Businesses can change overnight. Brands can’t. A new product. A new market. A new audience. A new ambition. Inside a business, these things can feel like natural next steps. The result of years of work, investment and thinking.
Outside it, they can feel like they’ve come from nowhere. Because people can’t see everything that’s changed inside your business. They see your brand. And the brand they know can take longer to catch up.
What got you here?
Strong brands build strong associations. Ferrari means performance. Volvo means safety. LEGO means play.
Brand building is the process of making certain ideas stick. But there’s a line to be trod. The better you are at owning something, the harder it can be to become known for something else. What makes a brand famous can also hold it still.
That becomes a problem when a business starts moving. A manufacturer becomes a technology company. A product business becomes a service business. A regional player goes global. Capability expands. Ambition grows.
Inside, the change is already real. It’s being lived. Outside, perception might still be five years behind. Maybe more.
There’s a gap between the business you’ve become and the brand people still believe you to be.
Securing permission
Being capable of making a move doesn’t automatically give you credibility to make it. Brands need permission to move.
We’re not talking about literal permission, here. Nobody’s standing at the gates with a clipboard. We mean the point at which something new still makes sense coming from you.
Amazon moved beyond books because the bigger idea became access and convenience. Apple moved beyond computers because its relationship with technology was always bigger than a beige box under a desk. LEGO can make films, games and theme parks because it was never really about bricks. It was about imagination and play.
The product moves. But something underneath stays put. The strongest brands know what has to remain true while everything else changes.
How far? How much?
There are two useful questions when a brand feels the need to move.
1. How far are you going?
And:
2. How much are you changing to get there?
A new product might be easy to absorb. A new category takes more work. Change the category, audience, proposition, technology, behaviour and visual language together and you’re asking people to make quite a leap.
None of those changes are necessarily wrong. It’s the compound effect that takes hold as a result that matters. The further the move, the more important the thread back. Something recognisable enough to make the new thing feel like an evolution of what people already know. Without that thread, progress can start to look like departure.
Which brings us to Ferrari
We found the reaction to Ferrari launching Luce earlier this year interesting because the question underneath much of the noise wasn’t really whether people like the car. It was whether they recognised the Ferrari in it. Ferrari has spent decades building exceptionally strong associations around racing, engines, performance, theatre and Italian engineering. That gives the brand enormous meaning. But it also gives people enormous expectations.
Change one part of that equation and you can move the meaning. Change several at once and you start testing how much of Ferrari can disappear before people stop seeing Ferrari.
Familiarity has a job
Branding has a funny relationship with familiarity. We spend a lot of time talking about change. Transformation. Reinvention. Breaking category conventions.
All of which is useful. At the right time. But familiarity isn’t necessarily the thing holding a brand back. Sometimes it’s the thing that lets it move forward.
A recognisable behaviour. A point of view. A product truth. A visual code. A phrase. An attitude. Something that says: we’re going somewhere new, but you still know who’s taking you there.
The trick is knowing what matters and what merely happens to be familiar. Because they’re not the same thing.
Build the road
We often ask businesses where they want to be in five years. But as we develop brand strategies we attempt to answer another question: What would people need to believe about you for that future to make sense?
That’s where things move from insightful to useful. Because you can start building those beliefs before your brand needs them.
One new product widens the expectation.
One new story introduces a new idea.
One new behaviour proves something different.
One new move creates permission for the next.
Until the thing that would once have looked strange starts to feel entirely natural. That’s what a good brand should do.
It’s not about preserving a business exactly as it is. Or giving it permission to become anything it likes. It’s about ensuring enough enduring meaning to make any move that makes sense a possibility.
If your business has outgrown your brand – or people are still seeing the business you used to be – let’s talk.
