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 move to re-organize and rebrand the county’s top agency for adapting to climate change comes in a political climate where both the state and federal government are minimizing climate action — if not blocking it altogether. —Alex Harris, Miami Herald, 20 Feb. 2025

Consider the case of BlackBerry, which in 2012 renamed its operating system from BlackBerry OS to BlackBerry 10, attempting to rebrand as a modern smartphone competitor. —Rhett Power, Forbes, 9 Mar. 2025

International pushback remains intense in reaction to Trump’s public fervor to buy Greenland, seize the Panama Canal, trounce Canada and rebrand a massive body of water. —Alexis Simendinger, The Hill, 9 Jan. 2025

Founded in 2018 and named after Mithridates VI, the ancient King of Pontus, the brand last month revealed ambitious plans to rebrand. —Tianwei Zhang, WWD, 21 Feb. 2025

Word History

First Known Use

1895, in the meaning defined above