Growth is rarely a straight line. As brands mature, competitors catch up, consumer expectations evolve, and the decisions that once felt obvious become increasingly difficult. That’s why we recently brought together Claire Kelly (former marketing leader at adidas, Pets Choice and Spectrum Brands), Kathryn Ellis and Justin Healy to discuss a challenge facing every established brand: how to continue growth when you’ve been successful.
1.Brands rarely lose relevance overnight
One of the strongest themes from the session was that brands don’t suddenly become irrelevant. More often, relevance erodes gradually, as consumer needs shift, new competitors emerge, and category expectations change. The danger is that businesses explain these changes away rather than investigating them.
As Justin Healy explained, established brands often have access to huge amounts of data. The challenge for brands is the assumptions people make when interpreting the data, as teams can become so confident in what they believe they know about consumers that they dismiss early signs of change as temporary anomalies. The brands that stay relevant are often the ones that notice these small changes first.
2. Don’t confuse familiarity with understanding
Successful brands can become victims of their own experience. After years in a category, it’s easy to assume you understand consumers better than anyone else. However, Claire shared a powerful example from her career that challenged exactly that assumption:
While working on a major cake brand, her team set out to make a product taste more chocolatey as they were faced with a new competitor that had much stronger chocolate heritage. The obvious answer seemed simple: add more chocolate ingredients. Yet, after conducting consumer research, something surprising was revealed; what consumers perceived as “more chocolatey” wasn’t driven by adding more cocoa at all. The winning solution was adding skimmed milk powder, a cheaper ingredient that increased perceived chocolate flavour and improved commercial performance. The lesson from this real-world example?
Never assume you know what consumers think. Even when you’ve been working with a product for years – check in on your consumers, co-create the solution and it is much more likely to land.
3. Insight should challenge some assumptions, as well as confirming others
Many organisations use research to validate decisions they’ve already made, however, the most effective brands use it in different ways. Throughout the discussion, Claire and Justin returned to the importance of allowing evidence to challenge established thinking. Research is most valuable when it uncovers something unexpected, reveals a hidden tension, or forces a team to reconsider what it believes to be true.
As Claire put it, one of the biggest lessons she learned was:
Never assume you know everything. Never assume you know your product inside out. Never assume you know what your consumer thinks about your product either.
For growing brands, that mindset can be the difference between sustaining momentum and slowly losing relevance.
4. Relevance isn’t about chasing every trend
One topic that generated significant discussion was the pressure brands feel to constantly evolve. New audiences emerge, new channels appear, and new consumer behaviours attract attention. These constant developments can leave brands feeling pressured to pursue all these new avenues at once.
The strongest brands understand which opportunities fit their positioning and strategy, and which don’t. Growth comes from making deliberate choices to fuel their growth, rather than reacting to every market trend. Saying No is often as powerful, or moreso, than saying yes.
5. The best growth decisions start with the consumer
If there was one theme that connected the entire discussion, it was this: Start with the consumer.
It sounds obvious. Yet as businesses grow, internal priorities, commercial pressures and historical assumptions can pull teams away from genuine consumer understanding. Justin highlighted that Spark’s role is often to act as the consumer’s voice in the room, helping brands distinguish between genuine shifts in behaviour and assumptions that no longer hold true.
The brands that continue to grow are the ones who are listening to their consumers carefully, rather than over-investing in the wrong strategies.
Final Thought
The strategy that got a brand to its current position won’t necessarily get it to the next stage of growth. As categories evolve and competition intensifies, relevance becomes something that must be continually earned. The organisations that sustain growth are those willing to challenge assumptions, stay close to changing consumer needs, and make decisions based on evidence rather than instinct alone.
Want to continue the conversation?
If you’re thinking about how your brand can sustain growth, identify new opportunities or better understand changing consumer needs, get in touch with the Spark team at hello@sparkmr.com.