Brand Strategy & Design
by OneZeroEight
Sept 15, 2026
4 Mins Read
Companies once rebranded when the identity looked dated. Increasingly, the more important question is whether the brand still describes the business it represents.
A company can have a perfectly good logo and still have a brand problem.
The website looks modern. The colour palette works. Nobody is embarrassed by the presentation deck. Yet sales keeps saying, “We actually do much more than this now.” Leadership describes the business differently from the homepage. New products sit awkwardly under an old proposition.
Nothing looks particularly broken.
But something no longer fits.
That may be the more useful way to think about rebranding now. A brand doesn't have to look old to become outdated. The business simply has to move ahead of it.
There is a familiar rule floating around branding conversations: companies should revisit their brands every five, seven or ten years.
It sounds neat. Businesses rarely are.
PwC's 2025 Global CEO Survey, covering 4,701 CEOs across 109 countries and territories, found that 63% had taken at least one significant action in the previous five years to change how their company creates, delivers or captures value. Thirty-eight percent had started competing in a new sector.
PwC's 2026 survey shows that cross-sector movement hasn't gone away: 42% of CEOs said their companies had begun competing in new sectors over the previous five years.
Think about what that means for a brand created around an earlier business model.
The calendar may say three years. The business may have lived through ten years' worth of change.
AI adds another wrinkle.
For some companies, AI is a new feature. For others, it changes the product, service model, competitive set and even the category the company wants to belong to.
KPMG's 2025 India CEO Outlook found that 78% of Indian CEOs said their leadership had a clear view of how AI would disrupt their business models and create new opportunities. Fifty-seven percent planned to allocate 10% to 20% of their budgets to AI over the following 12 months.
That creates an interesting branding problem.
A business might move from consulting to technology-enabled services. A software product might become a broader platform. A specialist provider might start selling to the enterprise.
Yet the brand can remain anchored to the original idea.
A company can outgrow its positioning long before it outgrows its logo.
Expansion rarely arrives neatly.
There are new services. A second product. An acquisition. Another geography. Perhaps a sub-brand was created because the original architecture couldn't accommodate what came next.
Deloitte's 2025 M&A Trends Survey of 1,500 US corporate and private-equity executives found that 84% of corporations had restructured during the previous 12 months or were doing so at the time of the survey. It also found that 85% expected their interest in foreign acquisitions to increase, with market expansion and access to technology among the leading reasons.
Brand architecture has to absorb all of that.
This is why M&A has long been a natural rebrand trigger. Landor's study of more than 2,300 acquisitions by S&P Global 100 companies found that 74% of acquired assets were rebranded within seven years of acquisition. The research is older, but it remains useful because it directly connects structural business change with subsequent brand change.
The issue isn't “Does the new logo look contemporary?”
It is closer to: Can customers still understand what belongs where, what the company stands for and why the expanded business makes sense together?
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