New Study: 38% of Rebrands Fail — And the Reason Is Almost Always the Same
What happened
A 2026 study by PwC and the Brand Finance Institute, tracking 614 rebranding campaigns launched between 2022 and 2025, found a stubborn 38% failure rate. The single most common cause, cited in 61% of failed campaigns, was insufficient pre-launch consumer testing — not bad design, not bad timing, just skipping the step of checking with real customers before going live.
Our take
This tracks with almost everything we see in practice. Businesses rarely fail a rebrand because the new logo is ugly — they fail because nobody checked how the actual people who buy from them would react before locking it in. It's the same instinct behind why we start every engagement with a diagnosis instead of a mood board: the reaction of your real customers is data, not an afterthought, and skipping it is the single most avoidable mistake on this list.