How I kept 700 people aligned on a brand that didn’t exist yet

Every article about rebrands is about the reveal: the new logo, the launch video, the press release, the moment the market meets the new you. Almost nobody writes about the harder half, which happens months earlier and entirely inside the building, and that’s communicating a rebrand to employees, getting your own people to believe in a brand that doesn’t fully exist yet.

The odds for any big internal change are poor: the famous claim that 70% of change efforts fail has no valid evidence behind it, as Mark Hughes showed in the Journal of Change Management, but McKinsey’s own survey of 1,713 executives found just 26% called their transformation very or completely successful, and those whose senior managers communicated openly about its progress were 8 times as likely to report success. At a safety-critical software company with offices in four countries, I ran internal comms through exactly that kind of transition, and engagement grew during the uncertainty instead of waiting for it to settle.

Why do employees decide whether a rebrand works?

Because they’re the first audience for the new brand and the toughest one. They see the gap between what the company says it’s becoming and how it behaves on an ordinary Tuesday, and they’re the people who answer when a client asks what’s changing or a candidate asks what the company stands for now.

Marty Neumeier’s line about brands sits on the front page of his own site:

“Your brand isn’t what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.”

Neumeier meant customers, but during a rebrand “they” starts with your own workforce. Employees decide whether the new brand exists by whether they repeat it, and they won’t repeat a message they don’t understand or believe. That’s why internal comms carries more weight than its nice-to-have reputation: it decides whether the expensive external work has anything true underneath it. I made the wider case for treating this as strategy in content marketing through a rebrand.

What does communicating a rebrand to employees involve?

Telling people what’s decided, flagging what’s still open, and doing both for months. A rebrand isn’t quick: Bynder’s 2023 survey of 1,002 marketers found the average one takes seven months from initial talks to rollout. You can’t go quiet for seven months and expect people to be aligned on launch day, but most of what they want to know (the new name, the final positioning, the story) is the stuff still being argued over in rooms you’re not always in.

So I sorted every internal message by whether it answered a decided question or an open one, stated the settled points plainly and acknowledged the open ones as open, with a date for when they’d be resolved, instead of papering over or dodging them.

What employees are asking	The reflexive move	What worked
Why are we changing at all?	Wait for the polished announcement	Share the reason early, before the new brand exists
Is my job safe in this?	Avoid it and keep talking about the logo	Name the fear directly and separate the rebrand from any restructure
What’s the new name and positioning?	Announce a draft that later changes	State what’s locked, flag what’s open, give a date
What do I tell clients and candidates now?	Leave people to improvise	Hand them a holding line they can use today
Does leadership have a plan?	Project total certainty	Show the process, including the unfinished parts

The second row moved everything: a rebrand makes people quietly wonder whether it’s cover for something worse, and if you don’t answer that, they’ll answer it themselves, usually with the darkest option.

Why should you tell employees what isn’t decided yet?

Because staying quiet until you can say everything costs you their trust, and the data backs the instinct to talk early. The usual move during a rebrand is to say nothing until the story’s finished, then unveil it, but McKinsey’s 2018 survey of 1,528 respondents found that when the desired outcome of a digital change was clearly communicated before launch, people were 3.5 times likelier to report a successful transformation.

Manufactured certainty doesn’t fool anyone who works there anyway: when leadership presents a half-formed rebrand as a done deal, people notice the seams, and the message they take away is that leadership has no plan. So I ran the updates as an ongoing thread, and the uncertainty turned into a story people followed instead of one they feared, the same pull I saw during a full ICP pivot mid-quarter.

How do you keep four countries aligned when the direction keeps moving?

With a steady channel people trust, a tight loop with whoever owns the rebrand, and enough local sense that the message survives translation. The figure I’m proudest of from that period is the 85% open rate on the internal newsletter that went to 700+ employees across four countries, held through the rebrand. For context, PoliteMail, which sells internal email software, puts the average internal open rate at 66% in its 2026 benchmark of over 2 billion internal emails.

Four countries made it harder, because the same message reads differently in Lisbon, London, Munich and the US, and a rebrand touches nerves about identity and belonging that vary by culture. The fix was staying close to whoever owned the rebrand, so my messaging tracked the latest direction and never last month’s version, plus enough local sensitivity that the core message held up in every office. That’s the open communication about progress McKinsey’s findings reward, and a steady internal channel is how you deliver it. I dug into coordinating across borders in what managing a distributed marketing team across four countries taught me, and into keeping one voice through it all in how I overhauled 40+ brand assets and rebuilt visual positioning.

None of this works without knowing what the new brand is trying to say, which is its own upstream job. I broke down building that foundation in building brand positioning from scratch, and the same role had me writing 80+ articles across the company’s technical verticals, covered in writing for technical audiences. The committee problem that flattens most company messaging is the same one that flattens internal comms, which I’ve written about in why B2B content sounds the same.

What would I do differently?

I’d set the limits of what I could share up front. Some information isn’t yours to share, whether it’s under legal wraps or still being decided a level above you, and “we’re figuring it out” only holds trust so many times before it reads as drift. Next time I’d tell people at the start what I could and couldn’t say, so the openness didn’t turn into a running list of non-answers.

The other trap is over-sharing a vision that isn’t ready. Leadership teams do flood people with an inspiring rebrand story that then changes, and every update after that erodes a little more credibility. I leaned toward openness, and once or twice I shared a direction that shifted, which meant walking it back internally. What I was after was a steady channel people kept opening because it had told them the truth so far, even when the truth was “not decided yet”, and perfect foresight was never the point.

And I’d lean less on the open rate as proof, the same caution I apply to external email open rates. PoliteMail’s own benchmark says open rates aren’t the most reliable measure of employee engagement, so today I’d pair it with what people did next: questions asked, holding lines used with clients, the rumours that never started.