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 the acquisition, Silver Tribe will rebrand as Initial Digital, becoming the first operating division to carry the Initial name and adding multichannel digital expertise to the platform. —Matt Grobar, Deadline, 17 Dec. 2025

That came as Penn entered into a major deal with ESPN to rebrand its online sports-betting business from Barstool Sportsbook to ESPN Bet. —Todd Spangler, Variety, 17 Dec. 2025

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

Word History

First Known Use

1895, in the meaning defined above