Established brands rarely become irrelevant overnight. There is usually no single disastrous decision, catastrophic campaign or moment when consumers suddenly decide to move on. Relevance tends to disappear much more quietly.
A competitor becomes a little more appealing. A product advantage becomes standard across the category. A younger audience forms a different relationship with the brand. An assumption that has guided the business for years stops being quite as true as it once was. Individually, none of these changes necessarily looks threatening. Collectively, they can fundamentally alter a brand’s future.
The uncomfortable truth is that brands often see many of these signals. They have sales data, trackers, research, customer feedback and market intelligence. The bigger challenge is recognising which changes are significant and having the confidence to act before the evidence becomes impossible to ignore.
That is why brands do not simply lose relevance. They give it away. I’ve tried to create some tips here, backed by brand examples, that will hopefully prove useful to brand managers wanting to ensure their brand keeps relevant and keeps growing!
1. Success Creates Its Own Blind Spots
Success is reassuring. It gives brands confidence, scale, distribution, awareness and, perhaps most dangerously, a sense that the formula still works.
For established brands, that confidence is usually well earned. Years of investment create familiarity, consumers recognise the brand, retailers know it and leadership teams have dashboards full of evidence showing what has worked before. The problem is that success can make change harder to see.
A brand can continue to perform while the foundations underneath that performance are beginning to weaken. Distribution can mask declining preference; habit can hide falling enthusiasm and promotions can prop up volume. Older, loyal customers may sustain sales while younger consumers quietly choose something else.
Debenhams is an uncomfortable example. For generations it was a fixture of the British high street, with awareness, heritage, prime locations and enormous familiarity. Yet those strengths could not insulate it from profound changes in how people shopped, what they expected from department stores and how quickly digital retail was developing.
The important lesson is not simply that Debenhams was slow to embrace online retail. Historic scale can create a long period in which things still look sufficiently normal. Customers still come through the doors, revenue still arrives and the name remains famous. All of that can make fundamental change feel less urgent than it really is.
Historic success can also become evidence for future decisions. Statements such as “consumers have always valued this”, “this is what our brand stands for” or “our core customer expects us to behave this way” may remain true, but they may also have gone unchallenged for too long.
The opposite lesson can be seen in Marks & Spencer. Few British brands carry more history or legacy, and M&S has itself experienced periods when its relevance, particularly in clothing, was seriously questioned. Its more recent recovery has involved challenging parts of the old formula, with renewed emphasis on product, quality, value, innovation and attracting more frequent customers. The point is not that M&S found a magical new formula. It demonstrated that heritage does not have to mean immobility.
Established brands therefore need to distinguish between genuine brand equity and organisational habit, between consumer loyalty and consumer inertia, and between something consumers truly value and something the company has simply become attached to. This becomes even harder when the brand is still growing. Decline creates urgency, while success creates permission to wait.
The more useful question is not simply whether the brand is still performing, but what is changing underneath that performance. Past success does not protect a brand from future irrelevance. Sometimes it simply delays the moment when the problem becomes impossible to ignore.
The more successful a brand has been, the easier it is to mistake momentum for relevance.
2. Relevance Usually Declines Before Revenue Does
One of the most dangerous assumptions in marketing is that if the numbers still look healthy, the brand must be healthy too.
Sales, market share and profit are essential measures, but they are often lagging indicators. They tell you what consumers have done, not necessarily what they are beginning to think, feel or consider. A customer can still buy your brand while becoming less attached to it or continue visiting your store while increasingly considering alternatives. The transaction survives even as the preference underneath it starts to weaken.
Tesco provides a useful example of both the danger and the opportunity. In the years before its major difficulties in 2014, the UK grocery market was already changing rapidly as Aldi and Lidl attracted more households and reset expectations around value.
The important part of the story is what Tesco did next. It refocused hard on customers, value, availability and the shopping experience, simplified the business, rebuilt trust and regained momentum. The recovery came from recognising that expectations had changed and responding with clarity.
Tesco therefore demonstrates something important: relevance can weaken before the full commercial impact becomes obvious, and it can also be rebuilt when a business recognises the shift and acts.
Behavioural changes often begin at the edges. A competitor enters the consideration set, a weekly habit becomes fortnightly, or one category moves elsewhere before another follows. Eventually the sales numbers tell the story, but the story began much earlier.
Boots provides another perspective. It is a heritage retailer operating in a world reshaped by digital shopping, specialist beauty competitors and changing expectations around convenience. Boots has increasingly combined its physical estate with digital behaviour, investing in its app, online shopping and new ways for customers to interact with the brand.
The lesson is bigger than digital transformation. Where and how consumers want to engage with an established brand can change long before their underlying need for the category disappears.
Marketers therefore need to look underneath headline performance. Are customers becoming less attached even while they continue to buy, and are those shifts being identified early enough to act before they show up in the P&L?
The brands that protect relevance do not wait until the numbers turn red, instead, they pay attention when the signals start turning amber.
3. Familiarity Is Not the Same as Loyalty
I say this often! Established brands often take comfort from familiarity. Consumers know the name, recognise the logo and may have been customers for years. In categories such as banking, that long relationship can look a lot like loyalty.
The problem is that familiarity and loyalty are not the same thing.
For decades, UK consumers often stayed with the same high-street bank for years, sometimes for most of their adult lives. That created enormous strength for traditional banks, but it also made it easy to assume longevity reflected deep attachment.
Today, consumers have become increasingly willing to reconsider what a banking relationship should look like.
Monzo did not become relevant by simply recreating a traditional bank on a smaller scale. It built around different expectations: mobile-first interaction, instant visibility of spending, easier money management and an experience designed around the smartphone.
Raisin challenges the traditional relationship from another direction. Its proposition makes it easier for consumers to compare and manage savings across multiple providers rather than assuming loyalty to one institution.
That changes the underlying question. The traditional model asks which bank someone is with, while the newer model increasingly asks which provider offers the best solution for what that person needs right now.
Traditional banks retain huge strengths in trust, scale, relationships and breadth of service. The significance of fintech is not that those strengths have disappeared. It is that familiarity is no longer enough on its own.
A customer can know a brand, trust it and have used it for twenty years while becoming increasingly open to alternatives. Familiar brands often see repeat behaviour and assume affection, when consumers may simply have encountered no sufficiently compelling reason to reconsider.
The better question is not simply how loyal customers are, but what would give them a compelling reason to leave. That forces brands to examine the strength of the current relationship rather than relying on its history.
Loyalty is enormously valuable, but it should never be treated as permanent. Consumers can know you, trust you and have chosen you for years, and still decide that someone else now understands their needs a little better.
4. In Trying to Stay Relevant, Brands Can Become Less Distinctive
There is a trap in the pursuit of relevance. Markets change, competitors move quickly and new cultural signals emerge. Established brands quite rightly respond by refreshing identities, changing tone of voice, adopting new channels and borrowing from whatever currently feels contemporary.
The danger is that, in trying to look more relevant, brands start to look more like everyone else. That is when relevance becomes confused with imitation.
Distinctive brands are rarely built by following category conventions perfectly. They are built by owning something recognisable: a point of view, an asset, a promise, a tone or an experience that consumers associate disproportionately with them.
John Lewis provides a useful example. Its “Never Knowingly Undersold” promise dated back to 1925 and had become deeply associated with the retailer’s reputation for trust, service and value. The pledge was dropped in 2022 because the original model had become difficult to operate in an online retail environment.
Two years later, John Lewis brought it back, redesigned for modern shopping and expanded to compare prices with online competitors. The interesting point was not simply the return of an old slogan. The underlying promise still had value, while the way it was delivered needed to evolve.
Burberry offers a different version of the same lesson. Few British brands possess more recognisable codes: the trench coat, the check, outerwear and a particular expression of Britishness. Those assets have been reinterpreted repeatedly, and Burberry’s challenge has been to remain culturally current without stripping away the cues that allow consumers to recognise it immediately.
Brands can easily mistake modernisation for reinvention. A new identity, campaign or tone may feel progressive internally, but if it removes the cues that made the brand distinctive, the result can be a more contemporary brand that is also less ownable.
The challenge is not whether to change. It is deciding what can evolve without giving away what made the brand valuable in the first place.
Ask yourself this:
“Would consumers would genuinely miss an element of your brand if it disappeared?”
Is the proposed change responding to a real consumer shift or simply nervousness about what competitors are doing? The strongest brands evolve their expression without surrendering their identity. Relevance should make a brand more meaningful, not more generic.
5. Heritage Becomes Dangerous When It Turns into Protectionism
Heritage is one of the most valuable assets an established brand can have. It creates recognition, trust and emotional memory, giving consumers shortcuts and making a brand reassuringly familiar in a market full of noise.
The danger comes when brands start protecting everything old simply because it is old. That is when heritage becomes protectionism.
The challenge is separating what consumers genuinely value from what the organisation has simply grown attached to.
Argos is a good example. For decades, its catalogue was one of the most recognisable artefacts in British retail. More than a billion copies were printed over its lifetime, and, at its peak, it was a fixture in millions of homes. If you have kids of a certain age the arrival of the Christmas Argos catalogue was an event!
Argos eventually stopped printing the main catalogue as customer behaviour moved online. The catalogue itself was iconic, but the deeper consumer value was not paper. It was access to an enormous range, clear product information and the ability to get what you wanted quickly and conveniently. The format could change because the underlying promise did not have to.
Greggs offers a different version of the same lesson. It began life as a traditional bakery business and has evolved into one of the UK’s biggest food-on-the-go brands.
That evolution has involved expanding menus, adding vegan products, investing in digital ordering and loyalty, extending opening hours and moving into new locations and occasions. Yet Greggs has not tried to distance itself from what made it famous. The sausage roll, value positioning and sense of accessibility remain highly recognisable.
What changed was the interpretation of the opportunity. Greggs understood that protecting heritage meant identifying the elements consumers genuinely valued and carrying those into new behaviours and occasions.
Every established organisation has things that are defended internally because “that’s who we are”. Sometimes they are genuine brand assets; sometimes they are simply organisational habits with a long history.
The distinction can often be exposed by asking whether consumers would genuinely care if something changed, or whether it is mainly the organisation that would struggle to let it go.
Heritage should give brands confidence to evolve, not an excuse to stand still. Protect what consumers value, not what the organisation is used to. This is a hard lesson to implement.
6. Insight Only Matters If It Is Allowed to Change the Decision
These days, most established brands do not suffer from a shortage of information. They have dashboards, sales data, segmentation, trackers, customer feedback, retailer data, social listening and years of research. The harder question is whether any of it is genuinely allowed to change the decision.
Research becomes far less valuable when it is used simply to validate a direction the business already prefers. Teams commission work, hear something uncomfortable, then explain why a particular finding may not apply. Another wave is commissioned; another methodology is tried and eventually the answer becomes easier to live with. That is not insight. It is reassurance. Believe me, as researchers, we much prefer it when our work leads to better decisions and brand growth as a result.
Hellmann’s provides a useful example of doing the opposite. The brand identified household food waste as a meaningful consumer problem and built its “Make Taste, Not Waste” platform around helping people use what they already had in the fridge.
That understanding did not remain a communications thought. It led to practical tools, recipes and programmes designed to help consumers reduce food waste. The important lesson is that the brand allowed consumer understanding to influence what it actually did.
Nestlé offers another perspective. Its consumer insight and innovation capabilities are designed to connect emerging needs and trends with product development and testing. The principle is simple: insight should not sit at the end of the process as a scorecard. It should help shape what gets developed, how ideas evolve and which opportunities deserve investment.
The purpose of insight is not to remove uncertainty. Marketing decisions will always involve judgement. Its role is to expose assumptions; identify opportunities and improve the quality of the bets the business chooses to make.
Sometimes that means confirming the existing strategy, sometimes it means making a small adjustment and sometimes it means telling senior people that something they strongly believe is no longer true. That is where courage enters the equation.
One useful challenge is to ask what evidence would genuinely cause the organisation to change its current plan. If the answer is “nothing”, it is worth questioning why the research is being commissioned at all.
The strongest organisations create an environment where consumer evidence can challenge internal certainty, rather than simply describing themselves as consumer-led.
Insight earns its commercial value when it changes what the business does next.
7. Relevance Has to Be Continually Re-Earned
One of the easiest mistakes an established brand can make is to think of relevance as an asset it owns. Awareness can be built, distinctive assets protected and distribution secured. Relevance is different. It exists in the relationship between a brand and the people it serves, and that relationship is always conditional. Consumers continue granting relevance only while the brand continues to earn a place in their lives.
Heinz is a useful example. Few food brands are more recognisable. The bottle, label, colours and product are deeply embedded in everyday life. Yet Heinz continues to find new ways to make that familiarity feel current through new formats, usage occasions, products, collaborations and communications that lean into the brand’s distinctive place in culture rather than trying to reinvent it completely. The point is not constant change. It is constant renewal.
Marmite offers another version of the same lesson. Its “Love it or Hate it” positioning has endured because it is rooted in a genuine product truth. Marmite has not tried to sand down its polarising character in pursuit of universal appeal. Instead, it continually refreshes how that truth is expressed, keeping the brand culturally visible while remaining unmistakably itself. Personally speaking, I really don’t like the taste, but I love the brand!
Relevance does not always come from trying to please more people. Sometimes it comes from understanding exactly what makes a brand distinctive and continuing to express that in ways that feel current.
A brand can be consistent without being static. Relevance is not about appearing younger, trendier or more fashionable. It is about continuing to give consumers a clear reason to choose you.
That need never disappears simply because a brand is famous. Competitors improve, categories evolve, consumers move into different life stages and expectations shift. What once felt distinctive can become ordinary.
Staying relevant therefore requires both discipline and courage: the discipline to understand which elements continue to create value, and the courage to act before the evidence becomes overwhelming, challenge assumptions that have served the business well for years and change what no longer earns its place.
Brands rarely lose relevance in one dramatic moment. More often, they give it away gradually through decisions that each seem reasonable in isolation: waiting too long, protecting too much, copying too readily, assuming too much or acting too cautiously.
The encouraging part is that the opposite is also true. Relevance can be defended, renewed and strengthened.
The brands that endure are not the ones that change constantly. They are the ones that keep understanding their customers, recognise when expectations are shifting and have the courage to act.
Staying Relevant Means Staying Curious
At Spark, we work with brands every day to understand what is changing, which parts of the consumer relationship remain strong and where the next opportunities for growth are likely to come from.
That might mean identifying the early signs that relevance is weakening, challenging assumptions the business has held for years, understanding why consumers are behaving differently or helping teams make a better decision about what to change and what to protect. Staying relevant is rarely about chasing every new trend. It is about understanding the forces shaping consumer choice, spotting when those forces are shifting and having the confidence to respond.
If your brand is facing that challenge, we’d be very happy to talk.
Get in touch with Spark to discuss how we can help your brand stay relevant and keep growing.
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Key Points to Remember
- Success can hide weakening relevance. Strong sales, distribution and awareness can delay the moment when change becomes obvious.
- Relevance usually declines before revenue does. Pay attention to the amber signals, not just the red ones.
- Familiarity is not loyalty. Customers can know, trust and repeatedly choose a brand while becoming increasingly open to alternatives.
- Do not confuse relevance with imitation. Chasing category conventions can make a brand more contemporary but less distinctive.
- Protect what consumers value, not what the organisation is used to. Heritage should be a source of strength, not a reason to resist change.
- Insight should be allowed to change the decision. Research that only confirms existing thinking adds very little commercial value.
- Relevance must be continually re-earned. Established brands need to keep understanding how expectations, behaviours and competitive choices are shifting.
- The strongest brands combine discipline with courage. They know what to preserve, recognise when change is required and act before the evidence becomes overwhelming.
- Brands rarely lose relevance in one dramatic moment. They give it away through a series of small, seemingly reasonable decisions.