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

While 2025 marks the final Dreamville Festival, the event organizers and the Raleigh City Manager announced plans to reimagine and rebrand the event in the future. —Tykesha Spivey Burton, Essence, 8 Apr. 2025

The Texans weren’t attempting to rebrand themselves, but the NFL has had to interpret tricky trademark policy while managing combative ownership groups arguing over the extent of a city’s right to a color. —Brooks Kubena, New York Times, 28 Mar. 2025

Audible disappointment rippled through Hong Kong’s AsiaWorld-Expo, where the band was performing for the first time since attempting to rebrand as NJZ last month. —Aria Chen, CNN, 24 Mar. 2025

Gavin Newsom seems to be attempting to rebrand as a moderate. —Carson Becker, The Washington Examiner, 28 Mar. 2025

Word History

First Known Use

1895, in the meaning defined above