The 100k invisible rebrand

A closer look at modern rebranding

Every few months, another headline drops: “Company X unveils new logo after multimillion-dollar rebrand.” The logo shows up on Twitter feeds, and the comments follow a familiar script. “Wait, what changed?” Designers squint, the general public shrugs, and the brand drops a glossy video about “a bold new chapter.”

So why do brands spend six figures for a logo that looks almost identical to the old one?

Logos are barely moving. Branding is sprinting.

The truth is the logo is no longer the star of the rebrand show. Most of the big changes happen elsewhere:

• Custom fonts that make every headline instantly recognisable (think Airbnb, Netflix, or TripAdvisor).

• Expanded colour systems that can flex across dozens of services and sub-brands (Amazon is king here).

• Motion design that carries more personality than a static logo ever could. Watch Walmart’s smiley roll into frame or Mastercard’s circles pulse and you’ll get it.

What looks like “just a logo tweak” is actually a full-scale refresh of the brand’s design ecosystem. The cost reflects not the kerning on a wordmark, but the entire machine that supports it. We often also decide to not work so much on a logo but rather on everything that goes around it like we did for Virya.

A brand today is bigger than its logo

A brand once lived in shopfront signs, business cards, and maybe a TV commercial. Today it lives in app icons, loading screens, video ads, packaging, sound cues, social media stickers, even AR filters.

You could cover the Apple logo on an iPhone and still know it’s Apple. You could remove the arches from McDonald’s fries packaging and the red-and-yellow block still screams Big Mac. Nike’s swoosh barely needs to appear in their ads anymore. The brand is the experience, not the symbol.

“A logo tweak costs six figures because it’s never just a logo tweak.”

In that reality, a logo tweak is often enough. The audience already knows the brand. The job now is to keep it sharp, consistent, and flexible across every modern touchpoint.

The psychology of “not too different”

There’s also a human factor. Once a brand becomes woven into everyday life, people grow attached to it. Swap it out for something radically new, and backlash is inevitable.

Football clubs have learned this the hard way. Juventus, Manchester City, and even Cercle Brugge faced fury when they modernised their crests. Fans hated the change… until they didn’t. With time, people forgot the outrage and wore the new crests with pride.

For global brands, it’s safer to evolve than to reinvent. Familiarity protects equity. Minor refinements avoid revolt. And yes, it means the average consumer may not notice what changed, but that invisibility is sometimes the point.

Where the money really goes

That headline number (100k, 500k, sometimes millions) doesn’t just buy a new vector file. It buys:

• Research into how audiences perceive the brand across cultures.

• Weeks of workshops to define new positioning.

• A proprietary typeface that no competitor can copy.

• Motion guidelines that make every animation feel unmistakably “them.”

• Systems that scale from a smartwatch icon to a stadium banner.

“Modern rebranding is about entire ecosystems (motion, fonts, systems) not just marks.”

The logo is the visible tip of an iceberg. The expensive part is the submerged structure that ensures consistency across a global empire.

Curious to see how we bring brands to life?
Explore our branding projects in the cases section.