Brand Relaunches That Failed (and What You Can Learn From Them)
Rebranding is like open-heart surgery on your business — thrilling when it works, fatal when it doesn’t.
And while the successes make the highlight reels, the failures?
They make for better stories.
So let’s grab a glass, dim the lights, and learn from a few famous identity crises that remind us:
great brands evolve; bad ones panic.
1. Tropicana’s Minimalist Meltdown
Remember when Tropicana ditched its iconic orange-with-a-straw for a soulless white box?
The internet sure does.
In 2009, the juice giant spent $35 million on a rebrand that screamed generic supermarket knockoff. Sales plummeted 20% in two months.
The Lesson:
When you strip away emotion in the name of “modern,” you strip away memory, too.
People don’t buy packaging. They buy recognition.
And when you remove every cue they loved, they don’t say “Wow, clean design!” — they say “Where the hell’s my orange juice?”
✏️ If your new brand looks like it’s still waiting for its logo, you’ve gone too minimalist.
2. Gap’s One-Week Identity Crisis
Gap’s 2010 rebrand is now a marketing urban legend.
They replaced their classic blue box logo with something that looked like a PowerPoint template for a mid-tier SaaS startup.
Public backlash was instant. The logo lasted six days.
The Lesson:
You can’t “innovate” your way out of irrelevance by pretending you’re a tech company.
A rebrand should be a reflection of evolution, not desperation.
Translation: You can’t fix cultural decline with Helvetica.
3. RadioShack’s “The Shack” Phase
There was a brief, shining moment in 2009 when RadioShack decided its salvation was… nicknaming itself.
They wanted to sound cool and relevant to Gen Z before Gen Z existed.
Spoiler: “The Shack” didn’t work.
You can’t escape obsolescence with slang.
The Lesson:
Rebranding isn’t about sounding younger. It’s about staying useful.
If your business model is outdated, no tagline can save you.
Brand strategy is surgery, not contouring. Don’t try to “youth filter” your existential crisis.
4. Pepsi’s $1 Million Smile
Pepsi spent a reported $1 million on a logo redesign in 2008 — plus a 27-page brand manifesto explaining how their new smile aligned with the gravitational pull of the Earth.
We wish we were joking.
The Lesson:
No amount of cosmic geometry can justify a logo that looks like it tripped over itself.
If your brand story needs a physics lecture to make sense, it’s not differentiation — it’s delusion.
Simplicity isn’t the enemy of depth. Pretension is.
5. Weight Watchers’ “WW” Identity Diet
In 2018, Weight Watchers decided “weight” was too negative and rebranded as WW, short for “Wellness that Works.”
Noble intent.
But consumers were confused — and the brand’s core reason for existing vanished overnight.
The Lesson:
If you’re going to evolve your meaning, bring your audience with you.
You can’t just rename yourself and hope people follow.
Because “WW” could mean anything — and in branding, “anything” often means nothing.
When you broaden your meaning too far, you lose the only meaning that mattered.
So, What Do These Fails Have in Common?
None of them started with strategy.
They started with fear.
Fear of irrelevance. Fear of competitors. Fear of change itself.
The result?
Brands that forgot what made them them.
How to Avoid the Hall of Shame
Don’t start with design. Start with truth.
(A prettier logo won’t fix a fuzzy story.)Evolve what works. Kill what doesn’t.
Don’t bulldoze everything for the thrill of “new.”Test your new story. If your audience can’t explain it in one sentence, it’s not ready.
Have courage, not chaos. Great brands don’t change for attention. They change for alignment.
Final Thought
Every failed rebrand was once a well-funded committee with good intentions.
But intention doesn’t sell. Meaning does.
The goal isn’t to be new.
It’s to be true, bold, and unignorable.
At TheorySF, we don’t chase trends.
We build brands that would rather own their category than apologize for existing.
Thinking about a rebrand? Let’s make sure it’s for the right reasons.
Schedule a Brand Strategy Session →
