Surviving Seven Rebrands (and the Lessons We Learned Along the Way)

My first sales job with a national, multi-family housing vendor company was selling internet exposure to people who often didn't even have computers.

It was 1999. I was flying out of Arizona, back to my home state of Minnesota, trying to convince apartment management professionals to spend money to buy advertising on something called "the internet" — a thing most of them had never used and didn't trust. I headed into the field with three-ring binders filled with pages of printed copies of what a listings page looked like on different search engines: AOL.com, Ask Jeeves, and Lycos. Our sales team had to use paper to explain the online product.

It wasn't just the pitch that ran on paper, either. Back in those days, managers had to take photos of their communities with a disposable camera and mail them to us to be processed and scanned. We intercepted "hot leads" from prospective residents and sent them to leasing offices by fax.

The company I worked for was called AllApartments. Within a few months of my hire date, it wasn't.

A marketing firm convinced leadership to rebrand as SpringStreet. A few months later, we added ".com" — SpringStreet.com. That's about the point when I moved from sales to Marketing. And then it got interesting.

SpringStreet.com got acquired by a company called Homestore, the original home of REALTOR.com. First we became "SpringStreet.com, a Homestore company." Then "Homestore, formerly SpringStreet.com." Then Homestore decided it wanted its own ".com," so for a stretch we were "Homestore.com, formerly SpringStreet.com." By the end of that year, we landed on Homestore.com Apartments & Rentals — and that's where it stayed until I left.

In the course of a year: Seven names. Seven logos. And three distinctly different color style guides.

And that wasn't the only chaos. We had new leadership, more than once. An IPO. Office relocations. Eventually, a couple of our executives went to prison for round-tripping — a fraud scheme that surfaced right as the dot-com bubble was bursting around us. We were selling a product almost nobody understood, under a company name that kept changing—and even when it was finalized, it sounded like a furniture store—inside an industry that was watching internet companies collapse on the evening news.

By any reasonable measure, that should have been a disaster. It wasn't.

We came out of it as one of the tightest, most effective teams I've ever been part of — a dozen sales reps around the country, plus product, marketing, and internal support, all pulling in the same direction, year after year, through every single one of those changes.

Here's what I've come to understand, looking back: our customers weren't loyal to a logo. They couldn't have been — the logo never stayed still long enough. They were loyal to the people. To us. The reps they talked to every week, the product team that kept building, the internal team that kept things running no matter what the org chart said that quarter. What held the business together wasn't the brand identity. It was the culture underneath it — shared goals, entrepreneurial thinking, people who treated change as something to work through together rather than something that happened to them.

That's the thing about brand that most companies get backward. They think brand is the logo, the name, the visual identity — something you build first and then defend. It's what you put on a website, and in your outreach and on your building and on your career apparel.

The brand identity that Marketing builds is important. It matters. But what we think of traditionally as "brand" is not what keeps customers and employees choosing you, at least not entirely. What keeps them is the culture they can feel underneath all of it — whether the people are the same, whether the values are the same, whether working with you still feels like working with you, no matter what's written on the letterhead that month.

And maybe most importantly, whether you and your organization are people that they trust, and that they genuinely like working with.

I didn't have language for this at the time. I just knew that something rare was happening on that team, and that it had very little to do with what we were called. It took me another twenty years — through leaving the apartment industry, building and running a small-town coffeeshop, and eventually starting The Bluebird Lab — to understand what I'd actually witnessed: culture is the brand. A generative culture is the goal. And in the best case and very attainable scenario, if you can align your unique culture with what your Marketing team is doing, the results are undeniable.

If your organization is navigating change — a rebrand, an acquisition, new leadership, a hard season — and you're wondering what's actually going to hold it together, that's exactly the work we do at The Bluebird Lab. Get in touch.