Nobody hated Woolworths.
When the last shops closed in early 2009 the country was sad about it. Sincerely sad. Sad enough to produce newspaper columns about pick ‘n’ mix and the smell of the record racks. But almost none of the people writing them had been shopping there.
Brands don’t die of being hated. Being hated at least means somebody is paying attention. They die of being fine. Ok. Middle ground. Of being a business people are quite fond of and never quite choose.
And they rarely get there by getting worse. They get there because the distance between what the business is and what people understand it to be widened, slowly, until nobody could see what separated it from anything else in the category. That distance is the gap. Closing it is how a business gets chosen rather than tolerated, which makes being loved a commercial position rather than a sentimental one.
Signs you’re being tolerated
The gap shows up commercially long before anyone in the business realises its a brand problem.
You’re discounting to win work you’d have won on merit previously. Sales cycles are longer, there are more competitors at your heels, and there’s more explaining to do before anyone will talk about money. Good candidates don’t self-select in any more, which means you’re selling the job rather than watching people want it.
None of those show up as a brand issue, they show up as a sales problem, a marketing problem, a recruitment problem. That’s why the gap gets to run for years.
Ask five people
The cheapest diagnostic available costs an afternoon. Ask five people in the business, separately, three questions. What does this company do. Who is it for. Why does anyone pay more for it. Separately matters.
Then count the different answers – that variance is the gap. Ask the sales team what they get asked twice, because the second question is always the one your brand failed to answer the first time. Ask anyone who joined in the last six months what surprised them. New starters can still see the business clearly.
If the CEO and the finance director describe the business differently to the same investor, you already have your answer.
The best time is before it hurts
Most gaps get looked at when they start causing big problems. The better trigger is structural: new leadership or an MBO, a funding round, a merger, a move into a new market, a listing win that suddenly puts you on a shelf beside better-dressed competitors. The last one, the business hasn’t changed at all, but the audience has.
The moment to act is six to twelve months before the consequences of that trigger land, while there is still money, attention and a time runway.
Wait until it becomes a pinch and you end up briefing and buying under duress, not from a position of control. The decision gets driven by urgency, which can lead to surface level problems being solved, not the root cause.
The ones who never let it open
July this year Coca-Cola launched a new global visual identity across more than two hundred markets, built with JKR. The brief, in the company’s own framing, was to make Coca-Cola more Coca-Cola: so the team took the script, the red, the ribbon, the Arden Square and push them harder everywhere the brand appears. It follows a 2021 update aimed at the same thing.
There is no significant gap at Coca-Cola. They spent anyway.
That’s the pattern across the businesses that stay ahead of this, in B2B as much as consumer. Coca-Cola has a global vice president of design. Stripe runs an in-house brand studio that commissions research into its own visual motifs. IBM has had a design policy since 1956, which is why a mark drawn in 1972 still holds up a company that has reinvented itself three times since.
The mechanism is that there are people’s who job to keep that gap tight or fully connected. It never becomes unbearable because it gets reviewed on a regular basis, not in a crisis.
Many business even above £10m have brand sitting nowhere in particular in their leadership responsibilities, often sitting with marketing, which is a channel in it’s own right, not sitting at board level where it should.
And before the obvious objection: the smaller you are, the cheaper the maintenance. A £20m business doesn’t need an internal studio. It needs one honest annual review and a senior given the accountability to put against it. The cost is minimal against the cost of not.
However, reinvestment is not the same as reinvention. Reinvestment takes what a business already owns and makes it work harder – sharper, more consistent, more present. Nothing changes hands. Reinvention swaps the asset out – equity that took years to build gets written off and the business starts again from a lower point.
Burberry did it once, than had to redo it, four years apart. In 2018 the brand retired its equestrian knight – in continuous use since 1901 – for a stripped-back wordmark and a new monogram. In 2023, under a new creative director, it brought the knight back. Peter Saville, the designer behind the 2018 identity, later said as much himself: replacing it again within five years was reckless, and not wise for a company of Burberry’s size to abandon continuity like that.
The cost was the switching. Every relaunch spends the recognition built by the one before it, and asks the market to relearn the brand from a standing start. Do that twice in five years and you’re not investing in the brand, you’re refinancing it, at a worse rate each time.
Reinvestment compounds what you already own. Reinvention spends it.
Two directions, and most only consider one
So what does closing the gap actually look like?
There are two answers. You can change the story so it describes the business. Or you can change the business so it deserves the story.
Almost everyone assumes the first, which is how you end up with a rebrand that flatters something not yet true. The gap reopens within eighteen months, because you can’t be loved for something you aren’t. M&S is the other route: the retail business got materially better first, and the brand work caught up to describe a company that had already earned the description.
Both are legitimate.
The gap is closed when your team can say the same thing without the deck in front of them, when the reason to pay more survives being said out loud to a sceptical buyer, and when somebody chooses you and can tell you why.
What it looks like in numbers
The gap is a brand problem, but it shows up as a commercial one. Which means when it closes, the effect shows up in the same place.
Bleiker’s Smokehouse had 25 years of reputation in Yorkshire for smoking fish and a brand that said none of it. Sat in the seafood aisle, it read as an 80s dinner party starter. It was repositioned as The Home of Smokecraft and rebuilt the portfolio around the smokehouse itself.
Like-for-like sales on existing lines grew 30%. Same fish, same recipes, same smokehouse. Listings with existing retailers went from 60 regional stores to 260-plus nationwide in Morrisons, with new multi-SKU listings won elsewhere. ROI landed inside four months.
Dense Hair Experts were selling a world-first preventative range that looked like a barber shop supplement. Monthly sales moved from £22k to £52.3k. Average order value went from £29.99 to £68.57 – the same customers, choosing to spend more than twice as much, because the brand finally justified the price. Online conversion rose from 0.4% to 2.3%. Post-rebrand, Dense secured up to £1m of investment to scale globally.
Neither business invented a new product to get those numbers. They closed the distance between what they already were and what the market understood them to be, and the money followed.
The cost of getting it wrong
Everywhere else in this issue the gap opens slowly, which is why it’s so easy to blame something else. Tropicana opened one (sort of) deliberately, and it hit them badly.
Tropicana, 2009. PepsiCo replaced the orange-and-straw carton design with a plain glass of juice, backed by a $35m campaign, which led to shoppers unable to find it. Per Information Resources data reported by Ad Age, unit sales fell 20% and dollar sales 19% between 1 January and 22 February. Roughly $33m of juice, not bought. On 23 February the packaging was scrapped, less than two months after launch. Their competitors all picked up the slack.
Tropicana removed the two things that made it recognisable at a glance. Seventeen years later Coca-Cola spent a considerable sum making its equivalent assets more prominent. Same argument, opposite ends.
Love or die.
Nobody sets out to be tolerated, it happens by default. A business keeps getting better at what it does, never updates the account it gives of itself, and the two drift apart until people stop choosing it.
The businesses the market is indifferent about are almost always the ones that were indifferent about their brand first. It sat with marketing as a channel rather than at board level as an asset, and the drift went unnoticed because noticing was nobody’s job. Indifference inside produces indifference outside. It just takes a few years to show up in the numbers.
That’s what love or die means. So go ask five people, three questions, separately. That’s where it starts.