Strategy

You can defend the tagline and the positioning in a brand review. You can't defend a color pair a designer chose from her daughter's birthday party. Dunkin' protected the color anyway, and the trademark filing shows how far they went.

You're proud of the company and tired of the brand, and you're afraid a rebrand costs you the customers who already know you. A method for deciding what you can't touch, what Cracker Barrel's year proves, and how to tell complaints from confusion.

Four firms on the shortlist, all describing themselves the same way. The four questions to send in writing, the ownership terms to check before you talk price, and a vetting sequence that runs in ten working days.

The exec team decided the brand gets fixed, and now you have to explain what that covers. What brand design is, how it differs from graphic design, the four stages, and what it costs when the alignment work gets skipped.

Genericide kills brands that get too famous. The ugly twin kills the rest: brands so careful to fit their category that customers can't tell them apart. A four-question self-test for whether your brand blends in, and what ownable looks like.

Your marketing partner offered to handle the rebrand too, and the price was good. What each discipline covers, why the blur costs you twice, and the four-item list that keeps the lanes separate without a reorg.