We If The Shack

Bad rebranding is hilarious. Good rebranding is boring.

A word of advice for nervous founders and executives. If you’re yearning for someone to tell you what your brand “really is,” stop. Forget it. Find a good psychologist instead.

The current marketing regime demands you pay an agency to rebrand your company. This despite historical precedent that successful rebrands are almost always fast, practical decisions emanating from the clear vision of a founder. Yet inside branding agencies, hundreds of logo variations cover the walls: a thicker line here, an oval instead of a circle there, and this one, oh with this one we really went wild.

The brand mark is just the tip of the iceberg. Before the logo phase, thousands of billable hours and hundreds of deck slides are spent “defining the brand,”—essentially a months-long career coaching session complete with Jungian archetype wheels and lengthy manifestos. For big companies, the process costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It’s mostly an exercise in absolute futility. Presenting a zillion sl…