Rebranding in the real world: what actually happens when you change everything

Old Spice did not change its formula, its price or its name in 2010. It changed who the advertising was addressed to. The premise behind "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like", made with the agency Wieden+Kennedy, was that most of the men's body wash sitting in a shower had been bought by a woman, so the brand spent thirty seconds talking past its user to its purchaser. Isaiah Mustafa's first two words are "Hello, ladies."

That is a full repositioning in the sense the foundations lesson sets out, and it is an unusually clean one, because almost nothing else moved. The second case here, Segment's absorption into Twilio, runs the other way: the wordmark survived nearly intact and everything underneath it changed. Both are worth following past launch week, because launch week is when the plan still looks right.

Old Spice, February 2010: the audience was the rebrand

Procter & Gamble had owned Old Spice since buying it from Shulton in 1990, and had spent the back half of the 2000s trying to recruit younger men with new scent lines and comic advertising while the name kept its association with a grandfather's bathroom cabinet. Unilever's Axe held the young male body wash market with a promise Old Spice could not credibly copy.

The reset was to stop arguing with the user and address the buyer. Everything else was held constant on purpose: same bottle on shelf that week, same price, same formula. A loyal 55-year-old customer had no functional reason to leave, which is what made the tonal risk affordable. That constraint is the part brand teams skip. Reposition the story and reprice in the same quarter and you cannot tell which decision moved volume, and you have handed the existing base a real reason to go.

Week one: everything the advertising could not fix

Media turns in days. A planogram at a national grocer turns on a cycle measured in months, so for much of the first year a shopper persuaded by the ad reached a shelf that looked exactly as it had before. Facings and distribution had to be sold to category buyers at the big retailers before a single spot aired, and a buyer who reads the campaign as a joke does not give you incremental space.

The famous week was not February but July 2010, when the team put Mustafa in a Portland studio and shot roughly 180 short response videos to comments from Twitter, Facebook and Reddit in under three days, answering strangers alongside Alyssa Milano and Ashton Kutcher. It drew tens of millions of views in its first week. Three things broke at once: the approval chain, since copy was being written, shot and published in minutes with no room for the legal review a P&G brand normally runs; the selection problem, since someone had to decide live which requests were safe to answer; and the expectation the burst created. Output like that is a one-time asset. Run it quarterly and the audience reads the second attempt as maintenance.

Month twelve: what the sales figures do and do not prove

The number that travels is a doubling of Old Spice body wash sales in the month after the response videos. It is real as reported and it is not clean: the same window carried a buy-one-get-one offer and expanded retail distribution, which trade press pointed out at the time. The defensible claim is that the repositioning worked and that its effect cannot be separated from the promotion running beside it. If your board wants one attributed figure, decide before launch which weeks stay promotion-free, or you will spend month thirteen defending a number you cannot defend.

The second-order consequence arrived in year two. Old Spice replaced Mustafa with Fabio in 2011 for the "Mano a Mano in el Baño" duel, it did not transfer, and Mustafa came back. Equity had attached to a specific performer and a specific comic register rather than to the abstract position. A repositioning that lives inside a character has a succession problem, and you find out about it at exactly the moment you have committed the following year's media.

Competition arrived on the launch weekend itself. Dove Men+Care went to market in February 2010 with the opposite register, sincere instead of absurd, and built a lasting business in the same category. An audience reset grows the category, and the growth is available to whoever answers next.

Segment into Twilio: the name survived, the meaning did not

Twilio announced its acquisition of Segment in October 2020, an all-stock deal valued at around 3.2 billion dollars, and closed it that November. Segment is a customer data platformcustomer data platformSoftware that unifies customer data from every source into one persistent profile that marketing, sales and service teams can act on.View full definition →: developers install a tracking library, events flow through Segment, and Segment fans them out to several hundred downstream tools.

The naming call looked easy. Segment kept its name under an endorsement, Twilio Segment, because the equity sat with data engineers who had typed analytics.track() into production code at thousands of companies. The migration sequencing the methodology lesson lays out assumes you can move the assets. Most of these belonged to somebody else.

Week one: the assets you do not control

A developer tool cannot be renamed in the places that matter most. Script tags pointing at cdn.segment.com were already live on customer websites and could not be edited by the vendor. Package names, SDK method names, documentation URLs and every code sample on the internet carried the old name and would keep carrying it. Several hundred partner integration directories listed "Segment" in copy the partner controls.

Then the parts nobody budgets for. A change of ownership re-triggers vendor review at enterprise customers: new legal entity on the contract and the invoice, fresh security questionnaire, procurement re-approval, and in this case new questions about what a communications company intends to do with behavioural data. Two go-to-marketgo-to-marketThe strategy defining how you'll launch a product: target segments, channels, value proposition and coordinated action plan.View full definition → motions had to coexist, a self-serve developer funnelfunnelThe customer journey from awareness to purchase, typically Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Decision, Action, with prospects narrowing at each stage.View full definition → and Twilio's enterprise sales organisation, with overlapping accounts and different comp plans. None of that appears in a brand book.

Month twelve, and month forty

By late 2021 the visible rebrand was done and the positioningpositioningThe mental space you want your brand to occupy in your target customer's mind relative to alternatives.View full definition → drift had begun. Twilio announced Engage at its SIGNAL conference, built on Segment's data layer, and Segment started being sold as one component of a customer engagement platform. The buyer moved from a data engineer choosing infrastructure to a marketing leader buying an outcome. The wordmark was preserved; the category the name stood for was not, and category is the harder thing to hold.

Month forty is the real test. Co-founder Peter Reinhardt left in 2023. Twilio wrote down hundreds of millions of dollars of goodwill tied to the Segment business, cut staff across the company, and in 2024, under activist pressure, reviewed whether to keep the unit at all before deciding to hold it. Some of that is market repricing rather than branding. Part of it is what happens when an acquired brand's promise gets rewritten faster than its customers rewrite their integrations: people who chose you for one reason are now being sold a second reason, and the switching cost that used to protect you starts working for whoever pitches them the simpler story.

CMO action items

• Separate the audience you are buying from the tone you are renting. Old Spice bought a purchase decision made by someone who was not the user, and that held. It rented a comic register attached to one actor, and that did not survive a recast. Write down which is which before you commission anything.
• Inventory every asset carrying the old name that a third party controls: partner directories, embedded code, integration docs, review-site listings, analyst databases. For an infrastructure product that list is longer than everything you own. Assume a permanent residue and staff someone against it for two years.
• Lock the measurement window before launch. Set the baseline through the equity inventory the methodology lesson walks through, then agree with finance which weeks run promotion-free.
• Write the stop condition now. "If unaided awareness in the new audience has not moved by month nine, we cut the spend" is a sentence that protects you later.

Common mistakes that kill results

Building the position inside one performer. The 2011 substitution showed P&G what the audience had actually attached to. If your repositioning cannot be recast, reshot and handed to a different agency without collapsing, you own a campaign rather than a position.

Reporting a lift a promotion paid for. The doubling figure and the buy-one-get-one offer occupied the same weeks. Anyone hostile in the room finds that within a day.

Rebranding what customers see and ignoring what they integrated. Segment's name lives in code the vendor cannot touch. The same applies to APIAPIApplication Programming Interface: a standardised interface that lets applications communicate and exchange data without knowing each other's internal workings.View full definition → endpoints, email sending domains, file formats and anything a customer wired into their own systems.

Keeping the name and quietly changing what it means. Twilio Segment stayed Segment on the box while the pitch moved from developer infrastructure to marketing engagement. Customers register that shift long before they register a new colour palette.