I think there is an example in Europe. myTaxi has been rebranded to FREE NOW. The change has been dictated to free the brand from just the taxi business connection. But I believe it was unfortunate, at least for their taxi business. I don't have hard numbers, but the new name and logo seems to be random, completely unrelated to taxis, so when you see a car with it, you have no idea that the driver is a taxi driver. It's 2 years now with new name, but they iOS app is still named: FREE NOW (mytaxi). Me and my friends always have to ask someone "how mytaxi is called now?" because the app is no longer under M in the phone.
Worse for the company is that, since myTaxi was extremely catchy, there came a competitor called iTaxi, and many believe it might had take over some of the clients just because people trying to find myTaxi installed iTaxi instead, as FREE NOW looked cryptic and unrelated to taxis for them.
But in general, people used to a brand always cry out how rebranding will kill the brand and it truly has zero effect. I remember people saying that gmail's logo changing would kill it. Then it happened like two more times. Google rebranded Hangouts/Chat/Whatever like fifteen times and they still somehow have users. And in fintech I've seen tons of successful rebrands despite users doomsdaying them out. Simple, mentioned downthread, is a good example.
People just hate change. I mean look at some of the replies here… I hope they'll be able to read themselves a year from now.
On Android it's even more confusing. Some time ago it changed from "FREE NOW (mytaxi)" to "FREE NOW (Kapten)". At first I feared that they were undergoing another stupid rebranding (or tried to do one to Kapten and then went back on it and I missed that). Turns out that was a company they acquired from the UK, which I assume 90% of existing users never heard of before.
Wise is obviously a rebrand intended for IPO, along with their talks of being IPO ready. But Stripe? They dont seems to be making IPO preparation at all. I wonder when will it happen or they are happy now as they dont have to deal with the pressure of being a public company.
The pandemic coming along masked it, but I think the Realtimeboard to Miro rebrand did. They went from a clearly defined value proposition in the name to a nothing-word. For software that was installed on desktops, so the name and icon changed.
n=1 but I still have to stop and think which app I want to open for a realtime whiteboard.
Buy.com switching to Rakuten.com comes to mind.
Seriously, have you ever seen a rebrand negatively affect a product? Rebrands have to be thought about retrospectively: you need to think whether it would make sense to go from the new to the old. Number26 for example rebranded to N26 and in retrospect it was an utterly obvious move.
Wise to Transferwise would make no sense especially if they are positioning themselves as more than a PayPal alternative. So this is a good rebrand.
And the generic name isn't a problem, any more than it was for Square. It's a shame $WISE is taken though.