accumulate into meaning. And when I reverse engineered that, I found a way of understanding what position those signals are actually creating. Which changed how I think about the idea of a “strong brand”.

I no longer think strong or weak is particularly useful. I think a company can be sending a coherent signal. Or its signals can interfere with one another, cancel each other out or accumulate into noise.

The simplest explanation I can give you is this: everything about a brand comes down to signals, signal coherence and a meaningful position. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s ease into it.

First of all, everything about your brand is about your business.

Your brand isn’t something you build through marketing alone. It is how the market perceives you through every interaction it has with you.

Yes, your visual brand is important. Shapes, forms, colours, images, fonts, logos and graphics all send signals that are easily read by potential clients.

And that is only the surface.

The tonality you use through your website, social media, newsletters, offers, customer support, sales pitches and even how you answer the phone sends signals too.

Did it get more complex? Absolutely.

Are we done? Not even close.

Because how you guide prospective clients on your website sends signals. The steps in your sales process add signals. How your offers are structured and priced sends signals.

Business decisions that nobody thinks of as “branding” are constantly influencing what the company means from the outside.

Most companies have an intended position. They work intentionally towards that position. But that’s not always where their accumulated signals are actually placing them.

So if everything you do creates a signal, what does it all add up to?

For the sake of simplicity, let’s look at a few things that can happen when signals meet.

The first one is what we aim for: signal coherence.

It appears when what the company says, shows and does reinforces the same underlying meaning.

A.k.a. everything that is done in the company, for the company, by the company is in phase with the company.

(That was maybe more cleverly put than clear, but I know you got that.)

The second one is signal interference.

Signals don’t necessarily just sit next to each other. They affect each other.

Premium + eccentricity, for example, does not necessarily mean premium + eccentricity to the person interpreting it. Together, those signals might create artistic authority. Connoisseurship. Fashion. Pretension. Something that wasn’t really present in either signal on its own.

So interference isn’t necessarily bad. It can strengthen the meaning of a company. It can shift it. Or it can create an interpretation nobody intended.

It depends on what the signals do to each other — and what else is going on around them.

The third one is signal cancellation.

A distinctive point of view that would make your company stand out is being pulled back (balanced, some may say) with so many reassurances that it loses the intended edge.

Cancellation reduces the net force of meaning.

Not confusion, but neutrality. (And that can sometimes be just as bad.)

The last one is signal noise.

There are just so many things going on at once, well thought-through things, no doubt — but not supporting each other — that no clear pattern really emerges.

Individually, they may all make sense. Together, they don’t. Too much information. Too little meaning. Noise.

Quick recap: Everything a company does creates signals. Those signals accumulate, interact and shape meaning. Sometimes they reinforce each other. Sometimes they weaken each other. Sometimes they cancel each other out. And sometimes their combination creates something that wasn’t there before.

That is what it all adds up to.

Read the Signs looks at what a company says, shows and does — and what it all adds up to.