Buyers don’t compare options. They recall a few and pick from those. The Ehrenberg-Bass work on mental availability makes the point plainly: growth comes from being remembered in more buying situations, not from being preferred in a head-to-head nobody runs.
Distinctive assets are the thing you are actually spending
Recall is built on distinctive assets — a color, a shape, a name, a phrase — repeated long enough to become a shortcut in memory. That repetition is the entire value.
A rebrand resets it to zero. So it carries a real cost, paid immediately, against a benefit that takes years to rebuild. Worth it when the assets were never distinctive, or when the company has genuinely changed. Not worth it because sales are flat.
Why the timing misleads
At any moment most of your market isn’t buying. The estimate from the B2B Institute and Ehrenberg-Bass puts in-market buyers at roughly 5% in a given quarter for many categories. It’s an estimate, not a law, but the direction holds: flat sales usually mean the other 95% don’t remember you, not that they saw your logo and disliked it.
What to do first
Follow ten inquiries end to end — source, what they read, who replied, how long, what they asked, why they said no. The cause names itself. Sometimes it’s the brand. More often it’s the fourth step.