A Tale of Two Brands & How to Rebrand Without Losing Your Soul
- Brainz Magazine
- 7 hours ago
- 9 min read
Written by LaTricia Morris, Branding Agent
LaTricia Morris is The Brand Revivalist, founder of Ox & Iron. She helps legacy-driven entrepreneurs cut through the clutter and create bold, unforgettable brands. With a focus on purposeful design and strategic messaging, LaTricia crafts brands that connect deeply with their audience and leave a lasting impact.
The most powerful rebrands aren’t about becoming someone new. They’re about revealing the best version of you and your company with crystal clarity.
Countless companies work really hard to build a brand with soul, something the market is happy to embrace, but maintaining that on the other side of expansion is the long-game challenge for any legacy brand.
As companies expand, building out the team becomes an inevitability to prevent capping out. We know this. Yet how we go about that can make all the difference between companies that live well beyond our time and those that fizzle out like the last one-hit wonder.
When you get this right, you gain an unfair advantage that competitors can’t touch. Because authenticity is the one thing they can’t copy. They can mimic your visual style, steal your messaging, and undercut your pricing, but they can’t replicate your true identity. That’s exclusively yours.
The permanent vs. the adaptable
Your brand’s core identity, its soul, needs to be its constant at the center of it all. Your values, your purpose, the unique way you serve customers, the principles that guide your decisions, these don’t shift with market trends or competitor moves.
The critical distinction between winning rebrands and failed ones is understanding that while your identity remains constant, your expression of it must adapt relentlessly.
Weak brands either refuse to adapt and become irrelevant or adapt so entirely that they become unrecognizable and therefore meaningless. Strong brands stay anchored to their identity while continuously refining how they express it.
Define your non-negotiables
Before you can transform how you show up, you need absolute clarity on what you stand for. Most companies stumble here. They think they know their brand’s soul when they’ve often never actually defined it.
A precise definition creates freedom. I find many business owners initially cringe as I work to help them lock in on key components of their brand identity, as they think of it as being “locked in” in a way that’s rigid, not flexible, and most frightening of all, precludes them from large sectors of the market.
Not true. In martial arts, we have a saying, “Precision over power. Timing over speed.”
While many try to make their wins by throwing as much money into their ad spend as possible and rushing into every little trend, legacy brands know that precision and timing are key for many of their biggest wins.
When you know exactly what’s non-negotiable, everything else becomes flexible. You can adapt boldly because you know exactly where the boundaries are. Those non-negotiables serve as north stars that help you navigate big and small decisions, so your company doesn’t fall prey to brand drift and lose the beautiful edge it deserves.
Start with your purpose. Screw the corporate BS mission statements. What impact is your company on this planet to make? What is the version of “better” you bring to the world around you?
If you don’t understand your company’s purpose beyond profit, you can’t expect the market to either. If they don’t get this, what else do you leave them but to relegate you into the mental heap of corporate entities vying for their wallets?
What outcome are you committed to creating? What would your customers lose if you disappeared? Next, identify your immovable values.
Again, I’m not going to let you get away with a lazy list of words you find appealing. “Quality, honesty, integrity.” Wait, sorry, just threw up in my mouth a little bit.
I’m not trying to be a jerk. I’m just saying, these shallow, table-stakes values trigger way more eye-rolls than clicks and checkouts.
What are the principles you actually operate by when it costs you something? What deals do you walk away from, or what shortcuts do you refuse to take? What standards do you maintain when no one’s watching?
Get clear on your unique point of view. What do you believe about your industry, your customers, or the problems you solve that others miss or deny? This perspective shapes how you approach every challenge and why your solutions look different from everyone else’s.
Finally, understand your distinctive capabilities. What can you deliver that creates real value in ways competitors can’t easily match? This isn’t about being better at everything, but about being unmatchable at the specific things that matter most to your customers.
When you’ve defined these four elements with precision, you’ve identified your brand’s soul. Everything else is arguably negotiable.
The equity you already have
You already have brand equity in associations, perceptions, and recognition that took years and possibly millions to build. Weak rebrands throw this away. Strong rebrands multiply it.
Some equity is pure gold. You may be known for innovation, reliability, or going above and beyond. These associations align with your core identity and deserve amplification. It’s important to discern these from things holding you back. Perhaps you’re seen as outdated when you’re actually progressive, or perceived as premium-priced when you offer exceptional value.
Don’t change your identity to match perceptions. Clarify perceptions to match your identity.
This gives you leverage. Instead of starting from zero, you’re redirecting momentum that already exists. You’re taking the awareness and recognition you’ve built and pointing it toward truth. When done right, your rebrand doesn’t feel like an identity crisis. It feels like a revelation. “Oh, now I see what they’ve been about all along.”
Visual identity: Recognition meets relevance
Most companies approach visual rebranding as an either/or decision, keep everything the same and look stagnant, or change everything and become unrecognizable. Both paths lose.
The winning move is understanding the difference between visual equity (what triggers instant recognition) and visual expression (how you apply those elements).
Your signature color, a distinctive shape, a characteristic style, these carry your essential character. They should stay protected. Everything else is fair game for refinement.
This can mean your signature color stays, but your palette modernizes. Your logo’s structure remains but gets refined for digital clarity. It can change a little or even a lot but should remain congruent to the extent that people still easily recognize it as an extension or symbol of your brand. Your style persists but updates to contemporary standards.
The strategic question isn’t “should we change our visuals?” It’s “which visual elements carry our soul, and which ones just carry our history?”
When you answer this correctly, you look like a brand confident enough to grow without being desperate enough to reinvent yourself. That confidence is magnetic in a marketplace full of companies chasing trends.
Messaging that actually lands
Your core message stays constant, while the language you use to express it must meet the moment, not by chasing trends but by communicating timeless truths in ways that land with today’s audience.
Corporate speak dies. Abstract language dies. Vague promises die. What rises? Clarity. Directness. Specificity. Proof.
“We’re committed to excellence” is communicated through specific evidence of how you deliver excellence that customers can verify. “We’re innovative” gets shown in concrete examples of innovations that solved real problems.
This gives you an advantage because competitors hide behind empty corporate language, while you speak the truth in ways people can grasp. The strongest messaging strategies understand this, people don’t buy your values. They buy what your values enable you to deliver and what doing business with you says about them.
The coherence that creates dominance
Every interaction someone has with your brand should express the same character. Your digital presence, in-person service, social media, packaging, and customer support should all feel unmistakably you.
Most companies treat brand as what their marketing team does. You need to treat it as what your entire organization delivers. When your customer service embodies the same care as your product design, when your social media reflects the same values as your leadership, when your follow-up demonstrates the same excellence as your pitch, that’s when your brand becomes real.
This coherence is rare because it requires everyone to understand not just what your brand looks like, but also what it stands for and how that translates to their specific role. In my years in branding, this has remained a beautiful byproduct of the brand development process and then bringing that back to the team.
Don’t leave people to guess
Too many companies assume employees, especially frontline workers, understand the brand when they’re seldom trained on it. This results in even staff with the best intentions operating on their own interpretation of what constitutes a good job, without really understanding how the brand should be represented at every touchpoint.
The companies that take the time to do the deep work and train their team to become a united force behind the brand don’t just have a brand, they have an identity so strong that it shapes how they operate at every level. That identity becomes their competitive moat.
When brands lose their soul (and when they protect it)
The stakes of this decision, to stay true or to drift, couldn’t be higher.
Lululemon founder Chip Wilson hit heavy on this in a recent ad and article he took out in The Wall Street Journal, giving his raw breakdown of the nosedive the company took, accounting for billions in less-than-stellar decisions. He argues:
“Lululemon forgot its muse, the woman who inspires culture, not just follows it. By drifting toward the mainstream and trying to appease everyone, Lululemon lost 50% of its market cap earned from ‘brand power.’ It lost its edge and with it, the ability to hire the best people.”
Read that again. A company lost billions in market cap by trying to appeal to everyone, by drifting toward the mainstream and forgetting its muse.
Wilson’s prescription? “The world doesn’t need another bland, quarterly-driven apparel company. It needs bold vision.” And critically, “Recommit to the muse, the woman who inspires the brand.”
Now contrast that with Aerie. While everyone rushes to adopt AI in advertising, Aerie just publicly rejected it. Their CMO, Stacey McCormick, announced they’re staying “100% real,” continuing their no-retouching pledge even as technology makes it easier than ever to perfect images.
They friggin’ get it. This isn’t stubbornness. It’s brand integrity. Aerie built their identity on authenticity and real bodies. AI-generated or heavily manipulated images would betray everything they stand for, even if it made production faster, cheaper, or more polished.
That’s the difference. Lululemon drifted from its muse and lost billions. Aerie doubled down on its core truth, strengthening its position. One company asked, “What does the market want?” The other asked, “What do we stand for?”
The market continues to reward the one who stays true to their core.
The truth test
Here’s how you know if your transformation is real:
Your longest-tenured employees should recognize your character immediately. If the people who know you best can’t see you in what you’ve become, you’ve abandoned your identity.
Your loyal customers should understand the progression. You should be able to draw a clear line from who you were to who you’re becoming. If you can’t, the change is arbitrary.
The transformation should feel inevitable. When you reveal your rebrand, people should think “of course,” not “what happened?”
And the ultimate test, Are you moving toward truth about who you are, or toward what you think the market wants? The market senses inauthenticity instantly, but when you become more fully yourself, more clear, more confident, more focused, the right market responds.
You’re not for everyone. That’s the point. You’re for the specific people who need exactly what you do best. Your rebrand should make it easier for those people to find you.
Making it real
A rebrand isn’t complete when you launch new visuals. It’s complete when your entire organization embodies the brand in everything they do.
This requires every person to understand why the rebrand matters, what it means for their work, and how they bring it to life in their decisions. Your sales team needs to see how the clarified brand makes conversations more effective. Customer service needs to understand how it shapes interactions. Product needs to know how it influences what they build.
When everyone can articulate what your brand stands for and see their connection to it, when they make decisions that naturally express your core identity, when they feel proud representing you, that’s when transformation becomes beautiful.
Your permanent advantage
Your competitors can copy your tactics, mimic your visuals, steal your messaging, undercut your pricing, and hire your people. But they cannot replicate your authentic identity.
When you rebrand without losing your soul, when you stay anchored to your core identity while continuously refining how you express it, you create permanent differentiation. This is not because you’ve found some clever positioning angle, but because you’re being unmistakably yourself with absolute clarity.
This requires courage. Resisting pressure to become what everyone else is becoming, trusting that your unique identity has enduring value, and believing that being fully yourself is more powerful than trying to appeal to everyone.
This courage creates a sustainable advantage. In a marketplace full of companies trying to be everything to everyone, you become the obvious choice.
The brands that dominate don’t stay frozen. They don’t abandon who they are. They grow toward the truest, clearest, most powerful expression of their identity.
That’s your path, becoming undeniably, unmistakably, unapologetically you.
Read more from LaTricia Morris
LaTricia Morris, Branding Agent
LaTricia Morris is The Brand Revivalist, founder of Ox & Iron. At the core of her work is the belief in seeing the greatness in others and helping them communicate their true value to the people who need it most. LaTricia specializes in creating brands that are authentic, purpose-driven, and designed to resonate deeply. By aligning identity with strategy, she empowers businesses to stand out and build lasting connections with their audience.
