In 2021, SurveyMonkey rebranded to Momentive. The brand launch was big and splashy, with a lot of online buzz. And why shouldn’t it be? It signified the rebirth of the twenty-year-old company.
No longer would its brand personality be fun and whimsical—it was going to be taken seriously. It was going to be trusted by enterprise companies. It was maturing, moving upmarket, and leaving its awkward teenage self behind.
But just two years later, they walked it all back. Today, Momentive is no more (except in some legal documents), and the company is once again presenting itself to the world as SurveyMonkey.
When a rebrand goes wrong, it’s not just disappointing—it’s brutal. You’ve poured months (or years) of work into your new brand identity. You’ve rallied teams behind this, burned through a lot of budget, and instead of momentum, you’re left with confusion.
This is a nightmare scenario. Because a rebrand, when done right, unlocks growth. Rebrands make your brand clearer, more recognizable, and more resonant with customers. It’s meant to clear the path forward, not block it.
So, what happened? And what can we learn from it?
It’s easy to think that a fresh new look will fix all your problems. But, rebranding is a challenging undertaking at the best of times and a costly distraction in the worst of times.
Having spent more than five years in a fast-paced creative agency, I’ve seen my fair share of rebrands—including all the ways they can go wrong and, hopefully, right.
In this article, we’ll walk through:
- Why SurveyMonkey’s rebrand was unsuccessful
- What a rebrand can and can’t fix
- How to determine if rebranding is the right move for your business
So if you’ve been itching for a rebrand but you’re unsure if you really need one, read on.
What a rebrand actually is
Let’s get this out of the way first: Your brand is not your logo.
It’s not your color palette, or your “voice and tone” document buried in a Google drive. It’s your company’s entire personality.
Yes, that absolutely includes your logo. But it also includes:
- How you treat your customers
- Your company values and mission
- The vibe of your team
- And all of the tiny interactions that make up someone’s experience with your business
When Chewy sends flowers to customers when their pets pass away, that’s branding.
Because here’s the thing: Brands are like people. And rebranding? That’s not like changing an outfit. It’s more like trying to become someone else entirely. And that’s what makes rebrands so hard and risky.
We expect brands to behave like people and to have some consistency in that behavior. We want brands to feel familiar. So, when they suddenly change—especially without rhyme, reason, or warning—it’s disorienting.
A rebrand disrupts trust, which is something you work hard to build over time (and can lose quickly).
Yes, there are times when rebranding is absolutely the right move. But before you make that decision, you need to be clear on why you’re doing it and what you’re risking in the process.
So, if you’re seriously considering a rebrand, let’s talk through some good reasons to consider undertaking one.
Good reasons to rebrand
1. You never took the time to define your brand properly
For many small businesses and early-stage startups, the product is central and the brand is an afterthought. And it makes sense; you’re focused on developing your product and growing your customer base. You’re reacting to things as they happen and solving problems as you need to. But at a certain point, you need to define a clear brand to unlock your next phase of growth.
Take Airbnb, for example. The first few iterations of their logo featured soft bubble letters in shades of blue, mirroring the then-style of tech companies it came up alongside, such as Facebook and Twitter. Their marketing at the time was very focused on the practical and boiled down to having a convenient, (usually) cheaper place to stay.
The design agency that helped them rebrand in 2014, wrote: “It became apparent that Airbnb’s line of ‘a place to stay’ was selling it short…Airbnb is all about people and not about the places at all.” Out of that rebrand came a new motto, “Belong anywhere,” a warm-toned colour palette, and the iconic Belo logo, which explicitly evokes people, places, and love.
2. You’ve been through a merger or acquisition
When two companies unite, things can get messy. You can sustain two brand identities for a while, but eventually you need to rebrand a product line, or maybe even an entire company, to fit your new reality.
For instance, when popular freelancing sites oDesk and Elance merged in 2013, they celebrated their marriage with the awkwardly hyphenated last name “Elance-oDesk.” Needless to say, it didn’t quite roll off the tongue or get them the brand recognition they were looking for. A year later, they rebranded the company as Upwork, with a clear visual story that matched their new name.
3. You’ve damaged your brand reputation in some way and need to recover
Sometimes, a company messes up so badly that its former brand becomes so toxic that it needs to distance itself from it. For instance, British Petroleum rebranded after the Deepwater Horizon crude oil spill to position itself as a “green brand.”
If that raises some eyebrows, note that a rebrand may not fix the damage—and it’s no substitute for real accountability. Actions are a core part of your brand, so if you want to make a case that you’ve turned over a new leaf, show us, don’t just tell us.
4. Your brand is holding you back from being able to reach new markets
Maybe your brand has a long and storied history, but it’s hindering you from reaching customers today. Take Old Spice in the late 2000s—a classic brand that was known for being more “grandpa” than “cool,” it needed to appeal to a younger demographic. The company rebranded in 2010 to relaunch its identity to a new generation of consumers (you might remember the iconic ads: “I’m on a horse”).
Another common issue is struggling to break into new markets when you scale. Maybe you’re a software company that built a certain reputation among your core audience of small businesses, but now you want to move upmarket into enterprise companies. You’ve marketed yourself as “simple” and “user-friendly,” but the organizations you now want to sell to are skeptical that you’ll be able to handle the complexity and scale of the work they need to do.
This is what Momentive was trying to do. So what happened?
Momentive’s rebrand mistakes—and what we can learn from them
Key lesson #1: You might be underestimating how well your current brand is working (even if you hate it)
SurveyMonkey's goal with the Momentive rebrand was clear: to show they’d grown beyond simple services and to signal that they were a serious, trustworthy option for enterprise companies. But what they didn’t factor in was how powerful their existing brand actually was.
I spoke with Creative Director and branding expert, Amanda Tennant, who shared:
“With a lot of these early tech companies, there’s a lot of brand loyalty.” Although the name ‘SurveyMonkey’ is ridiculous, its customers were loyal to that particular brand. A lot of these early-stage tech companies just have a lot of recognition across the board; everybody knows and loves them.”
And she’s right. While SurveyMonkey, true to its name, did extensive research and surveys leading up to the rebrand, the results were mixed. As Forbes reported, “a name sentiment survey of 6,014 people revealed that the brand’s popularity was on-par with Google and Salesforce but not aligned with enterprise software.”
Let’s pause there.
We can’t see SurveyMonkey’s internal data, so it’s hard to know exactly what “not aligned with enterprise software” means. But, from the outside, I suspect they might have focused a little bit too much on that second part of the results and not enough on the first part: the fact that the brand was as popular as Google and Salesforce.
That kind of brand recognition is not something to be taken lightly.
In their effort to reframe themselves as an enterprise-worthy solution, they threw the proverbial brand out with the bathwater, disregarding the power of the brand they did have. A brand people knew and trusted.
In hindsight, I wonder if there were other ways they could have addressed this perceived gap—maybe by focusing more on education or creating a big campaign to show that SurveyMonkey does more than simple surveys.
The lesson here is not to discount the power of the brand you have. Even if it isn’t exactly perfect, having a foundation you can work with is often better than being a complete unknown.
Key lesson #2: Changing your company name should be treated as a branding last resort
Most branding experts recommend not changing your brand name unless it’s so tainted that it’s impossible to move forward. That’s because one of your most significant advantages is being recognizable. Even if you don’t have the “perfect” story, being known in a space at all can get you on potential clients’ shortlists. If you change that, you lose all the natural momentum you’ve created. And the longer you’ve been in operation, the bigger the costs of changing your name.
When SurveyMonkey decided to change the name of its nearly two-decade-old company, it wasn’t tainted. At worst, the name was a little silly. As Jason Ball of Considered Content wrote in an analysis of the rebrand and re-rebrand for CMS Wire, being a little silly doesn’t necessarily mean not being suitable for enterprise clients, and actually gave the company an advantage in being memorable. He writes:
“Shortlisting vendors is often done with far less actual research than you might think, and ‘fun’ doesn’t have toxic associations (e.g., Google’s also a pretty fun brand). In short, the simple mental availability of a brand matters. A lot.”
By choosing “Momentive,” a name that was far tamer and corporate—and totally divorced from SurveyMonkey’s history—they lost that advantage. “When they switched to that name, it was just like, ‘okay, cool. You just grabbed another name that exists in the world,’” says Amanda. “‘What's that doing for you? Is it memorable?’ Obviously, not."
Key lesson #3: Your rebrand needs to mean something to your customers, not just to you
When Momentive launched, their CMO told Forbes:
“What I love about the name is this connection to speed and agility, which are such differentiators to us. The name is a nod to momentum, movement and to motion, and also speeds to the dynamism that our customers need to bring to the table in order to make decisions with confidence, and also to make decisions they know are the right decisions.”
While she does mention Momentive’s customers, the story here doesn’t feel like it’s for them. It feels like it’s driven by Momentive’s internal team. It’s about their perceived differentiators in the market, not what customers actually want from them.
This is something to be especially careful of. At the end of the day, your brand is in service to your customer. If you’re planning to change directions in such a huge way, you have to be sure that the story is something that will appeal to them, not just to you. (See rebranding disasters at Tropicana and GAP as other cautionary tales). And it’s not always easy to get this perspective from the inside, which is way it’s so critical to be in dialogue with your customers and really listen to what they have to say.
Evolve, but stay true to what makes you great
Okay, so at this point, I might have talked you out of a rebrand and spoiled all the fun. Sorry (and you’re welcome).
But I don’t want the lesson to be that your brand has to stay stagnant. That’s not it at all. “Brands are living things,” says Amanda. “They’re meant to and should keep being pushed, whether that's slightly dialling in your visuals, changing the typeface, or something else. It’s about making little tweaks that still feel very aligned with the original essence of your brand."
Your brand can and should evolve, while staying true to the core identity that made you successful in the first place.
That’s actually where our SurveyMonkey tale has a happy ending. As of July 2025, the brand reached $750M in annual revenue—up from $480.9 million in 2022, right after their disastrous Momentive rebrand. And while they no longer publicize their enterprise sales data, this substantial increase in revenue seems to suggest that they’re landing bigger deals with larger companies.
By leaning into everything that made their brand recognizable in the first place, they were actually able to achieve the results they were hoping for with their original, silly name.
It all goes to show, you don’t always need a drastic overhaul to get people to pay attention to you—but you do need to pay careful attention to your brand and what actually resonates about it with customers. This kind of brand curation is an ongoing project, the same way your personal growth as a human being is never over.
You might not need to change everything to compete in the market. You might just need to become more you.
About the author
Carina Rampelt is an Oxford-educated literary aficionado-turned-B2B writer and content strategist. When not creating great content for her clients, you can find her reading, knitting, or sharing her musings on her Substack. Find her on LinkedIn or check out her work at carinarampelt.com
