Rebranding Without Regrets: 7 Key Lessons from a Corporate Branding Expert
WiseStamp was joined by email marketing expert Anna Levitin to discuss a winning email marketing strategy for webinars.
True rebranding is so much more than a new brand book.
It’s a business transformation that impacts every customer touchpoint, internal process, and employee mindset. In our latest WiseTalk, we spoke with Elad Mishan, Chief Creative Officer at Firma Brands, about what makes a rebrand succeed—and what makes it fall flat.
Here are the top takeaways from the conversation.
1. Know When It’s Time to Rebrand
How do you know it’s time for a rebrand? It often starts with a feeling that your brand is no longer pulling its weight—or worse, holding you back.
Maybe your business has evolved, but your brand hasn’t kept up. Maybe your messaging feels flat. Or your team struggles to explain what sets you apart.
Rebranding is a major investment, and for good reason. It usually comes on the heels of a larger shift: entering a new market, launching a new product, or repositioning the company for its next stage of growth. The key is catching that misalignment early—before it starts costing you momentum.
“A rebrand isn’t about aesthetics—it’s about alignment. When your brand no longer reflects who you are or where you’re going, it creates friction—internally and externally. That’s when you know it’s time to evolve.” – Elad Mishan
2. A Rebrand Is Not a Logo Change—It’s Organizational Therapy
If your rebrand is only happening on the surface, you’re missing the point. The most successful rebrands go deeper. They reflect a shift in how the company thinks, operates, and communicates from the inside out.
That’s why Elad compares rebranding to a form of organizational therapy. It requires teams to look inward, confront disconnects, and reshape their narrative in a way that’s authentic and future-focused.
It’s not just about changing how your brand looks. It’s about changing how your brand feels.
“If your team can’t explain why the rebrand matters, your customers won’t get it either.” – Elad Mishan
3. Rally Around a Clear, Strategic Core Idea
Every successful rebrand starts with clarity. The creativity only comes in further in the process. Before you touch visuals or messaging, you need to define what Elad calls the Business Core Idea (BCI): a clear articulation of who you are, who you’re serving, and how you fit into the market.
It’s not just a positioning statement. Your BCI becomes the strategic north star for everything: your brand identity, your product roadmap, your internal culture, and even how your teams collaborate.
When done well, it gives structure to creative decisions, filters out distractions, and aligns stakeholders around a shared direction. Without it, rebranding becomes a surface-level exercise at best—and chaos at worst.
“The BCI is like your brand’s DNA. It’s the logic behind the design, the message behind the tone, the story behind the storytelling. Without it, you’re just changing fonts.” – Elad Mishan
4. Prioritize the Touchpoints That Shape Perception, Like Employee Email Signatures
Your homepage matters—but it’s not the only thing your audience sees. In fact, it might not even be the thing they see most.
Elad emphasized the importance of mapping out every brand touchpoint, from the obvious to the overlooked. This includes pitch decks, invoices, support emails, and yes—email signatures. These everyday interactions are often where customers experience your brand most consistently, which means they have a bigger impact on perception than you might think.
Neglecting these “small” details can lead to a fractured brand experience that undermines even the most beautiful rebrand.
“Email signatures, proposals, customer service scripts—these are often more reflective of your brand than your homepage.” – Elad Mishan
Pro tip: That’s exactly where a platform like WiseStamp comes in. During a rebrand, an email signature manager gives marketing teams centralized control to ensure every email leaving the company is on-brand, up to date, and consistent across all departments and regions.
5. Make It Stick Internally
Even the best rebrand will fall flat if your team doesn’t buy in. Elad emphasized that brand adoption has to start from within—long before you launch externally. That means giving teams the tools and language to live the brand, not just look at it.
The most effective approach? “Branding by doing.” At Firma, that means workshops where departments apply the brand story to their daily work—so marketing, HR, product, and support each understand how they bring the brand to life.
“You can’t just hand over guidelines and expect alignment. You have to involve the team, or they’ll never own it.” – Elad Mishan
A rebrand becomes real when it’s reflected in how people think, speak, and show up—not just in how things look.
6. Track What Matters
Post-launch, it’s tempting to move on—but rebranding isn’t finished until you can prove its value. Elad recommends tracking brand performance across three dimensions:
- Business metrics (sales, conversion, pricing power)
- Brand perception (recognition, differentiation, preference)
- Internal adoption (employee understanding and usage)
Without clear KPIs, it’s hard to know whether the rebrand changed anything beyond the aesthetics.
“You need to measure the gap between what people thought of you before, and what they think now. Otherwise, it’s just a design project.” – Elad Mishan
7. Changing Your Name? Tell a Clear Story
One of the riskiest (and most impactful) moves a company can make during a rebrand is changing its name. Elad doesn’t shy away from it—but he’s clear that timing and storytelling are everything.
A successful name change often coincides with a larger business shift: a new product strategy, international expansion, or M&A. That makes it easier to justify and explain the change. But no matter what, you need to overcommunicate the “why” and give your audience a bridge from old to new.
“If you’re going to change the name, you need to be ready to tell the story a hundred times, in a hundred different ways.” – Elad Mishan
Conclusion: A Rebrand Is Only as Strong as Its Execution
Rebranding is more than a creative challenge. It’s a strategic reset. And if you want that reset to actually make an impact, it has to reach every part of the business. From internal culture to email signatures, and from positioning to product experience—every detail counts.
As Elad reminded us, the best rebrands aren’t necessarily the flashiest. They’re the ones that feel right because they reflect who the company is becoming.
So whether you’re refreshing a legacy brand or launching something new, start with clarity, involve your team, and don’t overlook the everyday interactions.
That’s where your brand really lives.
