Jaguar sold 49 cars in a month. Cracker Barrel lost 100 million dollars in a week. X erased one of the most recognised names on the internet. Companies keep betting their names and logos anyway — and the difference between the wins and the wrecks has very little to do with design.

Forty-nine.

That is how many cars Jaguar sold across the whole of Europe in April 2025. Not forty-nine thousand. Forty-nine vehicles, registered from Lisbon to Helsinki, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association. Twelve months earlier, the same brand had sold 1,961 cars in the same month. A 97.5 percent collapse, in the year after Jaguar unveiled the most talked-about rebrand in modern automotive history.

The November 2024 relaunch retired the leaping cat that had adorned bonnets since before most of its customers were born. The launch film, built around the slogans “Copy Nothing” and “Delete Ordinary,” showed models in sculptural clothing walking through pink landscapes. It did not show a car. Elon Musk replied to the campaign with four words that became its epitaph: “Do you sell cars?”

Companies keep making this bet anyway. In the past year alone, Cracker Barrel lost and regained roughly $ 100 million in market value in a single week over a logo. Warner Bros. Discovery renamed its streaming service for the fourth time in a decade, arriving back where it started. And a wave of bank and corporate identity changes is quietly underway in Dhaka. The rebrand is the most expensive coin-flip in business. The question worth asking is not whether companies should stop flipping it, because they cannot. The question is why some coins land well and others land on Jaguar.

Registrations fell 97.5 percent year on year while Jaguar paused its line-up ahead of relaunch. Source: ACEA.

The most expensive thing a designer never charges for

Start with a correction to the popular imagination: the logo is the cheap part. A global identity programme from a top-tier agency might cost a few million dollars in design fees. The real bill arrives afterward, and it dwarfs the invoice.

There is the physical rollout: every sign, package, uniform, vehicle, letterhead and store fascia on earth. There is the digital migration: domains, apps, search rankings and social handles, each carrying years of accumulated equity that does not transfer automatically. Marketers who had built strategies around Twitter’s name discovered this in 2023, when the platform became X overnight and their search visibility went with the bird.

Then there is the largest cost of all, the one no accountant can book: recognition. Steve Susi, director of brand communication at Siegel & Gale, put it plainly when Twitter died: “It took 15-plus years to earn that much equity worldwide, so losing Twitter as a brand name is a significant financial hit.” Analysts at the time estimated the renaming destroyed between 4 and 20 billion dollars in brand value. The wide range says something in itself. Nobody can price a name precisely, which is exactly what makes betting on it so dangerous.

The scoreboard since then has been unkind to the optimists. Brand Finance valued Twitter at 5.7 billion dollars in January 2022. By its 2024 rankings, the consultancy valued the X brand at 673.3 million dollars, a fall so steep the brand dropped out of its global rankings altogether. The public delivered its own verdict: a 2024 YouGov poll found 55 percent of daily American users still called the platform Twitter, a full year after the bird was shot.

One of the sharpest brand write-downs on record. The 2024 figure pushed X out of Brand Finance’s global rankings entirely.

Why they do it anyway

If the downside is measured in billions, why does any board approve a rebrand? Because staying still carries a price too, and three forces are currently pushing companies toward the gamble.

The first is strategy made visible. A rebrand is the loudest way a company can announce it has changed its business, not just its wardrobe. Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC in 1991 partly because customers already said it and partly to signal a menu beyond fried chicken. Dunkin’ dropped “Donuts” in 2019 to claim beverages. Both worked because the new name described a strategy that already existed. The name followed the business. Trouble begins when companies reverse the order and hope a new logo will summon a new strategy into being.

The second force is escape. Some companies rebrand to run from their own reputation. Facebook’s corporate shift to Meta in 2021 arrived amid its worst run of scandals. 

The third force is newer, and it explains why the current wave feels crowded. Design has been commoditised. AI tools can generate a passable identity in an afternoon, minimalist sans-serif logos have converged into what critics call “blanding,” and standing out now requires either genuine strategic difference or theatrical risk. Jaguar chose theatre.

“The hasty abandonment of a globally recognised name, without a clear migration plan, has had disastrous consequences.”

— Richard Haigh, Managing Director, Brand Finance

The week the barrel cracked

For a study in how fast the market now punishes a misjudged identity, nothing beats August 2025 in Tennessee.

Cracker Barrel, the American restaurant chain built on nostalgia, unveiled a simplified logo that removed “Uncle Herschel,” the old man leaning on a barrel who had fronted the brand since 1977. The backlash was immediate, enormous and political; even the US president weighed in. The company’s market value fell by roughly 100 million dollars within days. One week after launch, Cracker Barrel surrendered. “We said we would listen, and we have. Our new logo is going away and our ‘Old Timer’ will remain,” the company announced. The stock jumped 8 percent on the reversal. Within a month, the chain had also suspended the 700-million-dollar restaurant remodelling programme the new identity was meant to herald, and by the annual meeting, activist investors were citing the episode as grounds to vote against the board.

One management consultant called it the fastest corporate reversal of his thirty-year career. The speed is the story. Gap’s infamous 2010 logo retreat took about a week too, but Gap faced angry blog comments. Cracker Barrel faced a coordinated social-media firestorm, presidential commentary and an activist campaign quoting its chief executive’s television interviews back at her in securities filings. The referendum on a rebrand used to take a year. It now takes a weekend, and the voters have proxy advisers.

Warner Bros. Discovery ran the gentler version of the same lesson. HBO became HBO Max, then Max in 2023, shedding the most respected three letters in television in pursuit of breadth. In May 2025 the company reversed course and restored the HBO Max name, betting its future on quality rather than volume. The humiliation was survivable and the recovery real: by the third quarter of 2025, the renamed-renamed service was adding 2.3 million subscribers a quarter and had reached 128 million worldwide. A boomerang rebrand, it turns out, costs less than a stubborn one.

What separates the winners

Put the case files side by side and a pattern emerges that has little to do with design quality.

The rebrands that worked described a real change customers could verify. KFC still sold the same chicken. Dunkin’ still sold coffee, faster. The names caught up with behaviour. The rebrands that failed asked customers to take a promise on faith, and removed the familiar before the new thing existed. Jaguar’s deepest error was not the pink launch film; it was withdrawing nearly its entire model line-up, including the XE, XF, F-Type and I-Pace, before a single replacement was ready to sell. Dealers spent 2025 with showrooms full of concept images. UK retail sites are shrinking from about 80 to 20. Whatever one thinks of the creative work, no identity survives an empty shelf.

Two ways to change a name: the pattern behind the case files.

There is also a bridge test in the language itself. Successful rebrands carry the old equity across: KFC kept the Colonel, Dunkin’ kept the orange and pink, HBO Max kept HBO. Failed ones burn the bridge and dare customers to swim. Twitter deleted the bird, the name and even the word “tweet” in one weekend, replacing a verb the world used daily with a letter. Cracker Barrel removed the one man its customers associated with the brand. The valuation firms’ numbers and the crowd’s fury pointed to the same conclusion.

People do not resist change. They resist loss.

The honest counter-case

Fairness demands the other ledger. Jaguar was not a healthy brand that a rebrand wrecked. Its global sales had already fallen roughly two-thirds from their 2018 peak before a single pink advert aired, and the sales collapse of 2025 owed as much to the deliberate production pause as to public mockery. The company also has numbers it likes to cite: web traffic up 110 percent after the launch, awareness up 23 percent, and a measurable rise in people who consider the brand worth paying more for. Managing director Rawdon Glover has been open about the maths. “It’ll be 2027 when we’re delivering cars in earnest,” he told Auto Express, conceding that the company had made peace with losing most of its old customer base to chase a wealthier, smaller one.

That is the uncomfortable truth at the centre of this story. A rebrand this radical cannot be judged at the moment of maximum ridicule. If the production car born from the divisive Type 00 concept sells at its rumoured 130,000-dollar price when it arrives late this year, November 2024 will be retold as courage. If it does not, the 49-car month becomes the tombstone. The agency was dismissed in May 2025, the chief executive retired in August, and the chief creative officer of 21 years left abruptly in December. The verdict, though, still belongs to 2026. Courage and recklessness look identical at the starting line; only the finish separates them.

The wave reaches Dhaka

Bangladesh is entering its own rebranding season, and the global case files arrive just in time. The most consequential local example is barely a logo story at all: the merger of several troubled Shariah-based banks into the newly created United Islami Bank is a rebrand as regulatory surgery, a new name deployed to quarantine old damage. Depositors will judge the new brand by its credit discipline, not its colour palette.

For the country’s healthier companies, the lessons compress into three. Budget for the iceberg: in a market where signage, packaging and trade-channel materials stretch across hundreds of thousands of retail points, the design fee is a rounding error against the rollout. Apply the bridge test ruthlessly: equity built over decades of television jingles and shop-front familiarity is the one asset a challenger cannot buy, and a rebrand that discards it hands competitors a gift. And remember that the referendum is now instant here too. 

None of this argues for standing still. Brands that never change calcify, and the graveyard of companies that clung too long to a dated identity is merely quieter than the graveyard of botched relaunches. It argues for sequence: change the business, prove the change, then change the clothes.

Jaguar will find out soon enough which graveyard it avoided. Somewhere in Coventry a production line is finally building the car the pink film never showed. When it reaches showrooms, the company will learn what forty-nine really was: the bottom of a bridge being rebuilt, or the sound of one that burned.