The rebrand conversation usually starts the same way.

A designer presents the case. Gently but clearly. The logo is dated. The typography is inconsistent. The colour palette belongs to a different era of the business. The evidence is visual, strategic, and difficult to argue with.

The room goes quiet. Then someone senior says: "We have had that logo for twenty-two years."

And just like that, the conversation is no longer about design.

The Sunk Cost in the Room.

The Sunk Cost Fallacy is the tendency to continue investing in something because of what has already been spent on it, rather than because of what it is currently worth.

In economics, it is irrational. In human psychology, it is almost universal.

A company that has used the same logo for two decades has not just spent money on it. They have embedded it into every surface, every communication, every piece of merchandise, every uniform, every building. The logo stopped being a design asset and became an organisational fixture. Changing it feels less like a strategic decision and more like dismantling something real.

The CEO who championed the original rebrand in 2003 still sits on the board. The marketing director remembers the photoshoot. Three members of the founding team have the old logo on a framed print in their offices.

None of this is relevant to whether the logo is working. All of it is relevant to why nobody wants to touch it.

What the Sunk Cost Is Actually Protecting.

It is rarely the logo itself that people are defending.

Scratch the surface of any resistance to a rebrand and you find one of three things underneath it.

Identity attachment. For founders and long-tenured leaders, the brand is not a business asset. It is an expression of who they are and what they built. Redesigning it feels like being told the original was wrong. That the years it represented were somehow lesser.

Fear of transition cost. Rebranding has a visible price tag: new signage, updated templates, reprinted materials, website changes, staff communications. These costs are immediate and concrete. The cost of keeping an outdated identity, in lost trust, reduced premium positioning, and weakened competitive relevance, is diffuse and harder to put on a spreadsheet.

Risk of losing recognition. This one has genuine merit. Brand recognition is valuable. Changing a known identity carries real risk of temporary equity loss. The mistake is treating recognition as a fixed asset rather than a depreciating one. A logo that was once recognisable as premium becomes recognisable as dated. Recognition without the right associations is not an asset.

"Familiarity is not the same as effectiveness. People can recognise something perfectly and still feel nothing when they see it."

How Designers Make It Worse.

The standard approach to a rebrand conversation is to present the problem visually and hope the evidence speaks for itself.

It rarely does.

Showing a client their logo next to a competitor's sharper identity is not a neutral exercise. It feels like an attack. The designer is positioned as the person who came in and told them everything they built looks wrong. Defensiveness is a predictable response to that dynamic, and defensiveness kills rational decision-making.

The designer who leads with aesthetics has already lost the most important part of the conversation.

A Different Approach.

The rebrand conversation needs to start with the business, not the logo.

Where does the company want to be in five years? What audiences are they trying to reach that they are currently missing? What does their current identity communicate to someone encountering the brand for the first time with no prior relationship to it?

These are strategic questions. They invite the client to think forward rather than defend backward. And they reframe the logo from a historical object to a future tool.

Once that reframe is in place, the conversation changes.

The question is no longer: should we change the logo we have invested twenty years in? It becomes: does this asset serve where we are going? And if not, what would?

There is also a practical technique worth deploying: separating equity from execution. Most established brands have genuine equities worth preserving. A colour. A structural element. A typographic characteristic. Identifying what to keep is as important as identifying what to change, and it gives stakeholders something to hold onto through the transition.

Telling someone you are keeping the best of what they built is a fundamentally different conversation from telling them to start again.

The Cost of Waiting.

Every year a company stays with an identity that no longer serves them, the gap between where the brand looks and where the business is widens.

Customers notice before anyone internal admits it. The identity starts to create a ceiling on perceived quality, pricing power, and audience reach. Competitors who rebranded earlier begin to occupy the visual territory the company has vacated by standing still.

The sunk cost does not decrease with time. It compounds.

The twenty-two-year-old logo will be a twenty-five-year-old logo if this conversation is deferred again. And the transition cost that felt prohibitive today will feel the same in three years, except the equity loss in the interim will have been real and unrecoverable.

Changing a logo is not erasing a history.

It is deciding that the next chapter deserves its own visual language.