By James Kwon
05/30/2024
By James Kwon
When one of your favorite brands undergoes an overhaul, it feels like tectonic plates are shifting in your brain.
A rebrand is a rebirth, a metamorphosis that transforms a caterpillar into a butterfly. It denotes an evolution in the way a brand connects the dots between their prevailing “WHY” and our imagination.
Whether it’s a change to the name of their business, a redesign of their logo, penning a new mission statement, or keying in some new typography, businesses transform to augment their brand positioning.
Let’s examine four stellar rebranding videos from some of your favorite businesses to illustrate expert brand positioning. 3…2…1… Action!
Asana is a front-running project management software brought to you by a talented team led by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. Before their recent brand refurbishment, the seamless functionality of their software would set them apart from the pack only to have their insipid branding drag them back into the wash-out of brand obscurity.
To quote Asana on their reasoning for a rebrand, “in an ocean of bland, blue-tinted enterprise software, we saw ourselves as a magical, multicolored narwhal — but if you looked at us from the outside, it’s understandable if all you saw was another fish. 🐟”
For any avid users out there, Asana’s rebrand was absolutely delightful and welcomed with wide-open arms. It’s quirky, technicolorful, captivating, and downright effective. They definitely found their inner Narwhal and aren’t afraid to show it off.
Airbnb asists people bridge the gaps in their travels. A virtual house-renting service, it’s become a mainstay in travel plans across the globe.
But Airbnb’s brand is so much more than a house-renting service, it’s a vehicle to boost and bolsters everyone’s sense of community, our desire to “belong anywhere”. And that’s precisely what their brand aims to convey. Take a trip away from your community only to be welcomed into another one.
Brian Chesky, one of Airbnb’s cofounders, sums up their brand philosophy as such: “We used to take belonging for granted. Cities used to be villages. Everyone knew each other, and everyone knew they had a place to call home. But after the mechanization and Industrial Revolution of the last century, those feelings of trust and belonging were displaced by mass-produced and impersonal travel experiences.”
Uber’s revamped brand attempts to tether itself to one of the most relevant and all-pervading relationships of modern times. That’s right, the ever-deepening love story between humans and technology.
Their new roll-out video begins in such a lofty and universal place (with the advent of the byte to the discovery of the atom), that I wasn’t sure if they’d be able to bring it back down to the streets of earth in the following two-minutes.
Head over to Brand New for a comprehensive analysis.
But lo and behold, Uber pulls around the final bend of the short brand trailer with a fully fledged explanation of their mission, vision, and hints at future expansion. Even their new logos (one for passengers and one for drivers) explicitly express the relationship between the atom and byte of data, the organic and inorganic, humans and their destinations. If nothing else, it’s fun to follow along as Uber weaves their multifaceted brand positioning story right in front of your eyes.
As hard as a try, I cannot escape the gravity of Grubhub. As soon as I decide to eat a verdant, homemade salad, the Grubhub app will beckon me to place an order and save the salad for lunch the next day. And I almost always do. Grubhub is the epitome of convenience and comfort and may in fact be one of my favorite aspects of existing in 2016.
And now, their brand just got even better. While they’re brand story isn’t changing all that drastically (they still coerce you to “order food you love”), the way they get that message across has undergone some major modifications.
Complete with emojis (or “mmmojis” as they aptly call them), a new logo, typeface, iconography, and the short video below, Grubhub seems to have an appetite for amazing branding.
Amazon calculated that if its pages slowed down in load time by just one second it would lose $1.6 billion...
Web Development
The Client: CCL is a building materials company committed to serving builders, remodelers, and homeowners in southeastern Massachusetts. CCL focuses...
Case Study
What in the world could be better than satisfying the creatives and clients simultaneously? Nothing, that's what.
Branding