Most rebrands start with a moodboard and end with a mark nobody can explain. The order is the problem.
A rebrand usually arrives as a request for a logo. Sometimes the logo is genuinely the problem. Far more often the business cannot state what it is in a sentence that its own salespeople repeat the same way twice, and a new mark will not fix that. It will just make the confusion better looking.
Positioning is the unglamorous work of deciding what you are, who it is for, and why it is not the other one. It is done by looking at the category and the competitors rather than at references, and the output is a sentence rather than an image. The test is whether your sales team stops rewriting it.
Everything downstream gets easier once that exists. The name has something to be judged against. The identity has a job rather than a taste to satisfy. The ad has something credible to say, which matters because paid media is where positioning gets tested against people who can leave. And the guidelines have a reason to say no to things, which is the only thing that keeps a brand intact after the people who made it move on.
Doing it in the other order is what produces the familiar outcome: a beautiful identity, an expensive rollout, and a business that six months later is describing itself exactly the way it did before, because nothing about the underlying decision changed.
This is also why brand and performance sit in the same conversation rather than in separate departments. In a crowded category the click goes to the company people have heard of, and that is decided long before the ad is written.