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

The organization decided to expand the scope and rebrand the alliance last year after fulfilling its mission of establishing laser scanning as a core AR display technology. —IEEE Spectrum, 28 Mar. 2024

By August 2017, Cooper was named chief creative officer with plans to rebrand Playboy for his generation. —Skyler Caruso, Peoplemag, 19 Jan. 2024

The attempt to rebrand her had older, murky origins, including 4chan in-jokes and a Pinterest user who in 2013 went viral for images falsely attributing Hitler quotes to Swift, but picked up steam as Trump did. —Miles Klee, Rolling Stone, 1 Feb. 2024

To keep clients, many medical pot clinics are planning to rebrand to broader holistic services. —Peter Hecht, Sacramento Bee, 21 Feb. 2024

Companies often need to rebrand to stay relevant and competitive or to align with shifting market dynamics. —Cheryl Robinson, Forbes, 10 Feb. 2024

There are two different paths for Chinese companies escaping the Mainland: 1) subterfuge to rebrand Chinese products and manufacturers by transiting third countries to avoid sanctions and taxes, and 2) genuine relocations of manufacturing capacity. —Anne Stevenson-Yang, Forbes, 16 Feb. 2024

Conversation instead has centered on Agag's recent proclamation that Extreme E will rebrand as Extreme H in 2025, becoming the first racing series powered fully by hydrogen. —Gregory Leporati, Ars Technica, 16 Dec. 2023

In recent decades, the Pentagon has even tried to rebrand these operations with a more mundane, but more accurate, name—Military Information Support Operations, or MISO. —Justin Ling, WIRED, 1 Feb. 2024

Word History

First Known Use

1895, in the meaning defined above