When a heritage house hands its codes to a new director, the cheap move is reinvention. The expensive, harder move is restraint. Anderson did the second.
What Anderson understood — and what most rebrands miss — is that distinctive assets compound. Touching them is a tax. The brand-asset audit before any rebrand should be radically conservative.
- →Identify the three assets the audience already knows. Touch nothing else first.
- →Refresh the system around those assets — type, motion, sound, photography — not the assets themselves.
- →Measure recognition before launch and 90 days after. If recall drops, you went too far.
