Hi all,
I know, it’s Wednesday and I’m 24h late on the sending of this letter. But I’ve been traveling the past 2 days and couldn’t make it :(
Buuuut, here I am. And first, I invite you to join Cooper’s Office —> The past few months, we renovated an old house for our new office by the ocean that we now have 7 extra dedicated desks for friends from the ecosystem looking to work from the coast.
Second one, the topic of the week. I had some great conversations the past week with project owners about rebranding an existing asset, starting with the unfamous one: we need to rebrand.
And sometimes it’s true. Sometimes the identity is outdated, the story doesn’t match the business anymore, or the place has genuinely evolved and the brand needs to catch up.
But very often, when someone says we need to rebrand, what they really mean is something else.
The service feels off and the team is tired. The room doesn’t have the same energy anymore. The menu is trying to please too many people and the experience has lost its rhythm. The place is still beautiful on paper but in real life something doesn’t land.
And instead of touching the things we don’t like talking about, we start talking about the logo.
Because as you know, the logo is safer and our friends Claude & ChatGPT are able to do something with huge taste in 12 seconds ;)
But the logo doesn’t ask for a difficult conversation with the team. The logo doesn’t require changing a supplier, tightening a menu, resetting standards, fixing operations, or admitting that the place slowly drifted away from what it was supposed to be.
What I mean by that is that a rebrand can be useful, but it can also become a very elegant way to avoid the real work.
I’ve seen this happen too many times. A place feels messy, so the founder wants a new story. The experience feels weak, so they want a stronger visual identity. Guests don’t return, so they want a new campaign. The room feels flat, so they want new content.
And of course, all of that can help but only after the place has been fixed.
You can’t rebrand confusion and expect people to suddenly feel clarity. You can’t put a beautiful new identity on a broken experience and hope guests will politely ignore the fact that the welcome is cold, the offer is unclear, and the place doesn’t know what it wants to be anymore.
Guests are annoying like that.
They feel the truth very fast.
So this week, I want to talk about the difference between a rebrand and a reset.
Because most places just need to work again.
(Don’t miss the questions list I share at the end to test on your own place, its pure magic)
