- Rebrands don’t have to cost you awareness if they’re grounded in real data.
- Yerba Madre’s brand awareness grew by 8 percentage points in the months following the rebrand, giving its team concrete data to show leadership that their investment and change in strategy had paid off.
- Yerba Madre’s previous brand tracking came in quarterly PowerPoint decks that were outdated by the time they arrived. With Tracksuit, the team had an always-on view of brand health.
- Regarding brand perception, Yerba Madre led on sustainability and natural ingredients; however, the team realized that energy and flavor required stronger storytelling. Tracksuit helped Yerba Madre surface these insights, shaping the brand’s roadmap for 2026.
Implementing a full rebrand isn’t for the faint of heart. You have to weigh risks like losing brand recognition and equity, as well as disrupting what customers already associate with your brand.
When Yerba Madre launched its rebrand in May 2025, the team had a healthy paranoia around losing awareness during the transition.
But the opposite happened. Shortly after changing its name and pivoting its brand, Yerba Madre saw a significant lift in awareness, and the brand gained even more momentum.
We caught up with Yerba Madre’s Head of Public Relations, Amanda Cardosi, and Gordon McLean, the company’s Senior Director of Brand Strategy, to learn the story behind the rebrand, the lessons they picked up, and their exciting vision for the year ahead.
The Yerba Madre story 🌱🌎
Yerba Madre isn't just another beverage brand. Long before corporate social responsibility was a thing, the company, then called "Guayakí Yerba Mate," was already committed to being sustainable and socially conscious.
“We’ve always had a market-driven regeneration model, which means every part of our process is additive to the people and places in which we do business,” explains Amanda.
This philosophy shows up across every part of Yerba Madre’s business, including product sourcing and development, as well as how it supports the communities behind the product.
“We've developed our own shade-grown, which is a really smart and eco-friendly way of growing mate. And we work with Indigenous community partners across South America to grow our mate,” she adds.
What sparked the rebrand?✨🍵
After nearly three decades as Guayakí Yerba Mate, the team realized the need to pivot the brand.
That said, they also knew that a rebrand wasn’t something to rush. “That’s not a decision you take lightly,” Amanda says. “It has to have a good reason. And it did.”
There were two main drivers. First, the brand had outgrown its original name.
The company originally worked with one Indigenous tribe in Paraguay, the Guarani. When the brand was first established, the founders wanted to honor that relationship, hence the name Guayakí Yerba Mate.
The brand has since expanded its partnerships to include communities in Brazil and Argentina. As such, the original name no longer told the whole story.
Another big driver for the rebrand was accessibility.
“Guayakí is just hard to say,” Amanda admits. And with a mission to bring mate across North America, the brand knew that it had to make its name more accessible and recognizable to consumers.
The team eventually landed on the name Yerba Madre. Aside from being easier to pronounce, the name does a better job of capturing what the brand stands for today. The word “madre” translates to “mother,” and encompasses a broader connection to Mother Earth, regeneration, and the many Indigenous partners behind the brand
And “yerba” kept the brand rooted in what people already knew and loved. It references yerba mate itself and nods to the nickname current customers gave the brand: “yerbs.”
Gaining brand awareness and using Tracksuit to measure results 📊👀
Going into the rebrand, the Yerba Madre team had what Gordon calls “a bit of healthy paranoia.” They knew changing a name came with risk, especially when awareness sat at around 15%. The big question was whether the rebrand would cause that number to dip.
Spoiler alert: it didn’t.
Tracksuit gave Yerba Madre the valuable insights shortly after the rebrand — something that the team couldn’t have done with it’s old brand tracking solution.
“With our previous tracker, we’d get four cuts of data a year in a PowerPoint,” Gordon explains. “By the time it came back, it was out of date.” That lag made it hard to react in real time, or even know what was really happening.
With Tracksuit’s live dashboard, the team could check progress as it unfolded. “We thought we might actually lose awareness,” Gordon says. “But far from losing it, we gained awareness through the rebrand.”
Starting in May, right after launch and a strong PR push, awareness climbed steadily through November. In that short window, the brand gained roughly eight points. “Without Tracksuit, we just wouldn’t have been able to prove that,” Gordon says. “We would’ve been panicking under the illusion that we were losing rather than gaining.”
Logging into Tracksuit became routine for Yerba Madre’s team. “As soon as the first day of the month would arrive, that would be ‘Tracksuit day’,” he adds.
Beyond real-time tracking, Tracksuit enables the team to mark key moments and campaigns, so they can measure the results of their initiatives.
“The other thing that's useful about Tracksuit is being able to drop milestone pins. We were able to drop a little marker for May 1st. We were also able to drop little markers for PR and social media campaigns.”
Gordon continues, “This allowed us to observe if we were seeing any increases around a particular activity. So not only were we able to look at a macro level, we were able to pinpoint particular initiatives and see if we could correlate that to any changes in awareness.”
Putting the spotlight on Yerba Madre’s energizing and flavorful qualities ⚡️🍊
As awareness climbed, the Yerba Madre team turned its attention to a deeper question: how people actually perceived the brand.
Tracksuit’s perception metrics helped answer that. Gordon explains that the team built custom image statements to understand what the brand stood for in consumers’ minds.
“We found that we do better than our competitive set when it comes to the perception that we are made from natural ingredients,” he says. “But we don’t do quite as well when it comes to being seen as an energizing beverage.”
That insight mattered. To compete with brands like Alani Nu and Celsius, Yerba Madre needed to be known for more than just being natural. “We needed to be two things really,” Gordon says. “We needed to be seen as natural and energizing.” While the brand already owned the natural story, it became clear the team had to dial up the energy in its messaging and creatives.
Then came a third and even bigger revelation.
After a few months of data, Tracksuit surfaced the key category drivers. “That’s when we saw that taste is the number one driver in the category,” Gordon explains.
What surprised the team most was the gap. “We get the least credit for it in the category among our competitive set,” he says. “And we probably have the tastiest portfolio of drinks in the category. People just don’t know.”
The issue wasn’t the product. It was perception. Yerba mate, as a category, is often described as earthy. “It’s got a beautiful flavor profile,” Gordon says, “but it’s earthy rather than tasty.” Yerba Madre, however, offers a wide range of flavored beverages that deserve more attention.
That realization reshaped the brand’s priorities. Thanks to the insights they gained from Tracksuit, they now know that when marketing Yerba Madre, they need to spotlight flavor alongside energy and natural ingredients.
What’s next for Yerba Madre? 🚀🔮
Yerba Madre’s rebrand is just the beginning. In 2025, the team moved intentionally, saving much of its budget to support a bigger push ahead.
“We wanted to keep a lot of what we had for 2026,” Gordon says. “That’s when we’re really going to put our foot on the gas.”
The good news is that the team has the tools and data they need to confidently tell Yerba Madre’s brand story in 2026 and beyond.
The data surfaced through Tracksuit are guiding how the team refines its strategy. And because they can measure progress over time, they can ensure that Yerba Madre’s brand initiatives stay on track.
