Rebrands: you either love them or hate them.
As a customer, there’s something terribly unsettling when your favourite brand decides to change things up on you. There’s also the potential to discover a brand whose new shift in ethos suddenly has your interest piqued.
For companies, the endless possibilities that a rebrand project offers can be incredibly exciting. This is usually counterbalanced with the challenge of striking a happy medium between progression and innovation.
This year has been a particularly active one for rebrands. Businesses are quickly finding that meeting customer expectation and adapting to ever-changing technological advancements requires lighting quick reactions and a trigger finger faster than Clint Eastwood’s.
To keep hard-won market share, a handful of big brands have undergone transformations this year. Here are five of our most noteworthy brand transformations and the story behind them.
Kickstarter
Crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter, have been shaking things up since 2009 and have helped 14 million people back 136,143 projects during that time. They’ve publicly stated that the aim of the rebrand was to look more ‘grown up’— apparently all that revolutionary fundraising makes a relatively youthful brand want to grow a beard and hit puberty.
They commissioned New York-based design studio Order with the visual brief of ‘a haircut not a makeover’. Although they were only after a wordmark alteration, the end result has been so transformative that it has made waves in the creative community, making it a prime candidate for a 2017 rebrand roundup.