The projector hums a single, monotonous note. We’re on hour three of debating the kerning on a wordmark nobody will be able to read on a mobile device anyway. The air in the room is thick with the smell of stale coffee and desperation. A facilitator, whose consulting fee is likely more than our entire quarterly R&D budget, points a laser at slide 233. It displays two shades of blue. They are, for all practical purposes, identical.

“Cerulean Prime,” he says, with the gravity of a surgeon announcing a successful transplant, “projects approachability and trust, whereas Azure Dream evokes innovation and forward-momentum.”

Someone in the back murmurs their assent. I feel a vibration in my pocket. It’s another alert from the customer support channel. A cascade of them, actually. A critical payment processing bug, first reported 13 days ago, has now locked out an additional 3,333 users. Their money is in limbo. Our money is in limbo. But here, in this refrigerated tomb, we are talking about Azure Dream.

This is the grand deception. The expensive, elaborate, and utterly soulless ritual of corporate rebranding as a substitute for corporate responsibility. It’s the most profound act of organizational narcissism I’ve ever witnessed. It is a company spending millions of dollars to change its reflection in the mirror, while the house behind it is on fire. It’s a message sent to the wrong address, a declaration of intent that lands in the spam folder of reality. The message is for the board, for the new CEO, for Wall Street. It is for anyone and everyone except the single person it should be for: the customer.

The UI Dilemma

I’ve been guilty of it myself. Years ago, I led a team tasked with redesigning the user interface for a complex data-analysis tool. We spent months on it. We agonized over icon families, font pairings, and pixel-perfect alignment. We built beautiful, fluid animations. It was gorgeous. We presented it to the engineering lead, expecting a standing ovation. He was silent for a long moment, then clicked a few buttons. The whole prototype seized up. “It’s very pretty,” he said, not unkindly. “But the underlying database query takes 43 seconds to resolve. Your new design doesn’t fix that. It just makes the waiting prettier.” He was right. We were decorating the door of a bank vault that had been welded shut.

It’s a shell game played with brand equity instead of bottle caps.

Nuance: The Timing Is Everything

Now, I’ve spent the last few minutes railing against this entire process, painting it as an unmitigated evil. And I have to confess, that’s not entirely true. It’s a position I held for years, but experience has shown me it’s a little more nuanced. I was wrong to believe the act itself was the poison. The poison is the *timing*. A rebrand isn’t inherently bad. When a company has done the grueling, unglamorous work of fixing its core product, of rebuilding its culture, of earning back trust-then, a new logo can be a flag planted on a conquered summit. It’s a symbol of a genuine, internal transformation that has already occurred. It’s a celebration.

But 9 times out of 10, that’s not what happens. Instead, it’s a distraction. A sleight-of-hand. The new executive team arrives and, unable or unwilling to tackle the deeply entrenched operational horrors they’ve inherited, they reach for the easiest, most visible lever they have: the brand identity. It creates the *illusion* of change. It generates press releases. It gives the marketing department a massive, budget-consuming project that justifies their existence for the next 13 months. It’s a powerful sedative for a nervous board of directors. But for the customer whose payment is still stuck, it’s an insult. It’s a multi-million dollar way of saying, “We don’t hear you. And even if we did, we don’t care.”

True Identity is Earned

True identity isn’t something you commission from a Swiss design firm; it’s something you earn, day by day, interaction by interaction. It’s the cumulative effect of a thousand small promises kept. It’s the difference between a costume and a personality. It’s why some companies, especially those dealing with something as fundamental as providing for a family, understand this implicitly. Building a reputation around something like Kids Clothing NZ isn’t about chasing trends; it’s about establishing a baseline of quality and trust that a new logo can’t buy. The identity is baked into the fabric of the product, not printed on the label afterward.

We love to use a certain kind of language in these rebranding workshops. We talk about “narrative pillars” and “brand architecture” and “unlocking synergistic value.” It’s a vocabulary designed to make aesthetic choices sound like engineering. It’s profoundly dishonest. We’re not building a bridge; we’re choosing a color. We’re not solving a physics problem; we’re picking a font. The real work, the hard work, is happening in the code, on the factory floor, in the support queue. The real work is fixing the biscuit.

A Different Kind of Investment

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if a CEO took the entire $3,333,333 rebranding budget and instead gave a $3,333 bonus to every single customer support agent, developer, and quality control tester who identified and fixed a core problem. What would that do for morale? What would that do for the product? What kind of brand would that build? It would build one that didn’t need a new logo to announce its worth.

The Power of Simple Satisfaction

I see Hans P.-A. sometimes. We don’t talk about work anymore. The other day, I saw him at a small cafe. He was eating a simple, unbranded pastry from a white paper bag. He took a bite, closed his eyes for a moment, and gave a small, almost imperceptible nod. It was a look of pure, uncomplicated satisfaction. The product simply worked. There was no story, no campaign, no Azure Dream. And it was the most powerful statement of all.