Corporate rebranding: why do companies fail? ​

In our day to day life we are surrounded by brands, they are an important source of value for companies, customers and collaborators and represent one of the most durable resources of a company. This is why brand management is a key process for a brand to survive and improve and for the marketing management in general. A crucial and tricky issue of every practice of managing a brand is the rebranding phase, the moment when it seems necessary for our brand to get a refresh, a renewal, to reinvent itself. The rebranding process has to be made conscientiously, with a well-defined plan, expertness and proficiency and involving all the actors of the company for a prior optimal marketing analysis. Through the research question, this elaborate sets out to understand the corporate rebranding phenomenon and which are the negative drivers that make companies fail during the process of repositioning of their brands and what they should therefore avoid to do. The elaborate is divided into three chapters: the first chapter consists of an introduction to the corporate rebranding literature background, where the meaning and main features of a brand are described, what does it mean to rebrand and why do companies decide to do that, how can a rebrand be structured and finally how can a rebrand have a duplicity in its nature, as an equity creator or a destroyer, all with the basics of some of the most important theories of the rebranding scholars; the second chapter gets deeper into the analysis of rebranding with the presentation of two real business cases: the rebranding in 2009 of the American multinational Tropicana, subsidiary of PepsiCo. Group, in beverage industry, which cost Tropicana more than 50 million dollars lost; the failed rebranding of American clothing retailer The Gap Inc., abandoned in just one week; the third chapter concludes the dissertation, analyzing the results of what it has been previously said, trying to connect the case studies observed with the theories presented in the first part. At the end of the paper, as an answer to the research question, the reader will be able to understand what did the companies miss when managing their rebranding, which were the biggest mistakes and what should they have done instead, with route for further theoretical research. ​