A new logo rarely brings more customers, because customers don’t choose you for your logo. They choose you when they understand why you, faster than they understand why the other option. Fix that first. Then the new logo comes along and actually means something.

Why do so many businesses start with the logo?

Because it’s the most visible part of a brand, and the easiest one to decide in a meeting. You can put three options on a screen, vote, and leave with a sense of progress.

Positioning is harder. It means agreeing, out loud, on who you’re for, what you’re best at and what you’ll stop saying. That conversation is uncomfortable. A logo conversation is fun. I get it. I love a good logo too.

Will a rebrand bring me more customers?

Sometimes. A rebrand earns its money when the brand is actually what’s holding you back:

• You’ve outgrown it: new market, new audience, new product.

• It looks untrustworthy next to the companies you compete with for big deals.

• Two companies merged and nobody knows what the new one is.

• People confuse you with someone else.

It won’t help when the real problem is that people don’t get what you do or why it matters. A new font on an unclear message gives you an unclear message in a new font.

What should I fix before the logo?

The sentence. One clear sentence about who you help, with what, and why you instead of the alternatives.

Here’s a quick test. Ask three people on your team what the company does. Would they say the same sentence? Then ask a happy customer how they’d describe you to a friend. If the answers are “roughly”, “it depends who you ask”, or “good service, nice people”, your problem isn’t visual yet.

What does “positioning first” look like in real life?

Two receipts from my own work.

Gimmonix (B2B travel tech). When I joined, the website spent most of its energy explaining how the technology works. Impressive, and hard to buy. Before touching any visuals, we repositioned: stop over-explaining the how, lead with the value it creates for the customer. Only then came the rebrand: identity, messaging, website, LinkedIn and a brand guideline. The marketing program that followed grew active users by 42% and new users by 41%. I won’t pretend the logo did that. The logo was the last step, not the first.

Kaymera (secure phones). We did a full rebrand and a new website, and organic search went up 12%. Nice. But the biggest win came from somewhere else entirely. The product’s value was invisible by design: it looked like an ordinary phone, so customers couldn’t see what they were paying for. With the head of product, I designed a branded onboarding experience and a weekly report of attacks stopped. Churn dropped 20% year over year. No new font involved.

So when is a new logo the right call?

When the story is already clear and the look is what’s lagging behind. When your sales team says the same sentence, your customers repeat it back, and the brand still looks like it was made for a smaller version of your company. Then a rebrand is a power move, because it amplifies something true.

If you’re not there yet, start with the sentence. The logo will still be waiting, and it’ll be better for it.

Not sure which one you need?

Take Are We a Match?. In two minutes it tells you whether your bottleneck is the story, the follow-up or the measurement. Or see how I built four brands from the logic up on my Work page.