McAfee is rebranding: 68% of consumers know the company only as an antivirus

The formula of the problem, therefore, looks like this: decades of consistent work in the cybersecurity market have built McAfee's reputation as a reliable antivirus vendor — but at the same time cemented an image of the company that no longer reflects the full range of its current services.

The company intends to fix this situation through a rebranding. The official launch of the new identity is scheduled for September 29.

For the market, the situation at McAfee is revealing. A long brand history and high consumer confidence are assets that are usually hard to overestimate. McAfee's brand trackers, according to Fried, consistently record the company's leadership on the trust metric. But that same asset becomes a limitation when the company expands its product line: consumers continue to see in it only what they came to love about the brand decades ago.

The task of the rebranding is to repackage perception. McAfee needs to transfer the accumulated trust from the "antivirus" category into a broader category of comprehensive cybersecurity, including fraud protection and dark web leak monitoring.

The success of the initiative can be judged by the dynamics of the very metric that currently signals the problem: if the share of consumers who associate McAfee only with antivirus begins to decline while brand trust is maintained, the rebranding will have achieved its goal. For now, the starting point is fixed: 68% and almost 40 years of history.

The emergence of the category of products for fighting fraud and monitoring the dark web also reflects a shift in the nature of threats: today, attacks are increasingly directed not at devices but at the users themselves — through phishing, social engineering, and compromise of personal data. That is precisely why McAfee is seeking to be recognized not only as an "antivirus" company but also as a provider of a broader set of digital protection tools.