Bold Rebrand, Bigger Risk: What It Takes to Reposition a Brand Well

In November 2024, Jaguar released a rebrand film with no cars in it. Just models in candy-coloured suits, a stripped-back sans-serif wordmark, and the line "copy nothing." Within 48 hours the video had racked up 160 million views, Elon Musk had asked the brand's account a four-word question that picked up 7 million views of its own, and a Bild poll of 18,000 people found 93% of them thought the new Jaguar was "creepy." By April 2025, Jaguar's European sales had crashed 97.5%, from 1,961 units the year before to just 49.

That's the thing nobody tells you about bold rebrands: they don't fail quietly. Get one wrong and it becomes a case study people are still dissecting a decade later. This is exactly the tension a good brand repositioning agency has to manage on every single project, whatever the scale.

Why Bold Rebrands Carry Bigger Stakes Than Everyone Assumes

Jaguar isn't the only cautionary tale. Gap swapped its serif logo for bold black Helvetica in October 2010, no announcement, no build-up, and had reverted within six days, after a parody-logo site collected almost 14,000 spoof entries and a protest Twitter account picked up 5,000 followers overnight.

Tropicana ditched the orange-with-a-straw for a plain glass of juice in 2009 and watched sales of its Pure Premium line drop 20% in six weeks, a reported $30 million gone before the packaging quietly went back to normal.

Even Burberry's much-admired 2018 rebrand (Riccardo Tisci, Peter Saville, a slick new "TB" monogram replacing the century-old knight) didn't survive contact with reality: five years later, under Daniel Lee, the knight was back and the monogram was gone.

Every one of these was creatively accomplished work from serious names. What they had in common wasn't bad design. It was a repositioning built on instinct instead of evidence, launched without the audience being brought along for the ride.

Compare that with Mastercard, which dropped its own name from its logo in 2019 and kept only the interlocking red and yellow circles, a call it could make with confidence because testing showed more than 80% of people already recognised the symbol without the word "Mastercard" next to it.

Or Dunkin', which tested "Dunkin'" without the "Donuts" in real stores for over a year before making the switch official in 2019, precisely because customers had already started calling it that themselves. Bold, in both cases. Reckless, in neither.

It's not just about being bold, it's whether the boldness is built on something.

You don't need to go viral, being bold doesn't require making global headlines, for better or for worse. Most successful repositioning work happens quietly. A brand finds its edge, launches it properly, and simply starts winning more of the room it's in without ever trending or triggering a newspaper poll. That's exactly the kind of bold Wildish & Co has built a habit of getting right.

Wildish & Co: Brand Repositioning That Works

Here's four of our rebrands showing what that bravery actually looks like in practice: real repositioning, not a surface-level refresh, each one taking a genuine risk with what the brand stood for. Rather than defaulting to safe, incremental changes when a client comes to them feeling like their brand has fallen behind, building the repositioning strategy first and lets the visual boldness follow from it.

Divine Chocolate: Repositioning Ethics as Flavour, Not Just a Feel-Good Purchase

Divine Chocolate had a genuinely rare story to tell: a Fairtrade bar co-owned by the Ghanaian cocoa farmers who grow it, on shelves since 1998. The problem was that "ethical chocolate" had become a crowded shelf in its own right, and a wave of newer, taste-led brands were eating into Divine's space. Rather than lean harder into the ethics message, our bold brand transformation repositioned Divine around flavour and premium quality first: hand-drawn illustrations of Ghanaian cocoa landscapes, a new serif typeface (Holise Medium) for warmth and craft, and a brighter, more vibrant palette layered over the brand's core dark green and cream.

Post-launch testing showed a significant lift in shelf standout, taste appeal and overall brand attractiveness. Proof that repositioning around what customers actually want (taste) outperforms repositioning around what a brand wants to be known for (virtue).

Toilet Twinning: Making an Unmentionable Cause Impossible to Ignore

Toilet Twinning funds toilets in communities without safe sanitation, which is about as unglamorous a brief as branding gets. Our answer, Flushing Out the Old for a Bold Rebrand & Launch Campaign, was to lean straight into the discomfort rather than soften it: a hand-drawn logo, a punchy, vivid blue palette, and a campaign called "Find Your Toilet's Other Half" that reframed a donation as a personal, slightly cheeky connection between two bathrooms on opposite sides of the world. It's a genuinely bold repositioning move, taking a charity's most awkward subject matter and turning it into the hook, and it worked because the tone of voice matched the confidence of the visual identity at every touchpoint, from social to print to the physical certificate donors received.

Spacemade: Repositioning From B2B Real Estate to a Brand People Actually Feel Something For

Spacemade, the UK's fastest-growing flexible workspace operator, needed to reposition from a purely B2B real estate play into something that resonated with individual members too.

We built Spacemade's new identity around a simple rectangular "S" that doubles as an open doorway and a framing device for photography of the people who actually use the spaces, then rolled it out consistently across 11-plus physical locations, digital platforms and out-of-home advertising. It's a rebrand that proves repositioning doesn't always mean changing what a company sells. Sometimes it means changing who the brand makes room for.

Ding: Building a Disruptive Sub-Brand From Nothing But a Product Brief

HomeServe didn't need a rebrand so much as an entirely new brand: one built to launch a home-repair subscription service with zero existing recognition to lean on.

Our answer was Ding, a name as easy to say as it is to remember, a mascot animated to signal warmth and speed, and a bold, expanding headline font designed to feel both reliable and full of motion. It's the boldest kind of repositioning brief there is, starting from a blank page under serious time pressure, and it proves bold doesn't require an existing brand to break away from. Sometimes it just requires nerve on day one.

What These Four Rebrands Actually Have in Common

None of these four projects needed reversing within a week, and none of them needed a viral moment to prove they'd worked. What they share is an agency that treats the strategy stage as non-negotiable before a single colour or typeface gets chosen. It's the same lesson as the headline-grabbing examples above, just proved quietly instead of publicly: bravery pointed at the right target tends to hold up, and bravery pointed anywhere else tends not to. It's also, incidentally, why so many rebrands stall long before they ever reach a customer: the boldness gets agreed in a workshop, then quietly diluted every time nobody's checked it against a strategy strong enough to defend it.

If your brand is sitting somewhere between "we've outgrown this identity" and "we're one workshop away from our own Gap logo moment," that instinct is worth listening to either way.

Have a browse through Wildish & Co's branding work to see what bold repositioning looks like when the strategy underneath it actually holds up. Some of it might look eerily like the brand you're picturing when you imagine what yours could become.