Resist the rebrand: the discipline that protects a brand

The counterweight to everything fast in the AI era comes from the person marketing the fastest-moving product of all. Imke Dannhauser, whose brand training runs through Carling Black Label, McKinsey and Google, has the clearest rule we've heard on when not to reposition.

"With everything in you, resist the urge to constantly reposition your brand. It's not just the cost of re-establishing what the brand stands for — which takes years. It's what you're walking away from: the investment behind your previous positioning, and the memory structures that give people a shortcut about what you're about."

Memory structures are assets. When someone sees your brand and instantly knows what it's for, that shortcut took years and money to build. A rebrand throws it away.

The evidence bar

When repositioning genuinely is on the table, Imke demands evidence in order: losses in both consideration and usage in the brand funnel (current users leaving, few new ones arriving), plus decaying emotional attributes such as "a brand I trust" and "a brand for me." And even that, she stresses, is "the start of your hypothesis, not licence to reposition." Interrogate consumers first, then make a considered, board-approved decision. Sequence matters too: proposition first, then the touchpoints you control (CI, website, advertising), then the slow, sensitive ones. In beer, she notes, touch the packaging and "suddenly I have a headache when I drink it."

Freshly consistent, not consistently fresh

Her phrase for the discipline AI-era brands need most:

"You want to be freshly consistent — the same positioning, brought to life in new and engaging ways. The other way around, consistently fresh, is starting a new building every time with a new brick."

Marketers get bored faster than their consumers do, and today's tools make acting on that boredom dangerously cheap. Her Carling Cup story shows the compounding alternative: one consumer insight, that every fan is an armchair coach so let them pick the team, refreshed in its articulation for over a decade and never replaced.

And on the eternal brand-versus-performance fight, her weight-loss analogy deserves wide circulation. Brand building is the long-term healthy-choices regime, but that doesn't mean the scale shows nothing after week one. Brand work can and should drive direct, measurable behaviour along the way. "Thinking about brand building as just warm and fuzzy pretty pictures is wrong."

Try this week: write your brand's one-sentence position and check your last ten pieces of content against it. Freshly consistent, or consistently fresh? And if a rebrand is being discussed anywhere near you, table the evidence bar before the mood boards appear.

Sourced from recorded, on-the-record interviews on the South African Digital Marketing Podcast. Every practitioner quoted above is named in the text.

First published on the SA Marketers' Circle.