rebrand

verb

re·​brand (ˌ)rē-ˈbrand 

rebranded; rebranding; rebrands

transitive verb

: to change or update the brand or branding of (a product, service, etc.)

After the original app Picaboo failed to gain traction in 2011, they rebranded the app as Snapchat and added the captioning feature.

—Madeline Purdue

Rebranding a company with a troubled history, or renaming a product with unfortunate associations, is often a necessary act of self-protection.

—Jeffrey Goldberg

broadly : to publicly refer to or describe (someone or something) in a new or different way

After France declined to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, George W. Bush supporters … tried to rebrand French fries as "freedom fries."

—Eve Peyser

… recommended last month that it was time to "rebrand" Britain as "one of the world's pioneers rather than one of its museums."

—Warren Hoge

rebranding noun

plural rebrandings

The emergence of the Tea Party, Boehner says, forced upon Republicans, in one cycle, a rebranding that otherwise might have taken the Party a generation to achieve.

—Peter J. Boyer

Examples of rebrand in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

With Buster Posey at the helm of baseball operations and Tony Vitello calling the shots from the dugout, the Giants have an opportunity to rebrand from a big-market afterthought franchise to one that — like Bonds — lives in the minds of all baseball fans rent-free. —Dieter Kurtenbach, Mercury News, 4 Dec. 2025

At the time, David Glasgow, executive director at New York University’s Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, and co-author of the forthcoming book, How Equality Wins, predicted that the federal government would not allow companies to simply rebrand. —Sasha Rogelberg, Fortune, 4 Dec. 2025

BlueFive didn’t disclose the size or value of the stake, but aims to be a controlling shareholder and later rebrand the company and use it as a vehicle to acquire other firms, according to people familiar with the matter. —Matthew Martin, semafor.com, 1 Dec. 2025

The company’s stock sunk quickly after the deal and the price remained depressed during three years of cutbacks, writeoffs, rebrands and redos. —Ted Johnson, Deadline, 20 Nov. 2025

Word History

First Known Use

1895, in the meaning defined above