Brand Revolution or Evolution? The Debate Is Over

Branding and narcissism

The full revolution thesis is born out of narcissism. The argument is that if you don’t revolutionize your brand all it once, your fragmented message will confuse the consumer or buyers.

That’s wildly self-involved because it assumes that your consumer or buyer sees the fullness and completeness of your brand through your eyes.

That’s not the way things work anymore. Far, far from it. Real life is not a marketing PowerPoint. If you’re a large, multinational company, maybe. You can spend hundreds of millions in linear TV and digital advertising for that light-switch moment.

But every other company and brand lives in a fragmented world where you can’t afford that grand reveal. On the contrary. Consumers and buyers are exposed to your brand through a gazillion slices and slivers. Across multiple, noisy, disorganized channels.

A digital ad here. A LinkedIn post there. A sprinkling of podcast messages, blog posts, email and text marketing messages. Maybe an old-school direct mail piece.

Search marketing and search optimization bring you to an isolated landing page or product page. If you’re a business-to-business marketer, your salespeople will be busy violating your brand work and creating their own pitch decks.

The entire framework of a holistic brand re-launch is from an era gone by. Despite the promises of ad tech to unify and personalize the ecosystem, that vision is chimerical. In fact, the iteration and optimization process of AI shatters consistency even further.

Brand evolution is a stubborn myth

Now, let me dispatch the brand evolution model. The comforting notion of a gentle refresh has been around for a long time. But it is merely an excuse for wimpy gradualism and incrementalism. It’s also another reflection of brand narcissism. The idea that subtle changes will be recognized or appreciated, by anyone other than the internal marketing team is the height of foolishness.

We are in a battle for attention—Chris Hayes’s new book, The Siren’s Call—How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, captures it perfectly.

This brutal struggle demands sharper, hotter, more grenade-like messages than the flaccid step-by-stepness of evolution. It demands the third way of mini-lution.

Create mini-lution moments

The mini-lution model is an attention hack that seizes each opportunity as a shock and awe moment on its own. Each mini-lution moment must be an explosive idea grenade, grabbing the consumer or end-user across the channels I described earlier.

I hear you thinking “But what about a brand strategy.” Yes, these powerful bursts need to be driven off a core brand strategy, and that strategy needs to be inherently disruptive and market-shaking. But once you have that strategy, you need to bring it fiercely alive across as many channels as possible. As quickly as you can.

And yes, executing the mini-lution model demands braids of consistency, so you don’t add to the slivering of our media world. Your brain-arresting Meta ad needs to be linked to a landing page that continues that story.

Don’t worry if there are tonal differences in your braids as you create dozens of mini-lutions in the market. It’s a good thing. As long as your brand narrative and personality are consistent, you won’t confuse your customers. You will delight them with the energy of creative change.

My advice: Don’t wait for the revolution. It won’t happen, it’s a fool’s errand. And don’t “evolve” your brand with nearly unrecognizable steps of small, insipid changes. You’ve all heard “Go big or go home.” Instead, the mini-lution transformation model is: Go small to go big or go home.