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

Preceded by the al-Qaida affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, HTS attempted to rebrand itself in 2016 by splitting from these elements and unifying Syria's opposition forces under a single umbrella. —Paul Du Quenoy, Newsweek, 9 Dec. 2024

In 1921, Charles E. Ives, a wealthy co-proprietor of the New York life-insurance firm Ives & Myrick, launched a bid to rebrand himself as an American Beethoven. —Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 4 Nov. 2024

The concept of carbon footprint emerged in 2000 from an award-winning marketing campaign created for British Petroleum (BP) to help rebrand the company as poised to move ‘Beyond Petroleum’. —Anjali Chaudhry, Forbes, 25 Oct. 2024

Both stores will rebrand to reflect their commitment to becoming one unified entity. —Allana Haynes, Baltimore Sun, 25 Nov. 2024

Word History

First Known Use

1895, in the meaning defined above