Six Months After Your Rebrand: Why the Brand Starts to Drift (And What to Do About It)

After helping companies rebrand for over 20 years, I’ve noticed something that happens around the six-month mark after a rebrand launches.

Organisations often, though not always, start to see the business wobbling off-brand. Not dramatically, thankfully, it’s rare to see a single moment where someone makes a terrible decision, and everything unravels. It’s much more subtle than that.

Here are the classic ones we see a lot:

• An old template gets reused because it was the fastest thing to hand.
• Someone creates a new social media post with some new colours added as the guidelines didn’t have a certain colour
• The new logo is edited for the internal awards and ends up in three slightly different formats.

I think about it the same way I think about anything that isn’t being maintained. Fine for a while, then noticeably off, then expensive to fix. A brand is no different.

Why brands start going off-brand around month six

While the rebrand happened and launched the project had a leader, a budget, weekly check-ins and a very clear end point: launch day. Then the launch happened, the team dispersed back to their actual jobs, and the brand leadership role got handed to nobody in particular. It became everyone’s responsibility, which in my experience, is the business world’s way of saying it became no one’s.

In short rebrands have owners. Brands, after launch, often don’t.

There’s also a cultural thing at play. The launch felt like a success, the team was relieved and the LinkedIn comments were kind. That moment of validation is real of course, and rightly deserved for both the agency and the internal team running the programme, but it also creates a psychological ‘finishing line’ that isn’t actually there. The work isn’t finished, it’s really only just begun as the rollout is a vital next stage.

Add to that the fact that most teams are genuinely busy. Nobody is sitting around thinking “how can I water down this brand?” They’re just trying to get things done efficiently. Old templates are easier to find than new ones. The approval process for a new asset feels like it takes seven people and a small miracle. So small shortcuts happen. It’s only when you look at the cumulative effect, usually around that six-month mark, that you can see the drift from the launch applications and visuals the agency gave you and what your own team is outputting.

The numbers here are pretty stark. marq (formally Lucidpress) research found that 81% of companies deal with off-brand content even when guidelines exist. So this isn’t a failure of instruction; it’s a failure of infrastructure and ownership. The good news – two very fixable things.

What brand guardianship actually is (and why it matters)

Guardianship is the role that should exist from the moment the rebrand launches, and usually doesn’t.

A brand guardian is a named person, or a small group, whose job is to protect and apply the brand after the launch party is over. An actual human with the remit to say “that’s on brand” and “that isn’t,” and the influence to make sure things are corrected if they aren’t. The job doesn’t stop there though. It’s also to Proactively help to set ongoing priorities and strategic direction for the brand when new opportunities or challenges surface.

For some clients that’s an internal hire – if you have a role such as Head of Brand this is part of their role. But many companies are too small for someone in the role. So, for others, it’s an external partner who acts as a fractional strategic brand lead, which is a model we use at Nalla and one I’d genuinely advocate for, particularly where the internal team is stretched or where a degree of objectivity matters.

What guardianship is not, and it’s the objection I hear most often, is policing. It isn’t someone wandering around pointing out the wrong shade of grey and making everyone feel bad. The point is to be the person who keeps the brand coherent and developed so that nobody else has to carry that cognitive load day to day. Done well, it reduces friction and makes doing the right thing the easy thing.

And guardianship isn’t just about protecting what was launched. A brand that launched in January will look slightly different by October, because it’s been tested against real-world use cases that nobody fully anticipated in the brief. Teams find things that don’t quite work and new contexts emerge. A good guardian creates a safe, structured way to handle that, so the brand can breathe and adapt without losing its core identity. It’s not brand weakness the the brand evolves, that’s the reality of how a brand matures.

Marq data shows that 71% of brand professionals report it takes seven or more people to approve a single on-brand asset, and 59% say content gets published before that approval cycle completes. The process meant to protect the brand without a brand guardian is so heavy that most people skip it. This isn’t protecting the brand it’s the thing destroying it, because every awkward process is an invitation to find a sneaky workaround, and the workaround is almost always off-brand.

As Isobel Peck, CMO at Informa, puts it:

“Having an expert brand guardian means staying on top of both internal and customer needs, and continually raising the quality of output.”

 

What is a DAM, and why does it matter for brand consistency?

A DAM, or Digital Asset Management system, is essentially a central, controlled library for all of your brand files. Current logo files, approved templates, on-brand photography, campaign assets, everything in one place, properly labelled and accessible to the people who need it across the globe.

For international businesses, this is a core infrastructure item rather than a nice-to-have. Without it, what happens is exactly what I described at the start: people work from whatever is closest to hand, which is usually something saved on a desktop from two years ago in my experience. Aprimo research found that 71% of businesses agree that inconsistent brand presentation leads to customer confusion. A DAM removes the version-control problem by making the right file easier to find than the wrong one. That last point matters more than people realise. If the correct asset takes five more minutes to locate than the incorrect one, the incorrect one wins every time.

The efficiency gains are real too. According to MediaValet’s 2025 DAM Trends Report, 60% of organisations using a DAM system report saving time and money, with teams saving an average of 13.5 hours a week on asset-related tasks! That’s more than a full working day returned to the team each week, redirected from hunting for files towards actual creative work.

It also means that when guidelines evolve, and they will, you’re updating one system rather than chasing 40 people to delete old files from their machines. And for teams working across different time zones or markets, the DAM is what keeps everyone working from the same visual language without needing a Teams call to verify whether a file is current.

Online guidelines versus PDFs: why it matters more than you might think

A lot of businesses launch a rebrand with a beautifully produced PDF brand guidelines document. For a small team in one location, it can genuinely work.

But if your business has more than 50 people, the PDF model is already struggling. If you’re operating across multiple markets or geographies, it probably isn’t working at all.

I find the challenge here is often businesses want to trim the rebrand proposal fee down and this is one of the areas they feel happy to trade on.

The problem isn’t that the PDF is wrong; it’s that it exists separately from the work and files people use. It often lives in a SharePoint folder that people visit exactly once during onboarding and rarely return to. It also doesn’t update when the brand evolves. It can’t be searched when someone needs to know whether they can use a specific typeface on a dark background. It creates a passive relationship with the brand, where following the guidelines is a separate, from being able to download the assets and templates that teams can use. “Speak to Roger in Marketing if you need our logo” no longer works for a global brand (Sorry Roger)

Online, living brand guidelines change that dynamic. They’re searchable and updatable. They can live inside the tools your teams already use. And critically, they can be kept current, so the guidelines someone in Singapore opens today are the same ones someone in London used last week.

Which brings me to translation. If your guidelines only exist in English and you have teams working in other languages, those teams are effectively unguided. They’re doing their best, but they’re interpreting rather than applying. Translating your online guidelines is one of the highest-return investments I see businesses overlook and the cost is modest. The alternative is every regional team building their own version of your brand, this often gets noticed when month six arrives and you’re trying to work out why things look so different across markets!

Final Thoughts

If you rebranded in the last year or two and some of this is resonating, it is not a lost cause. It just needs the right infrastructure: a named guardian, living guidelines, the tools to support consistent application, and a clear decision about what can evolve and what can’t.

The launch was the achievement and you’ve done that – well done! What happens in the quieter months afterwards is where the investment just needs maintaining. If you’d like an honest look at where your brand is sitting right now, that’s exactly what a Nalla brand clarity session is built for. Let’s talk here’s how to get in touch