The most valuable move a strong brand can make is to become more itself
28th August
Brand & Positioning
Something worth noticing happened in the same window.
Coca-Cola revised its identity for the first time since 2021, pushing its core assets, the red and white palette, the Dynamic Ribbon, the Arden Square and the Spencerian Script, harder across every touchpoint, under a single principle: make the brand more unmistakably itself (Transform). In the same breath, KFC evolved its system with JKR by placing the bucket, its most recognisable physical asset, back at the centre (Transform). Two category leaders, reaching for the same instinct, in the same week. The instinct is concentration, not reinvention. Neither business went looking for something fashionable to borrow. Each returned to what the market already holds about it and decided to use it harder. That is the opposite of the reflex most brands follow when growth stalls, which is to reach for the new when the answer is usually sitting unused in the old.
There is a reason this matters now beyond good taste.
AI systems increasingly summarise and recommend brands, and distinctiveness that survives compression is the point. Instagram understood this when it flattened its serifs and detached its script, choosing legibility over ornament because an identity now has to work at the size of an app icon and inside an AI feed as readily as on a billboard (Dezeen). Recognition is now won or lost in the smallest, busiest context, so that is the context to design for first. Set against that, the quieter story is the more expensive one. Research this month finds CMOs actively deprioritising the long-term brand-building they themselves believe is critical, in favour of short-term performance that shores up internal credibility, even as tenure in the top marketing seat sits at around 4.1 years (Inc, on BCG and Spencer Stuart data; Lippincott CMO Outlook 2026). Brand is being treated as a soft cost precisely when building it is the controllable, multiple-accretive move most portfolios leave on the table.
For founders
You do not need a new idea. You need to use the real one harder. The asset is almost always already there, under-used rather than absent, and the work is to find what is unmistakably yours and put it back at the centre. Authenticity is becoming the scarce resource as machine-made content floods every feed (New Engen), which means the genuine story you already own is appreciating in value while everything manufactured depreciates.
The strongest brands are not the ones adding the most. They are the ones with the discipline to subtract until only what is theirs remains.
For investors
Distinctive assets are balance-sheet items that never get priced properly. When a portfolio company concentrates on the few things the market already recognises, scattered equity becomes a coherent, priceable story, and short-termism in the marketing seat is a value leak you can see and stop. The audit is simple: what does the market already hold about this business that it has stopped using?
