Rebranding, relaunching, relapsing

On 1 April 1976, Steve Jobs cofounded Apple. Today, after 50 years, Apple is the world’s most valuable brand. Now what would have happened if the Apple board, when it removed Steve Jobs in 1985, immediately changed the name of the company to something other than Apple, and in September 1997, when Steve Jobs returned, changed the name of the company back to Apple, and in 2011, when Tim Cook replaced him as CEO, changed the name again? I know it’s hard to even imagine, but let’s say all of this had happened just with the company name and everything else stayed the same.

Would the company still have built the same brand equity? Would it still be able to charge such a premium for its products? It is hard to imagine that it would. What Apple built over the last 50 years is brand equity, and not just through its products but through consistent messaging, design, experience and decisions. All of that accumulated meaning had one name to attach itself to.

Now let’s take a flight from Cupertino to Islamabad and see what happened here. Apologies, still happening here.

In 1992, PTV-2 was launched, which became PTV World in 1998. In 2007, it was taken off the air and replaced by the Urdu-language PTV News. In 2013, PTV World was relaunched, this time as a dedicated English-language news channel. After 12 years, in 2025, PTV World was rebranded, with a new logo, new colours and a relatively new name: Pakistan TV.

Pakistan TV Digital was also launched alongside it, a genuinely new platform with its own newsroom and editorial framework, built to cover international events through a Pakistani lens. Here’s the part that undercuts the whole exercise. Pakistan TV, the channel that got the full visual overhaul, kept the exact same social media account it had as PTV World, same handle, same followers built up under a name that no longer exists, just a new logo and description pasted over it.

The only part of this relaunch that built something new from scratch was the platform that didn’t need a rebrand in the first place. The part that did need one got a coat of paint on an old account and called it done.

This is not just a PTV problem. This pattern is not new in Pakistan and has been happening for decades. Sometimes with organisations, most of the time with initiatives. Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) launched in 2008, backed by an act of parliament, a cash-transfer programme built to last. Eleven years later, in 2019, Ehsaas arrived as the bigger umbrella, and BISP’s own branding quietly disappeared, even though BISP kept doing the actual work underneath it, running as the core piece of Ehsaas Kafalat. Then 2022, new government, and the reversal ran the other way. Ehsaas initiatives got renamed after Benazir, and BISP’s name came back in official communication. Not because the programme had changed. Because whoever was in charge had.

The same was the case with the Prime Minister’s Youth Programme, which was launched in 2013, rebranded as the Kamyab Jawan Programme by the next government in 2019, and after the change of government in 2022, the Prime Minister’s Youth Programme name returned, while some initiatives continued under the broader youth-programme structure. The list can go on and on, and if we include examples from provincial governments, the list may never end. Some changes may come in the news because of public reaction, but the majority of them never even get a mention.

A narrative needs a subject that stays still long enough for people to form a relationship with it. You cannot build a story around something whose name keeps changing under you. Every time the noun shifts, whatever narrative was being built has to start over, and most people don’t bother starting over; they just stop paying attention. Which might explain something bigger than branding. Maybe part of the reason the state struggles to tell a coherent story about itself is this exact habit, not the only reason, definitely not, but a real one, sitting quietly underneath the bigger explanations everyone reaches for first.

And nobody’s counting what any of this costs. Not the logo redesign, not the new signage, not the reprinted forms, not the ad spend to make people learn a new name for something they already knew. There’s no line item anywhere that says: here’s what we spent teaching the country a name we’re going to un-teach them in three years. As long as nobody’s tracking that, and as long as the benefits of a launch are immediate while the cost of lost recognition is invisible and spread out, this is just going to keep happening. The incentive can become very one-sided.

It doesn’t have to be this way, and it’s not like there’s no example to point to. Brazil’s Bolsa Família launched in 2003 and became the country’s flagship anti-poverty programme, recognised well beyond Brazil’s own borders. The name endured across different parties and presidents for close to twenty years. That’s accumulated brand equity. In 2021, a rival government changed the name to Auxílio Brasil. By March 2023, Bolsa Família was back. The episode proves the opposite lesson: a name can become bigger than whoever happens to be governing at the time, entrenched enough that abandoning it costs more than restoring it.

There’s an irony sitting right inside the PTV story too. Its stated purpose, the reason it exists in this new form at all, is to provide an authoritative Pakistani voice to international audiences and cover international developments through a Pakistani lens. That’s a difficult case to make abroad when the channel can’t hold onto a coherent identity for itself at home. Nation branding doesn’t start with an international campaign. It starts with whether the domestic version of the story can survive its own government long enough to be worth telling in the first place.

None of this means a name should never change. Sometimes it should: a mandate genuinely shifts, an old name carries baggage nobody wants attached anymore, an institution merges into something actually different. But a rename should have to answer a real question before it happens: what exactly are we gaining that’s worth spending the recognition we’ve already built? Right now, almost nothing here gets asked that question. A new government arrives, and changing the name becomes the easiest visible thing to do, even when the harder work is fixing what the name was attached to.

Every government, whether provincial or federal, launches tons of initiatives, but I don’t remember when was the last time any one of them actually became a brand. Why? Because nothing sticks around long enough to earn the word. A brand is just a name that’s had time to accumulate meaning, good, bad, or mixed. Rename it every few years and you’re not building a brand, you’re resetting a counter. Whatever meaning had started to attach itself gets orphaned, and the new name starts again from zero, with no memory of what came before it and no credit for what worked.

Governments change. That’s normal, expected, built into the system. What isn’t normal, or shouldn’t be, is treating the name as government property to be redecorated on arrival. The name was never the government’s to begin with. It belonged to whoever it had already reached.

The article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Business Recorder or its owners.