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

Lazarus also put an end to speculation that MSNBC might have to rebrand itself once it is spun off from NBC. —Brian Stelter, CNN, 14 Jan. 2025

The push is the latest sign of the party's efforts to rebrand and bring in new audiences after a disappointing 2024 cycle. —Erin Doherty, Axios, 13 Jan. 2025

In a show of the brand’s new direction, licensee Sports Illustrated Tickets recently announced a 13-year naming rights agreement to rebrand the home of MLS’ New York Red Bulls. —Jacob Feldman, Sportico.com, 23 Dec. 2024

They were reclassified from endangered to threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act in 2017, after their populations began to rebrand. —Laura Baisas, Popular Science, 20 Nov. 2024

Word History

First Known Use

1895, in the meaning defined above