A successful rebranding strategy for legacy brands protects memory before it changes appearance. India’s heritage brands are reworking their identities at a pace not seen since liberalisation: Air India, Bajaj, Mahindra, Bank of Baroda and a revived Campa Cola have all relaunched in the last few years, and a 2025 Ehrenberg-Bass study of over 400 brand elements shows most marketers misjudge which of their assets consumers actually recognise. This rebranding guide breaks down the refresh vs rebrand decision, the brand asset audit method, and the distinctive brand codes that Indian rebrands kept or lost.
Key points
Most legacy rebrands fail at the inventory stage, not the design stage: teams redesign before they know which three or four codes carry the brand’s memory.
A brand refresh updates expression; a rebrand changes the promise. Choosing wrong means paying twice, once for the project and again for lost recognition.
Distinctive brand assets are scored on two measures, fame and uniqueness. High on both means untouchable; high fame with low uniqueness is a category convention you can change freely.
Air India, Bajaj and Mahindra changed expression around a protected core. Campa Cola changed the core itself, a defensible call only because the brand had been dormant for two decades.
How do you decide between a brand refresh vs rebrand?
The brand refresh vs rebrand question is really a question about what has changed in the business. A refresh updates the expression of a brand whose promise still holds: cleaner typography, a flexible logo system for digital, modernised packaging, a sharper tone of voice. A rebrand changes the promise itself, usually because the company has changed what it sells, whom it sells to or who owns it.
Tata’s takeover of Air India justified a rebrand because the product, service standard and ambition all changed. A 60-year-old spice brand losing share to D2C challengers in metro supermarkets almost always needs a refresh; its problem is salience and shelf presence, not meaning.
A useful test: list the five things your most loyal customers would say about you. If the new strategy needs them to say different things, rebrand. If it needs them to say the same things to more people, refresh.
Editor’s note: The most expensive mistake we see in rebranding Indian brands is a refresh dressed up as a rebrand because a new CMO or agency wants a visible mandate. If you cannot write one sentence naming what the business now does differently, you need a refresh, and the budget should go to distribution and media rather than a new identity.
What are distinctive brand assets, and why do legacy brands own the best ones?
Distinctive brand assets, a term from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s work on how brands grow, are the non-name elements that make people think of your brand without being told: the Amul girl, Nirma’s twirling child, the Parle-G girl, the Maharaja, the Britannia red and the Tanishq script. They work because they have been repeated for decades, in the same form, across every touchpoint, until the association became automatic.
A start-up has to buy memory with media. A legacy brand has it on the balance sheet, and a redesign that “modernises” the mascot or swaps the colour quietly writes it off.
Two properties decide whether an asset is worth protecting. Fame is the share of category buyers who link the element to your brand. Uniqueness is the share of those links that go to you rather than a competitor. High on both is a brand code and should be treated as untouchable. High fame with low uniqueness is a category convention, like saffron and green on Indian ghee packs, and can be changed freely. Low on both is decoration.
How do you run a brand asset audit?
A brand asset audit is the step most Indian rebrands skip, and the evidence says intuition is a poor substitute. The 2025 Ehrenberg-Bass study published in the Journal of Brand Management found marketers routinely overestimate how famous their assets are and underestimate how unique they are, because they project their own familiarity onto consumers.
- Inventory
Pull every element the brand has used for the last 20 years: logos and wordmarks, colours, mascots, taglines in each language, jingles and sonic cues, pack shapes, typography, celebrity associations and recurring ad devices. Legacy brands typically surface 30 to 50 candidates. Include the ones the current team finds embarrassing; those are often the most famous.
- Test, do not vote
Show each element, stripped of the brand name, to 300 to 500 category buyers across the markets that matter, in the languages they shop in, and ask which brand it belongs to. Score fame and uniqueness for each. A regional brand should run this in its core states, since an asset famous in Andhra may be invisible in Punjab.
- Apply decision rules
Assets high on both measures are locked and written into the brief as constraints. High fame with weak uniqueness goes on the sharpen list. Low scorers are released, which is where the design team gets its freedom. The output is a one-page “protect, sharpen, release” list that goes to the agency before any sketching starts.
What do rebranding case studies in India teach about what to keep?
- Air India: The Vista (2023)
Concept and Hook: Under Tata ownership, Air India replaced the red-and-orange Ashoka Chakra-inspired mark with “The Vista”, a gold window motif in gold, red and purple, signalling a premium reset.
Craft Mechanics: A full identity overhaul across livery, cabins, uniforms and digital, built for a global premium audience.
