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

Example Sentences

Recent Examples on the Web

When June Hayward's friend Athena Liu dies in a freak accident, June decides to steal Athena's manuscript and pass it off as her own—and let her publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song. —Town & Country, 9 May 2023

The redevelopment comes with a price tag of $29 million and will rebrand the space as the Elsby Hotel, the latest addition to the Tapestry Collection by Hilton. —Lucas Aulbach, The Courier-Journal, 2 May 2023

The strategy, simply, was to rebrand chess as good old-fashioned fun. —Matt Richtel, New York Times, 24 Apr. 2023

He was also criticized for trying to rebrand rather than abolish the Stasi security police. —Reuters, NBC News, 11 Feb. 2023

The increase in investment was helped by the number of new listing-friendly rules put in place over 2021, which have helped to rebrand London as the hottest tech listing hub of Europe. —Sophie Mellor, Fortune, 26 Apr. 2022

Because of its record on these and other cultural issues, the party’s—or, at least, Biden’s—attempt to rebrand Democrats as unifying, speaking for Americans across divisions of race and class, has so far failed. —Ruy Teixeira, National Review, 31 Mar. 2022

This then forced Facebook to postpone the launch of Libra and eventually rebrand it. —Chris Smith, BGR, 1 Feb. 2022

Flagstar was acquired late last year by New York Community Bancorp, which plans to rebrand the entire bank with the Flagstar name. —Jc Reindl, Detroit Free Press, 2 Mar. 2023

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Word History

First Known Use

1895, in the meaning defined above