When is a full reset the right call?

A full reset is the right call in two cases: nothing in the current system carries recognition worth protecting, or everything people recognize now works against where the business is going. That is rare. Most brands hold more equity than their teams give them credit for, and an honest keep, refine, retire sort usually finds something worth building from before anyone reaches for a blank page.

Who should own the keep, refine, or retire decision?

The people who hold the brand's memory should lead: long-serving team members, the people who built earlier systems, anyone who knows which marks carried recognition over time. Every stakeholder who touches the brand should understand the rules and the thinking behind them. When the system records why each piece survived, ownership spreads across the team. Nobody applying it later has to guess.

How do you tell if an asset still carries recognition?

Ask people outside the brand team. Survey new and long-time customers to see if they recognize each mark without a hint. Watch for unprompted mentions in social feedback and fan communities. Pay attention to where people recreate the symbol on their own, outside official contexts. If the audience built it into their shorthand, keep or refine it. If it never took hold, retire it.

A Good Rebrand Is an Edit by Tyler Garner

On September 22, 2026, McLaren revealed what it calls an evolved brand identity, one connected expression across McLaren Automotive and McLaren Racing. At the center sits a new wordmark inspired by the sign above the service station Bruce McLaren's parents owned in Remuera, Auckland, where he built the car that took him to his first racing win. The Speedmark stays at the heart of the brand. Papaya stays as a defining color, now joined by an expanded palette inspired by pivotal moments across the brand's history. The Speedy Kiwi stays too.

The Racing and Automotive teams started by going through their shared archives, drawing on symbols, stories, and design details that defined the brand. That is the right first move: the strongest rebrands keep and refine what the audience knows before they add anything new.

What does it mean to run a rebrand like an edit?

Running a rebrand like an edit means starting with what exists. Editing taught me the cut is judgment. The footage is there, and the work is deciding which parts keep their place in the final version. Identity work runs on the same rule. The material an audience recognizes is the footage. The job is choosing what makes the final cut.

I came up through the craft as a producer, director, editor, and brand-systems designer, and spent about 17 years at Full Sail University building and leading a creative team. Editing never rewards the person who shoots the most footage. It rewards the person who can look at a full bin of options and cut it down to the version that actually works. McLaren's own announcement calls the Speedmark one of its most recognizable symbols, and it stayed. Keeping it was the edit working.

Why do teams reach for a blank page instead of the archive?

Teams reach for a blank page because it feels like proof of effort. A mood board looks like control, especially under deadline pressure. In my experience leading a creative team, the urge to start fresh is strongest exactly when trust in the existing material is weakest. Nobody wants to defend keeping something old, so throwing everything out feels safer than arguing for what should stay.

I have seen this pattern inside my own team more than once. Someone hits a wall on a project, the room gets nervous, and the fastest way to show progress is to start clean. It looks bold. It is usually just fear wearing a creative director's jacket. The archive is unglamorous. It requires someone to sit with old files, old marks, and old campaigns, and ask which of them the audience still carries around in their head, unprompted. Slower than a fresh set of references. Harder to defend. But it is where the answer lives.

How do you decide what to keep, refine, or retire?

Start with an inventory of everything the audience already associates with the brand: names, marks, colors, phrases, sounds. Sort each one into keep, refine, or retire based on how strongly it is recognized and how well it still serves the story you are telling now. Only after that sort should new work begin, and only to connect what remains.

Keep: the marks and names an audience recognizes without being told what they are looking at.
Refine: the assets that still carry meaning but no longer read clearly, or no longer connect to everything else in the system.
Retire: the pieces that never built recognition, or that now work against the story the brand is telling.

Why do some rebrands fail after launch?

A rebrand fails after launch when the reasoning behind it stays in the room where it was designed. The identity lives in the application: shipping labels, loading screens, surfaces nobody photographs. When the teams who built it move on, the next person applying it does not know which pieces were chosen and which were discarded. Without that logic baked into the rules, each application becomes a new argument.

Months later, somebody in sales has to know which parts of the old deck they can use. If the new identity connects to the old system, the rules answer it. A full reset's cost appears long after launch day, in decisions big and small.

None of this requires being sentimental about the past. It requires treating recognition as an asset, then deciding, piece by piece, what stays. The job in editing is judgment. The job in brand identity is the same.