This article explores renaming brands in international communication from the perspective of rhetoric along three dimensions: discourse, competence and context. It chose the world's top 100 brand names released by Interbrand, aiming to analyze their rhetorical strategy by renaming methods, semantic representation of brand connotation, and the balance of localized or internationalized rhetoric content of brand image. Main findings are: in choosing a new name the meaning is given more emphasis than its sound. Besides linguistic issues, the three most important factors affecting renaming are targeting market influence, symbolic and good meaning. Renaming can be a value-added process to recast the brand in the new market and create a unique global-local image.