Let’s talk about a brand. A brand that’s got people sitting up and taking notice, from Paris Fashion Week to Cannes. That’s working with Alexander Wang, Bella Hadid and Charli XCX, Law Roach and Heidi Klum. Not to mention their beach club pop-up co-hosted with Rhode. What is this brand I hear you ask? Is it a buzzy new name in fashion? Yet another celebrity beauty line? Neither of the above. The brand we’re talking about is… Magnum?

That’s right. Magnum. Magnum the ice cream brand you can grab at your local 7-Eleven, put a couture dress made from cocoa bean husks on a Paris runway. But what exactly is the idea here? What’s behind this seemingly bizarre branding pivot and is it working?

What’s the idea behind the campaign?

Short answers to the above: They’re marketing ice cream like haute couture, an increasingly competitive premium ice cream market, and yes.

Long answer, well let’s start with why, shall we.

Why Magnum had to move

Quite simply, increased competition. In recent years, brands that position themselves as premium alternatives in the ice cream aisle have started to multiply. Where once Magnum may have only had to contend with Häagen-Dazs, there’s now an entirely new class of premium brands looking to gain a foothold. Jeni’s, Van Leeuwen, and increasingly slick supermarket own-brand that looks just about close enough to premium from two feet away. Compared to a legacy brand like Magnum, these newer competitors can often lay claim to a more contemporary and less obviously corporate brand, pushing elements like bespoke stores in prestigious neighbourhoods and, in the case of Van Leeuwen, their origins as a NYC food truck. Magnum’s own performance admits the damage, with shares down almost five points and consumers defecting to imitations. Worse, the classic had become the standard, and standard is the worst thing a premium product can be. For an existing player like Magnum it’s either restate their case for why they ought to be your go-to for that extra luxurious choice, or get outmanoeuvred by brands with more novelty.

Why fashion and not something else

So why copy your tactics from an industry that ostensibly has nothing to do with yours?

Magnum’s play might seem bizarre, but part of its power is that as strange as it feels on first look, it’s actually really obvious when you take a second to think about it. Sure, high fashion and ice cream seem incongruous, but only in the most literal-minded analysis of product. If you approach the branding from the perspective that what you’re actually selling is a premium option, an elevated choice in a market dominated by cheap standards, then the comparison is natural. In the simplest terms, Magnum is piggybacking off the decades of differentiation that built a moat around high fashion to say “we are to that pint of store-brand Waitrose vanilla what LV are to Zara”.

The playbook

What makes this more than a gimmick is how far they’ve gone to execute on it. Without the right system behind it the whole thing reads hollow, goofy and yes, cheap, which undermines the entire premise. Here’s the playbook, roughly in order of how hard each move is to copy.

It starts with how the product is shot. Their product shots embrace the aesthetics of fashion and luxury photography rather than food photography, framing the ice cream as a sculptural object rather than a consumable. Floating product, fragrance-ad lighting, desire before appetite.

Then the monogram. Fashion houses mark everything they make, a brand in this context is more than a conspicuous logo it’s a label of quality guarantee. Magnum presses the M into the chocolate and engraves the name on the stick, on a product that gets eaten in four minutes.

But every house also has a signature you know without the logo. Burberry has the check. Magnum took the crack of its chocolate covering and ran it across the advertising the way a house uses a print.

Then the collaborations, and this is where the casting logic shows. Household names (Klum), fashion stalwarts (Wang), industry-adjacent figures with enormous cultural capital right now (Charli). Sure, the Wang and Bella Hadid work started in 2016 but hold that thought.

Then the dress. Paris, 2022. Iris van Herpen built a couture gown from cocoa bean husks, the waste from the ingredient in the bar, and Cindy Bruna walked it. Watch what Magnum didn’t do here. They didn’t stage their own show. They got a garment into somebody else’s, van Herpen’s fifteenth anniversary, and borrowed the whole room, already at attention for an admired creator with niche-specific clout. They avoided being a gimmick by coming in the side entrance instead of bursting in the front and disrupting, by being a participant in a culture, not a vulture picking strips off it.

And finally the show. May 2026, Cannes, Magnum’s first. Fifteen looks from eight designers on the Croisette, curated by Law Roach and closed by Heidi Klum. They gave Roach a title too, Taste Architect. Houses because don’t hire stylists, they appoint creative directors.

This took ten years

Which brings us back to Wang and Bella in 2016. The dress was 2022. The show in 2026. This isn’t just a momentary pivot for the brand, rather its a process, ten years of the same behaviour. If what we tried to get across above was that Magnum got away with this because of their attention to detail and their commitment, then the time-scale of this tactic is another piece of proof in support of that claim. Ten years is an ambitious timescale for any brand strategy, but ambition is what makes tactics like this work.

So is it working?

Well, yes, and the best evidence isn’t the catwalk.

In 2024 Magnum ran an entire campaign against its own fakes. Stick to the Original. Like a Magnum is not Magnum. Brands don’t fight copycats in public unless the copy is worth making, and every house eventually inherits this problem. Indeed, getting counterfeited is a receipt of good work. The numbers point the same way, if more loosely: overall sales volume is up close to 5% year on year for 2026 per the FT, though that’s for the Magnum Ice Cream Company, which also produces Ben and Jerry’s, so treat it as direction rather than proof.

Takeaways

First up, Magnum’s branding shows how you can borrow lessons in positioning from other categories. Understanding your own industry matters, but understanding the deeper patterns of how brands differentiate themselves in other categories is what helps you stand out in yours.

Secondly, craft matters when you’re making references. Really knowing your stuff is what makes you come across as in on the joke and authoritative as a brand, not just chasing a trend.

Thirdly, collabs should be part of a wider approach. It’s not just about piggybacking off the exposure of personal brands, it’s about how they embed your product in an existing network of meaning. Choosing the right partners is what let this feel fluent and not cringe.

And lastly, the boring one. Ten years. Magnum didn’t hastily buy this position after sales dropped, they accumulated it one move at a time, most of them years apart.

Why Does Brand World Building Matter For Fragrance Brands?

Fragrance is unique as a product category. The entire product is sensory. It exists to evoke emotion and provoke a visceral response, but unlike say, music, which has the privilege of being transmittable wirelessly, or food and drink which has a distinct visual, fragrance is ephemeral, invisible, and bound to a space. No billboard or social media ad is going to share what Byredo Bal d’Afrique actually smells like.

So how do you brand fragrance? The answer the best modern perfumeries have found is brand world building. Media can’t carry the scent, but it can carry the ethos of the scent. A story which speaks for the fragrance and signals that make said story visible. Fragrance brands have managed, when they’re successful at least, to build a system of touchpoints that draw audiences into a story and a world which sells, and the product itself is part of the package.

Below are four brands that combine this approach with an obsessive attention to repeating that ethos through packaging, store presence and storytelling.

DS&Durga

DS&Durga’s story is the founders’ conviction that there’s something profoundly similar about fragrance and music as invisible art forms.

A scent can say as much as a song and transport you anywhere.It‘s a story rooted in biography. Founded by a couple who previously worked as a musician and an architect, they take the knowledge of their respective disciplines and use it to fuel the brand’s creative identity. Music uses sound to evoke emotion. Architecture is the artistic expression of a sense of place. Their scents use the invisible properties of perfumery to do both.

They place that story front and centre by making the founders the mouthpieces of the brand. They’re in front of the camera across IG, sharing the creative process behind their perfumery and all the decisions involved in making their products.Then the system makes it tangible, well beyond a mission statement on a website. Each scent gets its own playlist. The sample pack is sold as greatest hits. They sell a vinyl record as part of their merch. And architecture and music are the foundations of their in-person activations too. Their Cognac Reign fragrance was a reference to Baroque music, so they built out the world around it, constructing a version of an early modern French court for a Louis XIV party on the NYC subway. A juxtaposition of the anarchic maximalism that defines both Versailles and NYC, drawing an invisible connection across time in the same way their scents are intended to.

Le Labo

For Le Labo, the story is craft. You’re meant to think of them as people who put the art of perfumery above business.

A company of scent makers, not scent merchants.It starts with the name itself, French for the lab, foregrounding the process of inventing new scents. But their sharpest signal is the one that costs them money: they encourage you to leave the store without completing a purchase.When you visit one of their stores, designed with the aesthetic of the artisan workshop in mind, you’re encouraged to rub a sample on your wrist, leave, go home and let that scent settle. Perfumes develop over time as they interact with your own natural odour, the scent of your environment and your clothes. As a consumer, taking the time to leave and come back makes perfect sense. As a retailer, it’s problematic. Getting a customer to enter your store is expensive, so when Le Labo tells you to leave with nothing more than a sample, they’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

They do it because they care more about selling you something you’ll actually love than just selling you something, and they trust in the quality of their products to bring you back. That signalling, placing craft and the product’s integrity over commerce, is integral to their branding.And the system echoes it everywhere. Functional labels that read like ingredient lists. Promotional images of the perfumers making the scents in store. They’re unrelenting in hammering home this single idea. It’s what makes Le Labo tick and it’s what sets them apart from other perfumeries.

Claus Porto

Few brands take their dedication to a single era and location as seriously as Claus Porto. Heritage and Portuguese origins are the axioms of the brand, and their products are designed to transport you to the world of 19th century Portugal, a land of old world refinement and rural idyll.The signals are physical. Hand wrapped soaps with wax seals, patterns inspired by Portuguese architecture. And the story runs deeper than external signalling, because the manufacturing is true to it as well, with ingredients that evoke Portugal’s diverse countryside.

The system extends to their stores. Their locations in Lisbon and Porto, typically in historical or architecturally significant buildings, come with on-site museums dedicated to the history of the brand, once again reminding you of the world they inhabit. It’s not one they built themselves, but it’s one they obsessively work to convey through every detail. Not just the scents, but the stores, the packaging and the naming.

Ffern

Then there’s Ffern. A brand that truly is one of one when it comes to this type of branding. Masterclass doesn’t quite sell it.In the simplest terms, Ffern’s story is about returning perfumery to its artisan roots, lived at the seasonal rhythm of the English countryside. But the creative ways they find to retell this one-sentence story are where the brand really shines.Take their release schedule. Four scents a year, released on the solstices and equinoxes, because their whole world revolves around the turning of the seasons. Scroll through their socials and you can literally watch the seasons turn.

Each fragrance release comes with a cinematic campaign film, shown in the Ffern Cinema on their site, because their intricate brand world is best enjoyed communally. Thematically their scents are inspired by figures from British folklore, like the green knight of Arthurian legend, with art direction dominated by castles, knights and armour. Last winter it was the lighthouse keeper. The seasonality ties into medieval life and tradition, and it also focuses their creative output by limiting a whole season of content to that one story.Even the commercial model is calculated to fit within the world. You can’t just buy their products online, you have to join a limited capacity ledger. That time-limited scarcity isn’t arbitrary, it mirrors the seasonal produce of agrarian production. If you make the list, each seasonal release arrives with crafted objects that extend that season’s story. A matching perfumer’s candle, a seasonal tea, or the artefacts that support each fragrance, each one made by a different independent artisan.

The Takeaway

Music, architecture, history, folklore. The perfume brands that succeed make use of meticulous attention to their packaging, store experiences and marketing so that the entire journey, from first encounter to daily use, feels like stepping into a brand world.This lets them differentiate. It also gives them a far broader range of emotional levers to communicate with than scent alone.And it’s brand world building working exactly as designed. All of these brands are wildly diverse in their signal and system, but incredibly tightly reined to their story.

Sponsor the Story

What makes for good sponsorship? Slapping a logo on something gets you attention, but beyond name recognition, what does it accomplish? Aligning sponsorship with brand story does something with that attention. It builds associations and anchors your brand in the fabric of the event or thing you’re sponsoring, rather than sitting on top of it as an advertisement.

The bottom rung is the simple act of putting your brand name on something. It wins you name recognition and nothing more. Above that sits alignment on the level of values, which is obviously valuable. But aligning story is the logical next step. Story alignment doesn’t pair two entities that share similar abstract values, it pairs ones whose arcs, histories and paths parallel one another.

But while story alignment remains a gold standard for sponsorship, there’s another sort of relationship that takes things even further, where stories are intertwined, not aligned. This last type of relationship is what we call ‘hosting culture’, and it’s a form of branding that’s getting more and more popular, particularly with regards to high end and luxury products.

In this issue we’ll break open a few of these sponsorships to see how the dynamics work: two that align story, four that host culture, and what separates each rung of the ladder from the one below.

Louis Vuitton and the Trophy Journey

Louis Vuitton started as a manufacturer of luxury luggage in 1854. Their heritage of craft is their blue ocean, because it’s inimitable. No competitor can buy 170 years of history, so it serves LV to leverage it wherever they can.

The other pillar of the LV story is its global nature. Fashion is a conspicuously global industry. The big four fashion weeks take participants and the fervent crowds that follow the events on socials and in legacy media from Europe, to North America and back again. And luggage, the founding product, is the object inherently associated with travel itself. LV doesn’t just sell to a global class of people, it brands itself as a facilitator and part of the global flow of culture and commerce.

So when LV sponsors the World Cup or the Monaco Grand Prix, they don’t dress the athletes. They provide bespoke LV baggage to carry the prize. The World Cup trophy travels the world in an LV trunk, and the winner’s trophy at Monaco comes out of one. At the Paris Olympics in 2024, the medals and the Olympic torch arrived in LV trunks too. The company justifies its presence, not by plastering its name on a billboard, but by doing what it does and has always done, just in a conspicuous context.

By sponsoring the trophy cases specifically, LV anchors itself to the story of the journey. Global presence, prestige, heritage, and an object of value protected in transit.

A tradition of elite performers in their field, committed to a globe-spanning enterprise, linking cities and cultures around a shared obsession.

Rolex and Wimbledon

Precision instruments and elite sport are natural partners. Omega has timed the Olympics since 1932. Tag Heuer are in on that action too with F1. Accuracy matters to both, so the pairing makes sense. But that’s value alignment. Rolex and Wimbledon go a rung higher.

Rolex has been the official timekeeper of Wimbledon since 1978. Yes, engineering excellence defines Rolex, but plenty of watch companies get the job done with regards to timekeeping. Rolex is there for a different reason, and the reason is that Wimbledon is not just any elite competition, it’s the most famously ‘high-status’ sporting event in the world.

Both Rolex and Wimbledon were built in the early twentieth century on the same obsession: technical excellence inside a traditional craft. Both spent the next hundred years being sticklers for tradition when it comes to their image while simultaneously modernising everything underneath it in order to retain their market position.

Wimbledon still plays on grass and still enforces all-white kit, and also runs the most advanced broadcast operation in tennis. Rolex still makes mechanical watches, and also invented the waterproof case that made the modern sports watch possible.

The allure of ‘old-money’ oozes from every part of Wimbledon, which takes place in one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in London, from which it takes its name. And a tennis court holds a fraction of the crowd a football stadium does, so scarcity is built in. Wimbledon permits almost no visible branding on its courts, another nod to the idea that they sit above the commercial considerations of most other competitions. The Rolex clock on the scoreboard is one of the only commercial logos in the grounds. This is a tournament that famously turns down sponsorship money to protect its atmosphere. Presence there can’t be bought. Rolex runs on the same logic. Waiting lists, limited supply as a factor of manufacturing excellence, not in order to juice markets, presence in the right places.

Wimbledon and Rolex bridge the gap between the pre-war era of European elegance and old-world prestige whilst maintaining a commitment to technical excellence.

How to Host Culture

Hosting culture is one rung above story alignment. You’re not placing your story next to a matching one, you’re actively entangling the two. Rather than handing over cash in exchange for a logo placement, you’re doing the work that makes the culture possible. The event doesn’t just reflect your brand. It depends on it.

Red Bull sponsors athletes who want to break records and take their performance to groundbreaking levels. But the sports they choose to prioritise are often not heritage sports. Cliff diving, air racing, freestyle motocross. They know the role of upstart that they play in their own story, and to keep it cohesive they make themselves part of the stories of upstart sports communities, as the patron that makes their activities possible. Red Bull didn’t attach itself to an existing culture, it helped build the infrastructure of that culture and scaled it to a global audience.

Miu Miu runs its own book club. A fashion house built on a particular kind of femininity builds the room where that femininity gets discussed. Intellectual, unconventional, a little subversive. Centering conversations about art and anchoring their brand as a creative enterprise.

Loewe began in 1846 as a collective of leather craftsmen in Madrid, so in 2016 it created the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize. A prize worth fifty thousand euros for the best piece of craft in the world, in any discipline. In the early years makers were hesitant to enter, but the latest edition drew more than four thousand entries from over a hundred countries. There’s no bigger stage in world craft.

Absolut spent four decades on the same idea, filling an art collection with its own commissions from Warhol’s bottle onwards.

Facilitating discussion, preserving, patronizing, curating, and broadcasting, these are ways in which brands can go from guests in a space, to hosts and from simply being adjacent to culture to being involved in its making.

Loewe and LV, Rolex and Wimbledon, these are about as old as brands get, but you don’t need 180 years of heritage to do this.

Nothing, the London phone brand has been hosting its community since before it had a product. Fans hold an elected observer seat at board meetings. Maybe a gimmick for another company, but Nothing’s build-in-public ethos and their transparent aesthetics draw on the communitarian and DIY histories of modern tech, so audience involvement has always been what they do.

What’s the outcome? The Phone (2a) Community Edition, co-designed by the community: hardware, wallpapers, packaging and the marketing campaign, submitted, voted on and shipped. And as a result, audiences have a vested interest in a product before it’s ever hit the market. Launch events are meetups where people attending helped build the thing being launched.

Nothing’s story is that technology got closed and boring. So they opened the company up, and grew the culture from inside it.

Each of these brands is noticeable but not out of place. Because they share a point of origin and a destination with the culture they support, the association forms on its own. Nobody has to be told what Loewe has to do with craft. The prize shows that.

The Ladder

Anyone with enough money can slap a logo on a board. Fewer brands can find a story that runs parallel to their own. Almost none are willing to host the culture themselves.

That’s the ladder. Every rung you climb, the association gets harder to copy, because the higher you go, the less you’re paying for the connection and the more you’re building it.

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Often times founders treat branding as something that happens to a product once the product is finished. Selling is thought of as a separate process from making. Once the engineering has been signed off on and the tooling ordered product gets kicked down to a creative department charged with positioning it in the market. The problem with this kind of siloisation is that by that point the product has already largely been defined and branding is forced to work within a limited set of parameters. By keeping branding considerations apart from product design, branding is handed a job it cannot really do.

Context is there for your product whether you want it to or not, whether you choose to engage with it or not. The standards and norms of your category has started building associations for people before you’ve said a word about your product. Beer = pub. Vaccuum = utility product etc. The accumulated sentiments formed by decades of brand interactions and category marketing defaults are the environment you enter into, and when your product arrives looking like the rest of the category, it inherits all of that, including the parts you would rather not have.

Meaning your product either accepts the category’s terms or it argues with them. If you want to brand against category tropes, then that’s a decision that needs to be made before design is finalized. Because successfully counter-category product tend to do it without a word of copy, the argument is built into the thing itself.

Start with the perception, not the product

Noam Lager, product description – unfiltered, 5.2%, Hallertau hops, brewed to the Purity Law, developed with the research brewery at the Technical University of Munich. What’s unique here? Nothing really. Given that product brief and the typical stubby brown bottle, a crest, and some combination of green, brown, red and gold you’d be hard pressed to convince anyone that there was a good reason beyond personal taste to buy Noam over any other Bavarian lager, or beer generally for that matter.

But for Noam, branding started before it got to advertising and marketing, it started with the design of the object itself. Rather than competing against beer on its terms, Noam positioned itself as the drink you order when champagne, Chablis or a cocktail would be the obvious choice. To achieve that positioning, they scrapped the expected trappings of beer bottle presentation and design and made something that loudly positioned itself against a drinking culture where the expectation is that beer is a dressed down drink.

Instead of referencing the aesthetics of the brewery, browns, archaic lettering and elaborate crests, Noam took its cues from fashion, perfume, classical architecture. The clear ribbed glass bottle is conspicuous but elegant, with a fluted profile as a nod to Munich’s architecture. Its shape is borrowed from the perfume bottles not beer bottles. Noam sits comfortably next to the Moët or at a wedding table without people wondering if it’s there as a budget option. As a result Noam has ended up on lists at Soho House Berlin and Colette rather than in the fridge at the office.

The fact that Noam knows that their product design is essential to their branding and presentation is highlighted by their cooler. A transparent acrylic, gold base, LED lit which holds around ten bottles. It’s designed to sit in the middle of the table rather than under it, reiterating that this is a beer that deserves to be admired for its beauty before you ever crack it open. It aligns better with the brand ethos than a lot of campaigns manage to, because it keeps the brand present for the whole evening. That’s a manifesto product in the classic sense, and it only exists because somebody understood that the argument had to continue past the point of purchase.

Sometimes the perception is your own fault

But its not always a matter of category norms, previous design can carry with it branding considerations that are holding you back.

Think about Apple’s old wired EarPods, the white ones with the volume tab halfway down the cable that you probably haven’t touched since 2018. They were given away in the box, and that decision was costing Apple in three separate ways.

First of all, they generated no goodwill, because nobody is grateful for something that arrives as part of the packaging. Second, they couldn’t be priced properly, because Apple had already told everyone they were worth nothing by giving them away, so any attempt to charge for a replacement pair was going to look like a con. Third, there was a perception mismatch sitting right in the middle of Apple’s most personal product. Apple sells to people who consider themselves discerning, creatives and people who, in their own words ‘think different’ and yet the visible signal of owning an iPhone was a pair of earphones that read as sticking with the default. If you cared about sound, or presentation, the first thing you did was upgrade away from Apple breaking out of the ecosystem and hurting their brand. They were losing reputationally and financially at the same time, and the leak was widening every year.

That’s the trio of challenges that they had to solve with the AirPods, and every design decision made for the iconic earbuds maps onto one of them. Cutting the cable made it obvious this was a new product, not a revision. The W1 chip justified the price, and the instant pairing it enabled gave people a reason to prefer them over the cheaper alternatives that were already on the market. Then there’s the stem, longer than it strictly needs to be, signature Apple accessory white and sits on the side of your face where other people can see it. The thing that used to be crumpled in a pocket or at the bottom of a purse became a fashion accessory, conspicuous consumption from a semi-disposable giveaway.

A product Apple used to give away for free is now estimated to bring in around $18 billion a year, with close to 550 million units shipped. That’s roughly one SpaceX worth of turnover in 2025, from an object that started life as packaging.

The argument can be about ownership

So it’s all just premiumisation? Not at all. And no product proves that better than the cristal.

Before 1950 a pen was a possession. Fountain pens leaked, needed maintaining, and cost enough that you kept track of where yours was. Which meant that the thing you needed constantly, all day, in every room, was also a thing you owned exactly one of and kept at your desk. There was a gap between how often people write and how available pens actually were, and the whole category was sitting on the wrong side of it.

The Cristal closed the gap by deciding a pen should be everywhere rather than owned. The hexagonal barrel borrowed its form from the pencil, which is the humbler object in the stationery drawer, not the grander one. The clear shaft let you see the ink going down. The tip was engineered well enough that the pen worked every time, which mattered more than it sounds, because the whole idea falls apart if the pen you find lying around is also the one that skips. Reliable enough to trust, common enough to always be within reach.

The consequence is that a Cristal is never far away. It’s in the bag, the drawer, the glove compartment, on the desk where you left it, so the pen you reach for is almost always this one. And because there is nothing extraneous left on the design, when you picture a pen in your head, you are picturing it. It’s managed to become the pen. Over 100 billion units sold, and a place in the permanent collection at MoMA. It launched a model that BIC would then be able to replicate for lighters and razors twenty years later, once the pen had proved the idea worked.

The pattern repeats

Swatch did the same thing to watchmaking in 1983. The industry was being taken apart by quartz and the instinct was to defend the positioning of watches as heirlooms, leaning into craft and heritage. Swatch’s decision to make a watch a fashion accessory instead, would prove to be a massive marketing success but it required them to build a product that made the decision impossible to misread. Scaling back the number of components, introducing a sealed plastic case, and variable colours. Nobody needed the proposition explained, because you couldn’t confuse one with a Rolex from across a room. And just like with Bic Cristal, just as with the AirPods, sales prove the success, twenty million sold in three years, a hundred million by 1991.

How this works in practice

We ran the same process with Dip at Blink Twice. Laundry is a category that has spent decades telling people it belongs under the sink, in clinical packaging, next to the bleach. Dip make detergent strips rather than pods, with safer formulations, and they could have competed on being more eco or cheaper, which would have made them a good option among many good options.

Instead we treated the category’s own perception as the thing to design against. If cleaning products are joyless because the category has always presented them that way, then the opening is to make the health of the home desirable, and to borrow codes from beauty and lifestyle rather than from cleaning. Dip became a home wellness brand rather than a laundry brand, and the product and packaging carried that argument on the shelf without needing to explain it. Revenue went from £1m to £5m inside 18 months, with sales tripling in the first month after launch.

What to take from this

The question worth asking about your own product isn’t whether it’s well designed. Almost everybody answers that one yes, and it doesn’t tell you anything.

Ask what your category has already decided about you, and then look at your product to see whether it’s agreeing. The brown bottle. The cupboard. The cable in the box. Somewhere in your category there is a convention so old that nobody in it can see it any more, and it is quietly making an argument on your behalf that you never agreed to.

Find it, and you have a product brief. Ignore it, and you’ll spend the next two years paying a marketing budget to argue with your own product.

When we talk about brands ‘rebranding’ we’re usually grouping together two different concepts. For this reason, founders often find themselves making the expensive mistake of confusing one for the other and rebranding when they really need to be refreshing their brand or vice versa.

Knowing what you want and need is important here, because the best talent in the world won’t get your brand to where it needs to be if they’re not briefed on the right project. If you don’t have a good conception of what you need then you can’t efficiently allocate resources towards that goal.

Definitions

Rebrand: A rebrand is a fundamental repositioning of your brand, changing its meaning. Think of this as a renovation where you’re gutting the house to the studs, and changing the whole architectural style. In a rebrand the message you’re trying to send to audiences with your brand is fundamentally altered.

Refresh: A refresh on the other hand keeps the meaning and sharpens the execution. It’s finding new ways to strengthen existing positioning, same meaning with new signifiers. You realign with your core story and modernise the craft. The message you’re trying to send about your brand is the same, but it’s articulated differently to cut through to audiences more efficiently. It’s about how you’re telling people what you’re about, not what you’re telling them.

A refresh returns you to a position. A rebrand changes it.

Examples

But as always, these things typically make more sense when they’re actually put in play, so here are some examples of companies who have historically embraced either the rebrand or refresh to successful effect, why and how.

Refresh 1: Mastercard (2019)

Mastercard refreshed their brand in 2019 with a minimalist logo that was still clearly recognisable, and dropped the company name. The result was an even more iconic visual cue which also signals that the brand trusts its recognition enough to let two simple shapes speak for their brand. And for a financial and payments company that confidence and trust is central. Same premise but a stronger way of communicating the message.

For Mastercard, a rebrand would’ve been both risky and potentially unnecessary. A core value proposition of a credit card company is that it’s accepted everywhere, this level of penetration and recognition is something Mastercard has been working towards building up for decades, and confusing people by targeting a radically new positioning is potentially damaging to the core value of their brand. Trust, reliability, universality. The refresh kept these principles intact and only tried to elevate the way they were being transmitted to audiences.

Refresh 2: Burberry (2023)

Burberry ran the same play in 2023, but by restoring rather than stripping back. Years of minimalist sans serif branding had left the house looking like every other luxury label, so they brought back the Equestrian Knight and committed to a signature electric blue across every touchpoint. Nothing about the meaning changed. British heritage, craft, the trench. The refresh simply put the brand back in touch with a story it had quietly stopped telling. That’s the other job a refresh can do. Not just sharpening your position, but reclaiming one you already own.

Rebrand 1: Airbnb (2014)

From a website for listing rentals to a ‘new way to travel’, Airbnb’s 2014 rebrand leveraged the decentralised and individualised style of their accommodations to reframe Airbnb as a way for travellers to ‘feel like locals’ by using short term rentals over standardised hotel chains. Logo change, font change but the central change was the value proposition underneath.

The product is essentially the same, a tech platform for connecting guests to hosts. But the positioning is fundamentally different. It’s no longer just that they could help you get in touch effectively and reliably with a host, they were offering you a way of travelling that was fundamentally different and more authentic than the hotel experience.

This came with a cosmetic upgrade as well, the new font, the soft coral colouring and their isometric home model advertising is instantly recognisable. Refresh and Rebrand do overlap in this sense, typically to land a reposition in the market, a cosmetic change is necessary on top, but this does not go the other way around.

The results for Airbnb were particularly sensational with a valuation that went through the roof and a truly enormous IPO, they didn’t just position themselves as one of the big tech companies, they fundamentally changed the industry in which they operated.

Rebrand 2: KIA (2021)

KIA’s 2021 rebrand shows the same logic from a different starting point. The old red oval was an anchor to one association, the budget car, and with the industry shifting towards EVs the position itself no longer fit where the company was going. So KIA changed the meaning. They dropped ‘Motors’ from the name, repositioned from carmaker to mobility company and replaced the logo with a wordmark deliberately unfamiliar enough to force a reintroduction. You couldn’t look at a new KIA and slot it into your existing mental model of the brand, because the mark itself broke that model. New meaning, new trajectory, and an identity rebuilt to carry it there.

Which One Should You Use?

So based on these examples, the rebrand/refresh split should be evident but what we haven’t covered is the operationalisation of it all. How do you do the work of figuring out which one you need? First of all, ask whether your brand has drifted or the market has moved. This will help you figure out if you need to refresh your brand or to rebrand yourself.

A brand which has drifted still has a compelling underlying identity but isn’t communicating it optimally. You’ve wandered off your own story, or the craft has aged, but the meaning is still right. In this case refreshing your branding is the move.

A market which has moved is a different problem. The position itself no longer fits where you’re going, so your underlying value proposition needs to change, and you rebrand to build that new meaning and carry it to audiences.

Both are routes to growth. A refresh grows by reclaiming what you already own. A rebrand grows by taking ground you don’t. The expensive mistake is confusing one for the other.

This is the sort of work that forms the foundation of what we do at Blink Twice, understanding exactly what the relationship is between your brand and the market you’re in in order to provide you with the strategy you need to elevate your branding. Not just fresh designs but an integrated strategy. Check out our previous work on BlinkTwice.studio or get in touch here if you want to chat to us more about the work we’ve done in the past, and the work we can do for you going forward.

We often refer to Blue Ocean Branding, a concept derived from the business management principle of Blue Ocean Strategy; It’s a concept that underpins more or less all of the branding work that Brand Eye takes on for clients, because we think it’s the easiest, most sustainable and most effective way for a company, product or person to compete in a crowded category. But while Blue Ocean Branding is fundamental, it’s not necessarily self-evident. So in order to solidify the theory of Blue Ocean Branding we’re going to discuss one straightforward way in which brands embrace this approach. These are brands with an exclusive truth.

What do we mean by that? Exactly what it sounds like - these brands have entered a blue ocean by figuring out something that is essentially true about their brand, not a message they’d like to deliver, not a slogan or an ideal, a true fact about the brand or company or individual, which only they can lay claim to.

By leveraging this truth as a moat, brands differentiate in a way that carving out a marketing niche can’t. A niche is just a gap you spotted first. Once it’s named, nothing stops a competitor following you into it. A truth is different. Only you can own it, so following you in means rebuilding a business, not a marketing plan.

So below, three brands who built their difference on a truth nobody could copy.

1. Tony’s Chocolonely - Supply Chain

Tony’s Chocolonely famously divides their chocolate bars into uneven pieces to represent the inequality persistent in the cocoa supply chain. The effect isn’t purely educational though. By shedding light on the nature of cocoa farming it presents a challenge to all other chocolate brands. Tony’s Chocolonely can speak up about modern slavery because their hands are clean, can the others say the same.

They know they’re doing things the right way because the essence of their business is a meticulously designed supply chain which distributes profit better than the competitors. So either competitors chose to keep walking and whistling as though they’re not complicit in the exploitationist practices of cocoa farming, looking even more unethical in the process - or they have to fundamentally redesign their entire business model, rebuild the product.

2. The Ordinary - Their Science over Marketing Approach

Be honest, when you read about a new ingredient that suddenly all over the lotion bottles, serum flasks and hair-care tubs in the aisles of your local pharmacy or supermarket do you have any idea about the actual chemistry that makes it work? For the vast, vast majority of customers the answer if probably, no. These brands may push scientific names to the forefront, but it’s not really to inform, it’s to obfuscate behind terminology that the layman isn’t versed in. You hear the name of a chemical you don’t recognise and assume that the good people at Maybelline must have some real boffins cooking up this stuff, sounds complex! The ordinary, however commits itself to using scientific labelling not as a marketing tool or to obfuscate or make their products seem complex, they use it to educate and inform making it abundantly clear to customers exactly what’s in their products, why, and what it does, and how.

The net effect is that other brands either have to abandon their tried and true marketing tactic of throwing around scientific terms purely for the sake of marketing, or follow suit and explain the functioning behind those chemicals. And once they do, it may be harder to justify their markup.

The clean approach of the Ordinary isn’t confined to the marketing, but rather makes the entire brand and industry transparent. Meaning that their advantage, the integrity of their products, becomes more visible.

3. Aesop - Sense of Place Over a ‘Templated Store’

Aesop is a skincare brand, so why is their exclusive truth about place? Because Aesop does its branding through its stores, and every store is built to be in dialogue with the ground it stands on.

Their first store opened in 2003, down the ramp of a former car park beneath the Prince Hotel in St Kilda. Hardly the most glamorous location. Three metres wide, twenty-five long, and by any normal retail logic a hopeless spot. But that constraint set the philosophy for everything that came after. Work with what the site gives you, rather than flatten it and print a logo on top, Aesop would take that principle and apply it no matter where they opened up from then on.

Every Aesop store since has followed the same rule. Local architects design each one for its own location, using local materials. Oslo trades in Norwegian slate. Kyoto uses timber salvaged from old townhouses. The store inside Melbourne’s Chadstone shopping centre is lined with basalt cut from the region’s own volcanic rock. None of it is a literal copy of the neighbourhood, they’re not blending in or assimilating, but interpreting. That’s how they show that they respect the areas they operate in, and their varied approaches are still held together by the same elevated minimalism wherever they are. The packaging never changes, but the place always does.

This is a truth a competitor can’t imitate, at least not cheaply and without the risk of coming off as a copycat. Most retailers scale by repetition, one store design rolled out across every city because it’s cheap and quick. But blandness isn’t just an absence of creative choice, it’s a choice in and of itself, chain stores signal a brand that lacks intention and Aesop’s identity is all about intention, about making personal hygiene something more akin to a ritual. To match Aesop, a rival would have to throw that efficiency away and rebuild their whole estate location by location. So they’re left with a choice. Keep stamping out identical boxes and look like a chain next to a brand that belongs where it stands, or tear up the model that makes their business affordable in the first place. Either way, the ground stays Aesop’s.

These brands all run counter to the approach that seeks to gain territory by stacking arbitrary signifiers of uniqueness on top of a fundamentally replicable business practice. Instead these businesses have all looked at what parts of what they actually do are unique, and would be costly or impossible for other brands to copy and then they lean into it.

‘Brand world’ is one of the most overused phrases in branding. It gets attached to anything and everything until it stops meaning much at all. But underneath the buzzword there’s a simple, useful idea. Instead of just crafting a recognisable but static brand, you build an ecosystem where different elements interact and interplay. Identity, packaging, retail space, content, campaigns, digital, collectibles, product design, brand rituals, activations, community, etc. These are the raw materials of a brand world. A brand becomes a brand world when it stops being a single thing you can point to and turns into a network of cohesive but distinct parts.

Doing it well comes down to three pillars: Story, Signal and System. We’ve broken down the theory before, so this week we’re showing you what it looks like when a brand puts all three to work and builds a world that millions want to live in.

Story

The North Star that makes your decisions for you.

The brand, as you may have guessed from the headline, is Diptyque. And the one-line version of their story is this: three artists who set out to turn everyday objects into art. Every decision since runs through that single lens.

Paris, 1961. Three friends open a shop at 34 boulevard Saint-Germain. A painter, an interior designer and a theatre director. The fact that they were all artists is fundamental to what Diptyque the brand would become and is probably a better way of explaining what Diptyque is than just calling it a home wares company. They treat an object the way you’d treat a canvas, because it was just how they saw the world.

Their origin is impossible to copy. It was born from a specific blend of bohemian adventurism, counter-cultural energy and old-world craftsmanship that only really existed in 1960s Paris, so Diptyque carries experimentation and respect for tradition in the same breath. For most brands, values that pull in opposite directions create tension. For one that comes from that exact time, place and group of people, they make perfect sense. That is the whole value of a story. It anchors an identity that would otherwise feel ungrounded or contradictory, and no one else can claim it. Once it’s clear, you stop having to decide what comes next. The story decides for you.

Signal

A single asset that makes your story visible. So rooted in your brand story it couldn’t belong to anyone else.

Bohemian. Multidisciplinary. Curious. Festive. That’s how Diptyque describe themselves, and it’s all about playfulness, blending cultures and mediums while holding onto elegance and craft. But how do you make all of that visible in one move, with no words at all? For Diptyque, the answer is the oval.

The whole achievement is that something so simple carries so much. Diptyque describes the oval as a meeting point of influences, from the cartouches of ancient Egypt to the ellipses of Baroque architecture to the medallions of the eighteenth century. It sits halfway between a circle and a rectangle, between softness and rigour. A basic shape, chosen with enormous deliberation.

What makes it a single asset rather than a logo is its range. The oval isn’t fixed. It stretches, frames, repeats and recombines across everything they make, and still reads, instantly, as Diptyque.

System

The difference between a slogan and a strategy.

A story can only be true if it shows up everywhere, the same way, every time. Diptyque’s does.

Their sense of place is the clearest example. They site boutiques in historic buildings and let the interiors reflect the architectural heritage of wherever they are, so the brand feels rooted and purposeful rather than like another link in a chain, elevating culture over pure optimized commerce.

Then there’s their aesthetic language, drawn from heritage crafts. Woodwork, pottery, stitching. It lets their designs range widely while always pointing back to the same truth: craft sits at the heart of the brand.

And of course the packaging, where story and signal work together. Dancing letters arranged into shapes and positions that read as physical wordplay, codes to crack, puns to untangle. Diptyque is a playful brand, so it invites you to play.

Bonus: The Brand Trojan Horse

A secondary object, so embedded in your customer’s life it keeps selling for you long after the purchase.

Diptyque could have stopped at the three pillars. Most brands that get this far do. But there’s one more move worth studying, and it’s one of the oldest in the book.

Diptyque’s version is the city candle, and it’s location-exclusive. You can only buy the Paris candle in Paris, the Tokyo candle in Tokyo. The scent becomes a souvenir you can’t order from your sofa. You have to be there*.

That one rule changes the maths. A candle stops being a candle and becomes a reason to visit the store in every city you travel to. The collection turns into something you build, one trip at a time. Every new city becomes another door into the Diptyque world, pulling you further in wherever you land.

*For one week a year, all 12 destination-exclusive candles are made available to everyone via the Diptyque City Candles Collection portal.

The same play is everywhere once you see it: the IKEA Blue Bag, The Red Bulletin, the Michelin Guide, the rhode lip case.

Know Exactly What You Are

Diptyque might be a masterclass, but the principles underneath it aren’t exclusive to them. By knowing exactly who they are, where they come from, which assets only they can own, and how to repeat all of it across everything they touch, they’ve built something enticing. Addictive, even.

Brand world gets thrown around as a buzzword. Story, Signal, System is what makes it real. We’ll keep banging the drum, because brands like Diptyque keep proving the framework works. Get all three right and you don’t just build a brand people recognise. You build a world they want to live in.

It’s world cup time! And if you’re a person who cares about business and branding, you ought be perking up just as much as the sport lovers of the world. Because this festival of football represents the largest televised spectacular in the world and both brands, and nations recognise its immense potential as a platform for branding yourself to the world.

In honour of that, we’re running a packaging world cup on https://www.instagram.com/jackofbrands/. One brand representing one country, head to head, battling it out for whose on-shelf presentation is the strongest. Will it be the big dogs of Spain with Loewe, or a scrappy underdog like Scotland with Hendrick’s gin?

We’ve made a little run-down with an argument for each contender here. Head over to Insta to get involved.

Diptyque - France 🇫🇷

Representing Les Bleus, we’ve got the French icon Diptyque with their singature oval labels and the dancing typeface that signals its place firmly at the intersection between heritage and libertine spirit of experimentation. Just like the iconic blue of France’s jerseys echoes the legends of Platini and Henry, even when it’s worn on the back of tricky mavericks of the new generation, Diptique carries the heritage of old-world craftsmanship merged with the cosmopolitanism of Paris’ left bank.

Claus Porto - Portugal 🇵🇹

Azulejos is the name of Portugal’s iconic blue painted tiles. Elegant, delicately crafted with expertise and masterful skill but not purely ornamental, the Azulejos are practical, they’re meant to cool dwellings. Inherited from Arabic craftsment, spread to Macau to Brazil to Portugal, like the Portugese team, Azulejos represent global influence and tradition at once. Claus Porto has taken this ethos, practicality with beauty - and carried it forward to their packaging design.

Loewe - Spain 🇪🇸

Like Spanish giants of the past have collected stacks of trophies, Loewe hardcore audiences know that a box from the fashion juggernauts deserve to sit on display like trophies in their own right. Elegant ribbons around sculptural boxes with their famous ornate sigil. But it never stands still. The packaging is a celebration of craft, constantly changing as Loewe collaborates with new designers and artists.

Fortnum & Mason - England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

The Eau-de-Nil box and hamper are more than a symbol of the brand, and more than a way of transporting groceries - they’re reminders of the value of the finest of global food and drink. Products of the quality that Fortnum & Mason stock deserve more than your classic woven recyclable bag. If England is equal parts bulldog spirit and genteel class, Fortnum & Mason’s packaging represents the latter.

Tiffany & Co - US 🇺🇸

Blue box, what else is there to say. You don’t need to explain the significance of the stars and stripes, and Tiffany, representing the United States are much the same. Tiffany is synonymous with diamonds, and their signature blue is synonymous with them. It’s not no frills, but it is powerfully direct.

Clase Azul - Mexico 🇲🇽

Hand painted decanters that stand out on any shelf. Embracing ebullience and demanding attention. From the handpainted designs to the bell bottle topper. This is not a piece of packaging that’s ever going to slide under the radar. Loud, classic.

Hibiki - Japan 🇯🇵

Quiet luxury is a buzzword lately, but it fits for Hibiki. Just like the Japanese national team lacks the household superstars that European and South American giants have, they’re deeply stacked with skilled players. Hibiki may not be a liquour brand that carries the heft of some, but who can claim to have a bottle that screams simple elegance and time-tried refinement like them?

Hendrick’s - Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Victorian eclecticism is Hendrick’s superpower, taking the rag-tag music hall bawdiness of the gin age and outflanking the liquor industry’s addiction to cleanness by being off the wall weird. Couldn’t be a better representative for a country which marries the romance of highland culture with buckfast guzzling Glasgow club rats.

Packaging is one of the purest forms of brand world building there is. Every surface is a chance to tell your story and every unboxing is a chance to pull customers deeper into your world.

Little touches like the weight of the glass, the snap of a tin or the illustration you linger on in the supermarket aisle matter. Even in a world built on ecommerce, packaging is essential. After the sale it is the tactile and visual bridge between the customer and the product. Make it elegant, enticing and distinctly you, and you turn a logistical necessity into a source of pleasure. But make it bland and you signal a lack of care.

But beyond just charming customers with a first impression, the real prize is packaging which also works as an open invitation to advertise your brand world. Obsessive care across every part of its manufacture and distribution is proof-of-work. Someone thought this thing was worth that much meaning, beauty and function, and the customer feels it. Done well it pays twice because it gives people something worth sharing. And it either builds your brand world or signals your brand story.

It’s Theatre

The friction of the lid. The knot of the ribbon. To the customer these read as tokens of quality, but the third-person view matters just as much. Packing is a surface ready to carry your story, it has to speak to the customer, but there’s no reason it can’t speak much wider than that.

Striking design. A handwritten note tucked inside. It is not only about perceived value. It is about designing a reveal that makes people feel the need to film, to photograph, to share that feeling of a premium experience.

Get that right and you take a cost you were always going to pay, getting product into customers’ hands, and turn it into branding real estate. A cost becomes an asset that nudges customers into being creators and ambassadors. People grow attached to things they have vouched for. And it carries the endorsement of a real person, which beats any ad an algorithm can serve.

When packaging becomes iconic enough to post, or an unboxing becomes good enough for a reel, you multiply every conversion. Sardine tins that you want to include in the picture of a table spread which you drop in the group chat. Buyers become ambassadors and brand people want to show off is social proof of the product underneath.

Signal for Some. System for All.

Regular readers know the three pillars of brand world building. Story. Signal. System. System is the obsessive commitment to your story across every touchpoint, and since packaging is a touchpoint for every brand, packaging is always part of your system. Not leveraging it by integrating it as part of that three pillared structure is leaving money on the table. Hold the story across every surface and each one reinforces who you are.

Signal, on the other hand, goes deeper. It’s a single asset that makes your story visible one which is so rooted in your brand story it couldn’t belong to anyone else. For some brands, packaging is that asset. The right signal doesn’t just get you noticed. It also makes your story impossible to ignore.

That is the lens for the five brands below. Signal for two of them, but system for every single one.

Top Examples

Loewe. Proof that visual identity and brand are not the same thing. Loewe reinvents its art-forward packaging release to release. The only constants are the logo and the curation. This is system. The brand is the playfulness and the high-art fluency held across everything, not a colour palette.

Fly By Jing. Chinese typography, bold colour, maximalist design. This is signal. The packaging is so rooted in its east-asian origins that no minimalist western competitor could lift it without contradicting itself. It demands attention, and it promises a product as bold and complex as the box.

Tom Dixon. One bold idea, applied with discipline. Take a visual element from the product and put it on the box. The gradients imitate the flames. This is system. The packaging is one more touchpoint pulled into the same story the product tells, so nothing feels separate from anything else.

Flamingo Estate. Baroque choices across a wide range of products. This is system. What unifies them is not just the emerald green. It is the detail, held intricate and crafted across the whole range, echoing the brand’s values.

Diptyque. The oval label is not packaging. It is the signal. Sixty years of dancing letters, each fragrance given its own typographic personality, type used as a paintbrush. So rooted in Diptyque that it could not belong to anyone else. Fresh with every iteration, never drifting from the world it sits in.

The Principle, Not the Format

As the diversity of the examples above should have made obvious, the specific way you do your packaging matters far less than the principles behind it.

First, tie it to your story. Your packaging reflects who you are and what sits inside. A striking piece of packaging that contradicts the rest of your range just confuses people about your brand.

Second, shareability compounds. Packaging people want to show off, or open in front of an audience, buys you exposure you did not pay for and indeed exposure you can’t pay for, people trust peer-to-peer endorsements far more than advertising, and it’s not a fakeable asset.

Third, commit to it everywhere. Pick an aesthetic, root it in principle rather than rules about font, logo or material, and hold it across every surface. Held that way, packaging never constrains creativity. It lets you keep experimenting while every release adds to the world instead of starting it over.

That is the whole game. Packaging is a cost you were always going to pay, treat it as a necessity and it stays one. Treat it as your story on the other hand, one made physical, and the necessity becomes a billboard. Commit to that across every touchpoint and the brand becomes a world people want to enter.

Founders tend to think of branding in terms of design principles, logos, wordmarks, or tone of voice. A less recognised part of branding is the patterns of behaviour that become associated with a brand. Think of the Guinness slow pour, or the Oreo twist.

Sometimes it’s a particular way of interacting with your product that sets it apart from its competitors and builds an association with consumers. We’re calling this phenomenon brand rituals.

Between branding and product design

What makes them interesting is that they’re a liminal case, living across the boundary between product design and branding. A ritual can be designed and baked into the product, or it can be picked up as a consumer habit that has natural evolved.

From there it travels up a layer. The habit gets built into the brand story, and then campaigns and advertising can build myths around it, or use the ritual as an embodiment of everything the brand stands for. The behaviour starts in the product, becomes a habit, and ends up as story.

The Oreo twist works this way. Nobody engineered it. People started prising the cookie apart and licking the cream, and the brand simply noticed, then built the twist, lick, dunk campaigns around a habit that already existed.

Done well, the arc is self-reinforcing, and consumers become ambassadors, even a source of product intelligence.

The habit loop

Strava is a good example. After each tracked run comes the upload, a habitual action that gives the whole experience a sense of completion and carries a social charge.

The upload doesn’t just mark the end of a session. It logs it for posterity, turning each workout from a one-off into a gradual contribution to an edifice of fitness. And crucially, it makes the whole thing a public performance.

Habit-based products like Strava are naturally suited to rituals, since repetition is baked in. The relationship is self-reinforcing. A habitual product makes a ritual easier to build, and once use becomes ritualistic rather than merely habitual, the habit embeds itself more deeply.

Duolingo’s streaks are a good case. They become part of your daily practice, an act of self-improvement, the educational equivalent of brushing your teeth.

This keeps Duolingo present in a user’s daily tech use, and it improves the product too, since consistent repetition is exactly what language acquisition demands. That points to another value-add. A ritual done well sits across both brand and product, sharpening the offering while strengthening its identity.

Ritual as spectacle

Even products that aren’t habit-based can be ritualistic. FIFA Ultimate Team packs are a digital cousin of the Pokémon booster pack, only with footballers. Their success became a decade-spanning phenomenon that lifted an already huge franchise into one of the world’s premier media products.

Opening them has become an industry in itself, with streamers building whole audiences around live pack openings. The opening is an elaborate animation laced with cues that let you guess the player you’re about to get. First the nationality, then a rating, then the colour of the fireworks. And if the card is good enough, the player leaps out and parades across the screen.

EAFC has engineered that sequence for maximum tension and dopamine, turning a digital unboxing into a ritual that draws audiences just to watch it performed. That I’ve not yet mentioned the cards are for playing actual matches rather proves the point. The product has become incidental to the ritual.

Ritual as elevation

Then there are rituals built neither on habit nor spectacle, but on elevation. The Guinness slow pour is the emblematic case, lending a humble pint a sense of devotion and friction that only deepens the experience.

A proper pour takes around 119 seconds, far longer than your standard pilsner. That friction sat in the product long before it sat in any campaign. The ritual came first.

The slogan came later. “Good things come to those who wait” was a campaign concept that embodied the wider brand story, patience rewarded with quality, and it built directly on a ritual customers were already performing. It gave the wait a meaning, and the surfer ad turned that meaning into myth.

Customers once impatient to get back to their friends now raptly monitor the foam settling in the glass, savouring the delay. Guinness didn’t create the friction, they recognised its value and turned a weakness into a perk.

How to build a ritual

So rituals can be a real boon. But how do you actually build one? A few qualities show up again and again in the ones that work.

Repeatability. This one is self-evident, but it’s the only true non-negotiable. If the behaviour can’t be repeated, it isn’t a ritual.

Simplicity. A ritual should be something people do almost without thinking, integrated into use rather than bolted on. That doesn’t mean frictionless, since friction can be the value-add, but friction and complexity aren’t the same thing. Keep it simple and the ritual adds to the experience rather than getting in the way.

Compounding. A one-off ritual works fine, as Oreo and Guinness show. But rituals like the Strava upload or Duolingo streaks, which let you compare performance over time, add an element of diary-keeping and progress.

A social element. Visibility sustains the habit through accountability and feeds the desire to build identity through what we consume. It also turns the ritual into a vector for the brand, the way unboxings do, putting both ritual and product in plain view.

Ownability. It should belong to your brand alone. Think back to Signal. If any competitor could lift the ritual, it isn’t distinct enough. A ritual should reinforce your brand story through performance.

Watch and learn

Unlike most of branding, rituals tend to emerge from real consumer behaviour rather than a campaign dreamt up in-house. So pay attention to how people actually use your product. A ritual may already exist around your brand, and that is a powerful signal.

If there’s a persistent pattern your audience enjoys performing as much as the product itself, it’s fertile ground for identity. Just be careful not to tread too heavily on something organic.

Spotify Wrapped came from understanding that sharing is inherent to how fans experience music, from trading mixtapes to discussing favourite bands. They stacked that on a second ritual common across demographics, taking stock of the year around the holidays.

They didn’t force a new ritual onto anyone. They read existing behaviour and reframed it as something only Spotify could own. That’s how a strong ritual is made.

In the age of algorithmic feeds and an endless churn of content, a new asset has come to dominate the world of branding. If you spend any amount of time inside the modern social media ecosystem, you’ve heard the phrase. The attention economy.

Coined by economist Herbert Simon, it describes a simple but consequential dynamic. As information becomes more abundant, attention becomes more scarce. On the modern internet, where content is effectively limitless, the ability to capture attention has become one of the most valuable commodities a brand can hold.

Of course, knowing what something is and knowing how to operate inside it are two different things. So how do you actually navigate the attention economy? These are the five principles we keep coming back to, the ones we think are essential to making sure your brand doesn’t just borrow attention, but accumulates it.

1. Sameness costs you twice

Density of content competing for your attention means that it’s not just a matter of getting people’s attention, but holding onto it. A brand that doesn’t differentiate itself can buy a moment of attention, but it can’t keep it. Which means you’re paying twice. Once to get noticed, then again the next time, because the first impression didn’t stick. Even if you do draw a segment of the audience, an undifferentiated brand can’t hold them. The ROI on every ad pound erodes. You’re not accumulating attention, you’re renting it by the second.

2. The brain doesn’t stop for the familiar

We’re trained to navigate an information-rich feed by filtering out samey content, so the only way through is to stand out. The sheer volume of brands fighting for attention means it’s impossible for the average person to invest themselves fully in every brand interaction. Consciously or subconsciously, most of what they scroll past gets muted or glossed over. The way to avoid falling into that category is simply to be different. In a sea of iterative brands that differ only by slight tweaks to an established formula and the same category clichés, the one that inverts the stereotypes is the one that stands out.

3. Trends fight for attention. Categories of one accumulate it.

David Protein doesn’t look like a protein bar. Its design language pulls from luxury categories and minimalist editorial, not gym culture and typical protein barbold graphics and primary colours. So it doesn’t just earn a glance, it earns a conversation. People stop, talk about it, share it, and the brand starts compounding social proof every time it appears.

That’s the difference between trying to win on trend and trying to win on category. A brand chasing trends is borrowing attention. A brand that’s a category of one accumulates it. Rains did the same thing with rainwear, reframing bad weather from an obstacle to a setting worth designing around. That kind of move stays with people long after the moment of impression has passed.

4. Blue ocean turns every move into a deposit

This is where Blue Ocean Branding compounds. When your brand sits in its own category, every move you make does double duty. You’re not just building the idea of your brand, you’re building the idea of the category itself. The two become inseparable. So every campaign, every product, every piece of content reinforces both at once.

That’s how attention shifts from rental to ownership. When consumers think of the category, they think of you, because you defined it. It’s a different economic reality. Every pound spent on branding builds permanent territory rather than another billboard rented for the week.

5. If you can’t outspend, you can out position

Money buys volume. But the attention economy already has volume. That’s the whole point. What it doesn’t have is differentiated, well-positioned brands. So the leverage moves from spend to strategy.

This is good news for challengers. You can’t out-spend an incumbent, but you can out-position one. And positioning isn’t something you throw money at. It comes from understanding your brand story, knowing your category, and identifying the angle nobody else is willing or able to take. Get that right and every pound of marketing spend works harder. The smartest positioning multiplies every other branding decision you make.

The Takeaway

The attention economy makes one thing clear. Visibility isn’t the same as relevance, and an ad isn’t the same as a brand. The brands that win in this environment aren’t the ones with the biggest budget. They’re the ones who built a world worth paying attention to in the first place.

The fundamentals haven’t actually changed. Story, Signal, System. Build a category of one, and attention stops being something you chase. It accumulates on its own terms.

How do you cultivate the skills, sensibilities and discernment that enables you and your collaborators to execute at a high level continuously and over time?

Because a brand and the context it sits in is never static, making something good, something spectacular even, isn’t necessarily enough. You need to understand the principles that facilitate good work, so that you can continue to perform and build successfully not just once, but continuously.

Part of this is a simple matter of cultivating good references and learning from other thinkers, founders and brand builders. One of the absolute premier sources for this type of insight is copywriter and ad-man extraordinaire George Lois.

If you’re not familiar, George Lois is sometimes affectionately referred to by industry peers and admirers as ‘the real life Don Draper’ a testament not only to his iconic status in the world of advertising, but also to his individualistic and unique approach to his craft. His seminal book on the creative and business craft, ‘Damn Good Lessons for People With Talent’ is replete with useful lessons for founders, and it’s exactly the type of resource that we’d recommend when it comes to cultivating a skillset that can sustain and support how you approach brand building.

We’ve distilled some of the book’s core insights into five headline takeaways below for you to start thinking about and elaborate further.

Always chase the Big Idea

In the 1960’s advertising was fundamentally altered in what was known as the ‘Creative Revolution’. A group of advertising creatives centered in New York City changed their approach to ad design and copywriting to center bold creative concepts, and core to this new philosophy was what they called the ‘Big Idea’.

To put it simply, an ad campaign, and a brand needs a single idea that can captivate audiences. It’s the singularity and scale that matters. Clutter leads to audience confusion, asking people to hold a bouquet of different concepts in their mind at once when they think of your brand makes it difficult to pin down and communicate effectively. Likewise, if you narrow your brand down to one single idea but it’s pedestrian and uninteresting, it won’t stick with people and won’t allow for enough angles of approach to not get boring.

So treat the Big Idea as your grand strategy. A simple statement that captures who you are and what you want to own. Get as tactical as you like underneath it. But the Big Idea that sits above it all has to be crystal clear.

A trend is always a trap

Trend following, definitionally, means unoriginality. By the time a trend has caught on, given the lead time of good work, you’re likely to look not only out of touch but falling behind. And even if you do catch the wave in time, you’re one of many. Instead focus on lasting value. Avoiding trends can either lead to you being an originator of them, in which case you solidify your credentials as an innovator and leader or, you bypass the trend cycle entirely to create something timeless and classic.

Either way you’re not only working more effectively, you’re also communicating confidence in your own direction.

Reject group think

Just because its consensus doesn’t mean its true. Evaluate ideas on their own merit and ask yourself, if nobody else on the team or in this business thought this was a good idea, would you still think its a good idea?

That’s not to say you shouldn’t embrace collaboration or take on board other people’s input into your process, but at the end of the day, you also have to remain dedicated to your vision. A strong brand isn’t built by comittee. Don’t be contrarian for the sake of it, but don’t let your own creativity buckle under the weight of the crowd.

A brilliant product won’t sell itself

Incumbents have all sorts of ways to distort the market to stop ‘superior’ products from rising automatically to the top. And that’s before getting into things like consumer habits which also stop the ideal model of cream rising to the top from always functioning. So even if you think your product is qualitatively better, you still have think about how to make sure that other people know its better, and feel compelled to try it for themselves so that they can internalise that knowledge beyond marketing.

And this isn’t restricted to selling a product or brand to consumers. You need to convince everyone, because you need everyone to be pulling in the same direction to be successful as a brand. That means new hires, that means investors. Selling your product is about selling the idea behind it as much as anything, and that means you’re going to need to be your own biggest advocate in every room.

Never just ‘be careful’

Sticking to what’s been proven effective provides you with a steadily declining amount of creative juice. You need to try different things in order to keep ideas fresh and that might mean taking risks, but that’s also how you’ll uncover new ways of making progress.

Carefulness guarantees sameness. Because carefulness is the default mode for most people when they embark on an inherently risky venture like building a brand.

Being careful is an inherent drawback of being a large brand or corporation. With increased regulation and oversight, as well as exponentially increasing stakeholders, each move becomes more and more cumbersome. Don’t impose those same constraints on your own company. Not needing to be careful is the systemic advantage that small brands have over large ones. Deciding to abandon it for the sake of not taking risks is a self imposed penalty and will hold back your ability to win attention.

Keep Engaging With Influential Thinkers in Your Industry and Beyond

These insights are the ones we think resonate the most with the way we practice craft at Blink Twice, but Lois storied career has generated many more choice morsels of tips and tricks all of which are interesting.

And Lois is far from the only voice in his niche. The world is full of incredible creative minds who have gone out of their way to share not only their work but their process, and their hard earned insights into the craft of creative work. But Lois didn’t write his book just for creatives, he titled it the way he did because he recognised that these are rules applicable to anyone with talent who wants to make something, this is why it’s so useful to founders.

So treat this as an active library, not a hall of fame. The point isn’t to venerate the greats. It’s to absorb what they figured out and put it to work. A brand is the sum of every reference, principle, and instinct you bring into the decisions that build it. Sharpen those inputs, and you sharpen the brand.

Credit George Lois and his book: Damn Good Advice For People With Talent

Why do all banks say trite things like ‘We put you first’? Why is every water bottle decorated with an alpine peak or a babbling brook? Why is every detergent sold in an opaque plastic jug in a primary colour that looks like it could just as likely contain motor oil or industrial solvent if not for the label having a picture of a smiling baby or a flower? Because all brand categories rely on invisible standards, genericisms and hackneyed tropes.

In an earlier post on Brand Eye, we laid out one of the core principles of Blink Twice’s approach to brand building, namely the concept of Blue Ocean branding. That’s the idea that a strong brand rejects those tropes in favour of a positioning that makes it one of one. This week we’re taking that theoretical approach and showing how it’s operationalized with the first step being what we’re calling Red Ocean Mapping.

What is Red Ocean Mapping?

Fairly intuitively, Red Ocean Mapping is about mapping the contours of the Red Ocean your brand sits in, that is to say – a crowded category with a heavy presence of tropes, cliches or stereotypes. This mapping process involves looking at the other brands in your category and breaking them down to find out what parts of their messaging, aesthetic or product design are tropes within the category. Patterns that are repeated, whether consciously or not, and which have become defining for brands. The idea is that if you can find what makes everyone else the same, that’s a potent vantage point from which to start ideating about what you can do to subvert internalized cliches in a way that speaks to your brand story.

But Red Ocean Mapping is more than opposition research. It’s about understanding the landscape of your category, what are the underlying assumptions that consumers have about it. It involves understanding not just what makes a brand in that category generic, but why those generic traits appeared, are they intrinsic to the product, are they imitations of past branding successes, are they simply best practice. If you simply set out to be different without bothering to try understanding why and how others do what they do then you’re not heading for a Blue Ocean, you’re just testing boundaries for the sake of it.

Let’s Look at a Red Ocean

Maybe the best move is to show you a glimpse at this type of investigation, rather than telling you about it.

Let’s take the smartphone market. Recently we’ve mentioned the brand Nothing, a few times and for very good reason. Nothing is a spectacular example of so many principles we adhere to at Blink Twice. In particular they have a crystal clear understanding of what the Red Ocean they’re escaping is.

The smartphone market is dominated by certain unexamined standards and assumptions. Remember in the 2000’s with Sidekicks and Razr Phones where new groundbreaking silhouettes and layouts were the norm for cell phones? That landscape of experimentation has long since given way to a standard design philosophy that has only changed iteratively since the late 2000’s with the release of the iphone. Pick up a Galaxy phone, a Google Pixel or an iPhone, without their logos or operating systems, are you even confident you’d be able to tell them apart? This anonymous sleekness is a reflection of the deeper mechanics of these brands, Google, Samsung, Apple these are as corporate as corporate gets. Incredibly polished at the cost of any and all personality.

Nothing is, pardon the pun, nothing like its competitors. Yes the design of the phone is unique, we’ve talked before about the exposed screws and industrial design language, but its rawness in product design is matched by a similar rawness in their company’s presentation.

Nothing’s founder, Carl Pei, is unabashedly open about the work in progress nature of Nothing. Where the aforementioned tech titans are wont to discuss product updates in hyper polished keynotes, Carl Pei is more likely to sit down in an office chair in front of a camera and upload a vlog-style YouTube video talking candidly about the process of making the tech

It plays with the semiotics and presentations of the world of tech-YouTubers and social media influencing to give a sense of transparency to the entire brand and its approach to design.

Carl Pei and his team understood that the brand tone of voice that existed in the world of consumer tech had become numbingly slick. There was no surface, so nothing stuck with consumers, and they also understood that this was a side-effect of the massive corporations behind the tech, not an inherent trait of tech marketing. Their unfair advantage was the very fact that they didn’t have a multi billion dollar stock valuation to think about every time they spoke.

This is why Red Ocean Mapping matters, because the amount of choices your brand could make to try and set itself apart are infinite. In order to understand which choices are actually going to resonate, and which parts of your category are not satisfying audiences’ appetites, you need to really understand the mechanics of that category in depth.

Red Ocean Mapping in the Wild

Nothing is a deep example, but the principle plays out across categories. Two quick studies in mapping a Red Ocean and using what you find to break out of it.

Who Gives A Crap

• Red Ocean: Big Toilet Paper.

• Tropes: Sterile plastic packaging. Pastel palettes. Smiling puppies. An arms race over softness and ply count.

• The Insight: The category was hidden under the sink for a reason. Nothing on the shelf earned a place outside of it.

• The Subversion: Bright patterned paper wrappers, an irreverent name, and 50% of profits donated to charities building toilets and improving sanitation in the developing world. A bathroom necessity became a shelf-worthy design object.

Casper

• Red Ocean: Legacy mattress showrooms.

• Tropes: Confusing model names. Commission salespeople. Awkward public testing. Opaque pricing.

• The Insight: Buying a mattress was an exhausting ritual nobody enjoyed.

• The Subversion: One mattress. One price. Delivered in a box. A 100-night trial that scrapped the showroom entirely. The unboxing itself became the brand moment.

Different categories, same discipline. Both brands looked hard at what their competitors had quietly accepted as standard, and then refused to play.

Do You Need Red Ocean Mapping?

Understanding whether or not the particular strategy of Blue Ocean branding and, consequently, Red Ocean Mapping are what your brand needs to orient its overarching brand strategy is actually fairly simple.

Ask yourself the following questions.

Do your sales rely on price or relationships or brand pull?

Can you explain what makes you different without listing features?

Could your logo sit on a competitor’s packaging?

Could your campaign ideas and content swap with theirs?

Do your type, colours, and tone of voice blend into the category?

These are simple ways of figuring out both the strength and distinctiveness of your brand profile. If you find that the answers aren’t the ones you want, your brand would likely benefit from differentiating itself in a way that both embraces what makes it unique, its story, and runs counter to the tropes of its red ocean. As we’ve outlined above, that means research, analysis, and a rigorous understanding of the territory you’re operating within.

Look at a Dyson vacuum and the very first thing you notice is the motor. Not hidden behind moulded plastic like every other appliance in its category, but put on display, front and center, unmissable. Transparent housing, exposed cyclones, the engineering sitting there in your kitchen like it has something to prove.

And that’s the entire point.

Instead of being just another household appliance, Dyson is telling you a different story about its products. It’s a feat of industrial engineering worth paying a premium for, and the exposed motor makes that story impossible to miss. You don’t need a tagline when the product is the argument.

This is the second pillar of Brand World Building, and this week we want to take a deeper dive into signal in its own right. Why it works, why you need it and who does it well.

Where Signal Sits in the Framework

A few issues back we broke down the three pillars that make up a brand world. Story. Signal. System. The story is the North Star, the belief that makes every other decision for you. System is the architecture that compounds those decisions over time, turning every asset and touchpoint into a reinforcement of who you are.

Signal is the bridge between them.

It’s the single asset that takes the abstract thing (your story, your philosophy, your worldview) and makes it concrete enough to hold in your hand. A piece of packaging, a silhouette, a material, a character. One thing, so rooted in the story that no competitor could credibly lift it.

Without a signal, your story stays theoretical. Without a story, your signal is wallpaper.

Signal Is Not a Logo

What most brands get wrong, is treating Signal as a visual identity exercise. A logo. A colour palette. A typeface. These things matter, but they are not Signals. A Signal is far more than that, because while a logo tells you who made something, a Signal shows you why it exists.

The test is simple. If you could put your visual identity on a competitor’s packaging and it would still make sense, you don’t have a Signal, you’ve got styling.

Plenty of brands have tried to lift Dyson’s exposed engineering look. Shark borrowed parts of it. But a borrowed Signal never lands with the same force, because Dyson’s story (a vacuum as industrial engineering, worth the premium) is what gave the exposed motor its meaning in the first place. Strip the story away and the Signal becomes a styling choice. That’s how you know it’s a real Signal. It’s so tied to the underlying story that it couldn’t belong to anyone else.

And if you’re not actively designing your Signal, you risk just defaulting to the category’s. Green glass for olive oil. Pastel palettes and lowercase sans serifs for direct-to-consumer beauty. Minimalism and beige tones for every wellness brand that has ever existed. These are category cliches. They telegraph one thing staring down at you from the crowded row of alternatives: “I’m another one of these.” Utilising Signal properly is about bucking these stereotypes, and making sure that your brand is unmistakably yours and undeniably different.

Who Gets It Right

Rains. The Danish apparel brand built its whole world on reframing rain as an environment to live in, rather than an obstacle. To reinforce that story and to set themselves apart they used the material of their products itself as their signal. That glossy PU and rubber textile is so conspicuous it functions as well as any logo, but unlike a logo the fabric is integral rather than superficial. It doesn’t just tell you who made the coat. It tells you what the coat is. Rain, made wearable. A testament that functional fabrics and garments don’t have to be separate from fashionable ones.

Nothing Phone. When you’re a challenger taking on the most dominant hardware brand in the world you need to maximise your signal for recognition. For Nothing, the signal is the transparent back of their phone, with its exposed screws and visible components. The architecture of the machine made legible. If Apple’s story is seamless, polished, impenetrable, Nothing’s story is the opposite. Scrappy. Honest. Built in public. The signal telegraphs that positioning before you’ve read a single word of marketing copy.

The Ordinary. A skincare brand whose story is radical transparency. Science instead of marketing. Accessibility instead of a luxury markup. For the Ordinary, the signal is the packaging. A clinical white label printed with the exact chemical concentration as the product name. Niacinamide 10%. Hyaluronic Acid 2%. Frosted dropper, serif wordmark that could sit in a chemistry textbook. Where wellness brands hide behind the veneer of nature with floral logos, natural scents and soft pastels, the Ordinary embraces the fact that it’s a product of chemistry. It doesn’t look like skincare, it looks like a reagent pulled from a lab shelf. And in their story, that’s exactly what it is.

David. A protein bar sold as a precious object. Metallic gold and bronze foil wrapping. A serif wordmark borrowed from luxury rather than fitness. The nutritional panel printed as a spec sheet. Every detail signalling the same idea: this isn’t a gym snack, it’s an instrument of optimisation. The name does half the work. Michelangelo’s David. The most celebrated depiction of the human form in history. The product is the answer to what the name promises. Optimal protein for your optimal form.

The Test

A logo tells. A product shows. A signal has to do both.

Your signal can be a silhouette, a material, a colour, a character, a piece of packaging, a way of photographing your product. The form is flexible. What isn’t flexible is the rule behind it. It has to be reproducible. It has to be ownable. And it has to make your story visible in a way that no one else could credibly borrow.

If your signal could belong to anyone else, you haven’t built one yet.

Everyone loves talking about the rebrands that fail.

Jaguar. The Gap logo. Tropicana’s redesign that lost them $30M in two months. Cracker Barrel, more recently. Shudder.

But what about the ones that completely transformed a business?

When a rebrand is backed by real strategic thinking, and executed with total commitment, it’s one of the most powerful moves a business can make.

The power isn’t a cosmeti onec. The power of a successful rebrand is its ability to reframe audiences’ conceptual categorisation of a brand in a way that works in conjunction with the business’ strategic priorities.

It’s strategy and identity moving as one.

There are broadly two types of successful rebrands. The first leans into a new strategic direction. The second reinforces and re-energises what the brand already stands for, with fresh conviction.

Both work. Both require a strategic truth and an identity system built to carry it.

Here are five rebrands that got it right.

Airbnb

Airbnb’s 2014 rebrand is the textbook example of identity and strategy locking into each other.

Airbnb’s pitch when it was founded in 2009 was disruptive. De-centralising the hotel industry into a managed peer-to-peer network of rentals. But the technology to do something like that long predated Airbnb, as did actual platforms putting that tech to use.

The true innovation of Airbnb was not tech, nor its application, but their ability to reframe short term rentals as not an acceptable cheaper substitute to hotels but a qualitatively different product. Not a budget substitute, but a richer way to travel. A way to belong anywhere.

That strategic shift is what unlocked the brand. And the identity made it real. When Airbnb leaned into this, that’s when their brand not only became distinct, but became logical.

This came along with a new logo and font, which reinforced the message, but which would never have done the trick on their own.

The Bélo symbol gave the platform a universal mark that could sit anywhere, from a Tokyo apartment to a Tuscan villa. The soft coral palette replaced cartoonish blue. The custom typeface, Circular, felt human and approachable. The photography stopped looking like real estate and started looking like travel editorial. The UX was rebuilt around hosts and guests as characters in a story as opposed to parties in a transaction.

Result: Revenue grew from $250M to $6B in six years. IPO’d at $47B.

KIA

Kia’s rebrand is interesting because the old logo itself was part of the problem.

The chunky red oval with the italicised “KIA” inside didn’t just look dated, it was an anchor to a specific brand association: cheap, budget, the car you bought when you couldn’t quite afford something else. Strip the old logo, and you’re not just changing a graphic. You’re breaking the link between the wordmark and a decade of “budget car” connotations.

Which is exactly what they did. KIA’s rebrand leaned into a generational shift in the automotive industry, embracing the modernity of the brand.

Recognising that the world of automotive production was transitioning from a traditional standard of internal combustion engines into an EV dominant environment, KIA recognised that the industrial shift also presented a unique branding opportunity.

The strategic pivot was about moving from ‘automotive manufacturer’ to ‘mobility company,’ positioning Kia for an EV-dominant future where heritage mattered less than design and technology.

They changed their positioning from ‘automotive manufacturer’ stripping ‘motors’ from their name. Combined with the renaming, because the old logo was carrying so much of the old positioning, they had to replace it.

Their new wordmark was deliberately unfamiliar and forced a reintroduction. You couldn’t look at a new Kia and slot it into your existing mental model of the brand, because the mark itself broke that model. Add to that a minimalist design language across the vehicles themselves where the new angular wordmark reflected the angular design vocabular of cars like the EV6.

Result: Global sales up 20%+ post-rebrand. EV6 won European Car of the Year 2022.

Juventus Turin

Juventus’s 2017 rebrand is probably the most controversial on this list. Fans hated it. Design Twitter(X) melted down.

The new logo had football fans fuming, but the metrics speak for themselves. A 25% increase in the value of their brand. Because the strategy behind it made sense.

Red Bull had already proven that a football club and a lifestyle brand could live in the same brand world by doing the same in reverse. Juve’s differentiating factor was basing their brand world not around ‘extreme’ culture like Red Bull but around northern Italian prestige.

It’s origins in Turin, Italy’s first capital and a city deeply assosciated with aristocracy, wealth and class, the Agnelli family’s industrial pedigree, and the club’s “quiet luxury” reputation gave them something no other football club had: a credible claim on fashion, design and northern Italian prestige.

They siezed the opportunity that appeared at the confluence of their own history with industry trends in sports and in fashion. The results?

A new logo which turned the J initial into a shield shape and made Juventus look closer to Chanel or Nike than to other football clubs. The kits moved into sage greens and pink pastels that looked more like fashion drops than regular football kits. Juve blurred the line between a matchday kit and a fashion piece. They invited Italian artists to reinterpret the logo in their own artstyles.

Juventus’ rebrand is a showcase of the fact that sometimes expanding a brand world will face pushback from legacy audiences, but that it’s a tradeoff for expanding into new sectors and doesn’t necessarily have to clash with your core principles as a brand.

Whilst this rebrand worked for Juventus due to the strategic landscape in which it was designed, I believe in general most football benefit from their heritage.

Result: Commercial revenue up 12% year on year. Merchandise sales spiked globally. Brand value up an estimated 25%.

Burger King

Burger King, unlike the previous three examples, didn’t use their rebrand to strike out into a new world, but to double-down and reinforce their original selling point.

After years of chasing McDonald’s into modernity to become slicker and more corporate, BK changed course. Their previous logo with a blue ring around it said “we’re a serious global fast food business” emphasis on global, fast and business, not the food.

Then, in 2021 they hard pivoted with a return to their 1969 logo. A flat, confident orange bun containing the words “BURGER KING” in a rounded, chewy custom typeface. Nostalgic, classic and simple.

Global supply chains, real estate and franchise contracts that are bulletproof, these things are surely good for business, but they’re not good foundations for a consumer oriented food brand. The old logo, and the design system it belonged to, had been carrying a message that wasn’t about being a super-modern company, but about making tasty food.

Result: Brand perception scores jumped. Outperformed every major competitor on social engagement post-launch.

Dip

The last one is a rebrand we developed ourselves at Blink Twice.

Dip sell laundry and cleaning products. Laundry detergent strips instead of pods. Safer formulations. A category that has historically been defined by two options: clinical (think Tide, Persil) or greenwashed eco (think Ecover, Method). Both forgettable, neither earns a prominent spot in your home.

The strategic unlock was recognising that the real competitor set wasn’t other cleaning brands. It was wellness and beauty. The codes of the self-care economy allowed Dip to use a whole different set of values and principles to sell their product.

People had been taught by Glossier, The Ordinary and the whole clean living movement to care what ingredients were in their moisturiser. But nobody had connected that instinct to what they put on their clothes and surfaces.

So we built Dip as the first true home wellness brand.

A refreshed logotype built on the act of the “dip” itself, visual and literal at the same time. Sky-inspired product photography that drew on fragrance campaigns instead of cleaning aisle shots used visuals to reposition Dip’s product in a different category by using their design principles and tropes. Calm, confident colour and honest design.

Result: £1m to £5m in 18 months. Sales tripled in the first month post-launch. Now the fastest-growing laundry strips brand in the UK. The full story is here.

Rebranding Is About Strategy, Not Just Logos

What all of these rebrands have in common is that they marry opportunity, strategy and design. The design changes reflect the intention of the strategy shift which in turn is in response to a market opportunity.

Airbnb's Bélo only means "belong anywhere" because the product, photography and tone of voice all back it up. Kia's new wordmark only reads as "design-led mobility brand" because the EV6 arrived to prove it. Juventus's J only reads as "global lifestyle brand" because the kits and collaborations built a world around it. Burger King's 1969 logo only lands as "craveable" because the whole system treats the food as the hero. Dip only unlocks "home wellness" because the category pivot was baked into the strategy.

Every single one of these shows the same thing. When a rebrand is backed by real strategic thinking (and executed with total commitment) it's one of the most powerful moves a business can make.

Editorial Note: This week’s newsletter is a two-parter. This post follows last week’s theory component, and gets into how to operationalise the insights from part one.

The most expensive billboard in the world can’t prove that people care about your brand. It can prove you have money, but that’s not the same thing. A product someone buys, keeps, and tells other people about? That’s proof. It’s earned, not bought. And the only way to get it is to build a brand world worth collecting.

There’s a craft behind elite collectible branding. It’s not a science, because it will always be a creative endeavour, but it’s not just vibes either. There’s a logic behind it, a series of steps which serve both as wireframe to hold your campaign together, and springboard for your creativity to launch off of.

Here’s how.

Start with Story

As with any campaign, a collectible needs to link back to your brand story. Not a product feature, not a brand value. An idea, a philosophy, a principle which people would want a physical artefact of.

The test is simple: if you stripped the logo off, would the collectible still say something about your brand? If yes, you’re working with Story. If no, you’ve made merch.

Merch ends up in the bin. Artefacts end up on the shelf.

When you’re developing concepts, the question to ask is: what is the central idea of our brand, and what would it look like as an object? Innocent Smoothies’ hand-knitted bottle hats work because they’re a physical expression of the brand’s personality. Warmth, handmade simplicity, a little bit quirky. Remove the Innocent branding entirely and the object still tells you something. That’s the difference.

If you can’t answer what the central idea is, that’s the problem to solve first. A collectible can’t carry an idea that hasn’t been clearly articulated yet. Go back to the brand story and make it more distinct before anything else.

Build the System

Story gives the collectible meaning. As such it’s the prerequisite, but it doesn’t make something collectable. Plenty of beautifully made objects with thought behind their design get bought once and forgotten. What separates a collectible from a well-designed piece of merch is the System — the mechanics that make people come back, complete sets, show off, trade, and engage with the object beyond the moment of purchase.

It has three components.

Defining the Set

Completionism only works when people can see what finishing looks like. The urge to complete something only kicks in when they know there’s something to complete. Market as a set, sell as a unit. If there are eight variants, show all eight. If there’s a rare tier, communicate the rarity. If it’s geographically distributed, make the map visible.

The edges of the set are part of the product. McDonald’s CARDS campaign worked because customers could see the full 24-card set from day one. They knew exactly how incomplete their collection was. That tension is the engine.

Building In the Game

Gamification works in two directions. The first is the moment of acquisition: is there an element of chance or discovery in how people get the collectible? The blind box, the unboxing mechanic, the treasure hunt. The second is what happens after: can people trade, flex, complete, or compete with the object itself?

The best systems do both. The acquisition is exciting and the post-acquisition life of the object has its own dynamics built in. Pokémon cards don’t just have the dopamine hit of the booster pack. They have an entire game, a trading economy, and thirty years of community built around what happens after you open it.

Making it Social

A collectible that doesn’t travel doesn’t work. The object needs to function as social currency, something people want to show off, photograph, trade, and talk to others about. Making it something that’s cool or beautiful or interesting is also about making it social.

Would people be as obsessed with Diptyque’s geographically limited edition candles if they didn’t also look amazing on a coffee table? Let’s say the maintained all the other characteristics, you still knew they were geographically limited, they still made you feel wordly, they still reminded you of that trip you took to Miami with their Palm Beach inspired scent. But they didn’t have that same element of clout, by showing off their origin. Would they have the same value? Likely not.

Example - Collaborations as Collectibles

Collabs function exceptionally well for certain brands as collectibles, because they’re typically time-limited, and stand out as conspicuous from the ‘ordinary’ offerings of a brand. They also fulfill the social aspect of collectibles, by cross-pollinating fanbases and audiences, and showing cultural literacy and being ‘in the know’.

But they only work when both brand worlds are clearly defined.

Adidas x Raf Simons (Ozweego/Stan Smith) — The Adidas/Raf collab took a mass-market sneaker and placed it inside the world of high fashion. Making it a seasonal drop meant that each colourway becomes a souvenier of sorts. It signals a moment, like vintage tour merch or Jordans.

Crocs collaborations (Balenciaga, MSCHF, Christopher Kane) — When done well, a brand can reinvent its entire brand world through collaboration. That’s what Crocs did in the late 2010’s, with little scope to compete on product design given the plastic mold design, the shoe was a commodity. Easy to rip off. Branding was really the only thing it had going for it, and the brand was generic, until they started doing partnerships.

Then they started collaborating, with Balenciaga, MSCHF, Post Malone, Christopher Kane. Each collab recontextualised what Crocs was. Not an ugly shoe. An ironic cultural artefact. The collaboration was the blue ocean move that made the brand distinct.

KITH took this further. Ronnie Fieg made collaboration the entire operating model. Each drop is a content moment. Each release reinforces the brand world by making taste and curation wearable. For KITH, the cadence is the System.

The failure mode is when only one brand world is strong. If your story is weak, a collab doesn’t fix it. Crocs didn’y just partner with cool brands, they juxtaposed them with their own lack of cultural cachet. The collision only creates something new when both parties bring something distinct to the table.

Test It Against the Brand World

The Story gives it meaning, the Signal makes it recognisable and the System makes it repeatable. So before you ship anything, two questions.

Does the Story give it meaning beyond the logo? Does the System give people a reason to come back for more?

Then the final one: could a competitor produce this same collectible credibly?

If yes, it’s a product, if no, it’s a collectible. And that’s the difference between something people buy and something people keep.

Editorial Note: This week’s newsletter is a two-parter. We’ll be starting off this week with the theory component, and following up next week with how to operationalise the insights from part one.

University halls with empty bottles of liquor lined up like trophies in the windowsill, your mate’s immaculate collection of half-and-half matchday scarves, or those people who inexplicably have a complete set of old encyclopaedias on a bookshelf that you have a sneaking suspicion nobody has ever opened, much less read.

Collecting is an incredibly common human habit, and one which a lot of people don’t even know they’re engaging in. But once you start thinking about it, you’ll notice that just about everyone is collecting. Billionaires collect fine art, just like kids on the playground collect Pokémon cards, or book lovers collect first editions.

Collecting transcends income brackets, age brackets, genders, languages, cultures and borders. It turns consumers into curators, and brand loyalty into identity.

Precisely for those reasons, brands can have significant success leveraging this innate behavioural pattern to build lasting emotional bonds with their audiences.

And, beyond simply being a marketing tactic, it also acts as a high-signal direct link to consumers. If people want to collect your things, it means you’ve successfully built a brand that people want to engage with beyond the purely transactional. You’ve transcended commodity status and forged a connection that is not strictly based on cost and utility.

These next two newsletters are all about how we can instrumentalise that insight into turning your brand into one people don’t just buy, but hold on to. That’s a fundamentally different relationship.

How Collectibles Fit Into Brand World Building

Let’s discuss where a collectible strategy sits within the broader frameworks of brand building which we’ve established in previous posts. Although collectibles are a potent tool, they don’t constitute a brand strategy in and of themselves, and will therefore need to exist within a broader approach.

One easy way to do this is to use our Three Brand World Building Pillars approach.

Collectibles belong pretty much entirely within the System pillar. They’re the repeatable architecture that gives your community a reason to keep engaging. But these pillars need to be working in tandem. Which means that if collectibles are a System, they need an equivalent Signal and Story. Without a Story, it’s meaningless merch. Without a Signal, it’s invisible.

Your Story should answer the question of what makes your brand something people want an artefact of. Your Signal should answer how someone might recognise a collectible as uniquely yours from across a room without seeing a logo. And the System should answer what the repeatable structure that gives people a reason to come back is.

This leaves one final element: can it be easily copied? If the answer is yes, then you’re not yet in blue ocean territory. If no, then you’re only competing with yourself, which is where you want to be.

The Five Psychological Drivers Of Collectibility

1. Completionism

Humans have an instinctive drive to complete sets. When there’s an incomplete collection it creates a low-level cognitive tension that can only be resolved by acquiring the missing piece. This creates a self-perpetuating loop of engagement when brands present a product as only one piece of a whole set.

McDonald’s has understood this for decades. Their Happy Meal toys pioneered the ‘collect all 8’ approach for a mass market. But the brand just took this thinking much further with the launch of CARDS, a nationwide promotion built around 24 hand-illustrated collectible cards across four categories, distributed through a dedicated CARDS Meal. The set structure shows you the edges of the full collection, subset categories create smaller completion goals within the larger one, and a rare 25th gold Ronald McDonald card adds treasure-hunt stakes. It’s the Happy Meal logic scaled up and made adult.

Lego employs a similar tactic with their minifigure series, marketing the complete set but selling its constituent components separately. The notion of incompleteness is built into the sales format and the promise of that complete set is advertised from the outset.

So is this category just for toys and fast food? Nope. Diptyque is a masterclass in how to market artisanality and craft. There’s nothing ‘childish’ about their brand, but their city candles make use of the same collectibility tactics as Lego and McDonald’s. They further introduce an element of geographic completionism, enmeshing the brand with the class and cosmopolitanism of the cities that get their own special edition candles and serving as proof-of-work for customers who value their worldliness and now associate that with Diptyque as a brand.

Completionism only works when there’s a system people can see the edges of. If your brand world is defined clearly enough that people can picture what the ‘full set’ looks like, you’ve built a system that generates its own demand.

2. Artificial Scarcity

Perceived rarity elevates perceived value. But there’s a meaningful distinction between manufactured hype (limited drops for the sake of it) and scarcity that’s rooted in the brand’s actual world.

Absolut stopped selling heritage and started selling contemporary art. Their limited-edition artist bottles turn minimalist packaging into a canvas for modern artists. They turned the packaging into the collectible. But the quality of these designs, and the fact that they link back to Absolut’s broader brand ambitions and sleek aesthetics, matters.

This works even better when scarcity doesn’t seem artificial. In the winter months, Innocent Smoothies drive sales through the hand-knitted hats placed on their bottles. Each one is hand-crafted, playing into the brand story of purity and simplicity. The hand-made quality is an inherent driver of scarcity. Add the variety and the fact that not every store will carry every knit-pattern and you’re sending customers on a treasure hunt, not just shopping.

Scarcity is a red ocean move when it’s just supply manipulation. It becomes a blue ocean move when the scarcity is tied to something only your brand world could produce.

3. Social Status & Curation

Some collecting is really about identity signalling and communicating social belonging. The collection itself becomes a curated expression of taste. The collector is demonstrating that they ‘get it’.

The prime example here isn’t a particular brand but an entire industry: fashion. People wear vintage Raf Simons, Helmut Lang, or Margiela as identity markers. Consumption becomes a way of articulating one’s identity. The collector is a walking extension of the brand world: tastemakers wear Celine because they’re tastemakers, and Celine is a valuable brand because it is worn by them.

When the signal is strong enough, the collector doesn’t just buy the brand, they perform it.

But collectibility for social status needs substance behind it. Beanie Babies is the cautionary tale. If there is no USP or brand world beneath the act of collection, brands can build hype but they don’t make products people want to keep, only ones they want to cash in for clout. Collectibility without a brand world is speculation. With one, it’s loyalty.

4. The Casino Effect

Randomness creates a dopamine response. The uncertainty of what you’ll get in a blind box or booster pack triggers the same reward pathways as gambling, but in a socially acceptable, community-driven context.

Pokémon cards are arguably the single best example of all three pillars working in lockstep. “Gotta catch ‘em all” literally commands collecting. This idea of collection, inspired by lead designer Satoshi Tajiri’s childhood hobby of bug-gathering, is central to the franchise. Every Pokémon is visually distinctive, instantly recognisable, and systematically categorised. But what sets the cards apart is the experience of opening a booster pack, which is engineered for dopamine. The anticipation of not knowing what you’ll get is part of what customers enjoy, evidenced by the popularity of unwrapping videos across social media.

Story, Signal, System. The ‘Gotta Catch ‘Em All’ ethos, the iconic designs and the booster pack distribution mechanism. All working together.

Gamification is powerful but fragile. Without genuine story and signal underneath, the casino effect burns out. Pokémon endures because the world is deep enough to sustain decades of collecting. Brands that bolt on gamification without building the world first create short-lived hype cycles.

5. Investment & Legacy

This is perhaps the most difficult driver for brands to engineer. It’s very dependent on a secondary market created without their input. But despite its complexity, it’s worth understanding to get a complete picture of why collecting is so engaging.

Hermès Birkin is the ultimate example. The scarcity is real (not manufactured drops), the craftsmanship narrative is airtight. The brand world is so well-built that the collectible appreciates because the world itself keeps appreciating. A Birkin isn’t bought for what it is, it’s bought for what it becomes.

Takeaway

These are far from all the reasons why collectibles seem to be a trait that exists everywhere and long predates modern consumer culture. But what’s safe to say is that these five principles are not only significant contributors to the collection behaviour, but that they are also ones which have been potently distilled by brands to build robust links between product, brand and customer on an emotional level.

So when you’re working on a product, ask whether anyone would collect any of the things you make. Not because of artificial scarcity or hype, but because the thing itself is an artefact of a world they want to be part of. If not, then through the principles outlined above, you have room to turn your brand from a flat surface to a world with depth.

But how do you operationalise these concepts on your own? That’s what part two will be breaking down next week.

Five Brand Traps

The bulk of the branding advice out there tells you what to do. Build a strong identity. Be consistent. Tell a good story. And that's all true. But some of the most costly mistakes brands make aren't about what they should be doing, they’re about what they're actively doing wrong, often without realising it

Over years of working with founders, startups and scaleups at Blink Twice, I’ve identified five patterns that consistenly bleed brand value. These aren’t one-off case studies in ‘what they did wrong’ they’re predictable and consistent patterns that reappear across categories, company sizes and budgets.

The good news is that once you can name them, they’re entirely avoidable.

Trap 1: Not Having a Clear Signal

When it comes to branding, you should be trying to stay in the minds of audiences beyond just their immediate interactions with your ad or your product. It’s all well and good to construct ad experiences or product interactions that are positive in the moment, but if you don’t give audiences a distinctive signifier which they can remember you by, then you’re building from scratch every time.

The most powerful way to solve this is through what I call a signal. A signal is more than just a logo or a wordmark. It’s a visual element so intrinsically tied to your brand story that it communicates your entire identity without a single word. The best signals don’t just tell you who made something. They tell you what that brand stands for.

Diptyque’s approach to this is their oval label, the shape is a portal, the entrance to a brand world where custom typeface and dancing type combine to give each product a unique identity and sense of playfulness. They use type as the paintbrush to reinforce their unique brand story - the artistry of living

Monte’s Red Face uses red to connote how their hair styling product makes you stand out, Rimowa’s use of ridged aluminium, a lightweight modern and sturdy alloy highlighting their connection to early aviation and Tiffany’s blue, the color of royalty and prestige. These brands make use of visual metaphors that reinforce their core brand story. They’re not only recognisable instantly, they are part of the storytelling in and of themselves.

Burberry’s recent transformation is another excellent example, as well as proof that this type of signalling also opens up new avenues for you to communicate with audiences and customers. Rather than simply updating their logo, they committed to owning a specific electric blue across every touchpoint. Particularly for a brand which already has a world renowned visual signal, their tartan pattern, that colour became the signal of an entirely new era. You didn’t need to read a press release to understand something had changed. You just saw the blue.

Identifying and owning your signal is how isolated marketing moments draw on pre-existing context to maximise impact, every single time.

Trap 2: Trying to Fit the Category

Oftentimes, in order to signal legitimacy, brands lean into pre-established norms within their category. Doing this, however, not only means you’re forcing yourself to go toe-to-toe with established giants who already have access to a legacy and audience recognition, you’re also throwing away your inherent advantage as a new competitor, your lack of obligation to pre-existing customers and stakeholders.

But here’s the alternative, Blue Ocean Branding. It is not simply doing the opposite of your category’s norms for the sake of it. The reason it worked for Vacation Inc is not because they made sunscreen look like whipped cream. It’s because that playful, nostalgic visual identity was the expression of a genuine brand insight: that sun protection didn’t have to feel clinical or dutiful.

The design was the vehicle for the story but crucially, the story came first.

Blue Ocean Branding means finding positioning that no competitor can follow you into because it’s rooted in something only you can own. It’s the key product truth. An emotional territory nobody else is credibly occupying.

Trap 3: The Content Treadmill

In a race for virality it can be tempting to throw everything at the wall in order to get exposure and attention, understandably, but if you’re not ready with a consistent message that has a logical interplay with all of your other content, you start from zero every time you hit publish.

When you engage with audiences, do so in a way that crafts a story that continues beyond that interaction.

This is what I call the System, the third pillar of a strong brand alongside Story and Signal. Building a system is the difference between a slogan and a strategy. Every piece of content is actively building the associations you want to own.

Red Bull is the clearest example. They don’t post random visuals. Every single piece of content, every sponsorship, every clip reinforces the same two things: High Energy and Extreme. And by associating their brands with the careers of elite athletes or teams, they also give you a continuous and interconnected world in which the inherent drive to follow a story through, means audiences stay connected.

Each piece draws on every other, and the associations deepen over time.

This is the difference between brand storytelling that compounds exponentially and simple linear exposure.

Trap 4: Wasted Packaging

Packaging is not just a cost of fulfilment. It’s one of the most important branding opportunities you have, and most brands waste it entirely.

The moment a consumer touches your product, it fundamentally alters their perception of its value. Apple understood this. The slowly sliding box, the weighted resistance, the precisely placed materials: every detail builds anticipation. It’s why people can’t bring themselves to throw the box away. The packaging is part of the product.

This moment is also the only time you have your customer’s full and undivided attention. Every other touchpoint competes. This one doesn’t. The smartest brands treat it as free media. Design for reusability and your packaging lives in your customer’s home for years, every reuse a free ad. Design for theatre and your customers film the unboxing for you. Design a unique shape and the form becomes the story, as Haws watering can proved with packaging that highlighted their products unique shape. Make it playful, as Innocent did with their smoothie hats, and people collect it. Make it personal and people share it.

Delivery is the only moment you have 100% of your customer’s focus. Treating it as logistics is throwing that away.

Trap 5: Retention Gap

What keeps your brand present in a customer’s life after the transaction ends? If you don’t have an answer to that, you disappear the moment your product is consumed. If you can repeatedly provide audiences with utility, then you’re building a lasting positive association.

The concept I come back to here is the brand trojan horse. A secondary product or asset, cheap (in comparison to the primary product cost) or free, and of immediate practical use, that infiltrates customer habits and keeps your brand front-of-mind long after the initial purchase.

Examples like the IKEA FRAKTA bag, Red-Bulletin and Rhode Lip case are some of our go-to’s but the Michelin Guide is perhaps the greatest example ever executed. In 1900, a French tyre company started distributing a free guide to the best restaurants in the nation. Following an incredibly elegant logic, they figured that if they wanted to sell more tyres, the best way was to get people to drive more so they’d wear their tyres out. And to get people to drive more, they’d need to give them a destination.

The guide became so trusted it is now the world’s premier restaurant rating system, synonymous with haute cuisine and refined taste. Customer retention, demand and an entire lifestyle their brand wanted to be associated with all built into one product, the perfect trojan horse.

The Takeaway?

The brands that win long-term aren’t just the ones with the best product. They’re the ones who understand that every touchpoint, every piece of content, every interaction is either building something or wasting it. Get them right, and the returns follow.

They say need is the mother of invention, but if that’s true then tinkering is surely at least a cool auntie? The history of iconic products is replete with examples of design innovations born not of intentional R&D but accidental convergence between a demand audiences weren’t aware of themselves, and a product that its producers found lying around in the scrap heap of abortive design ideas.

We’re going to take a quick look at a few examples of times that creative play led to incredibly beloved and innovative products and then make the case for why, and how, you can bake this process of creative play into the structure of your business.

Serendipity can sometimes be an incredible way to innovate but it requires you to have the right prerequisites.

Post-It’s

Post-It is such an iconic brand that it can be grouped in with the likes of Band-Aid, Xerox and Kleenex as companies that achieved such dominance in their category that their brand became synonymous with the product itself.

But the product which is now an office staple (pun intended) was actually invented as a way to make use of another failed invention by its parent company. A scientist named Spencer Silver working for 3M in the US in the 1960’s was working on super strong adhesives, but in his experimentation he instead ended up constructing a type of glue which was only slightly adhesive, reusable and pressure sensitive.

For the intended applications, Silver’s invention was a failure, but when reapplied to the yellow scrap paper laying around the 3M offices by other employees, they realised that it made for a very handy way of passing messages around, since these little scraps of paper could be peeled off a block, applied to another item and then easily removed again and reapplied. After almost a decade of floating around the offices of the American corporate conglomerate, this former ‘failure’ eventually found itself the foundation of a globe-spanning sensation.

Nike Waffle Sole

Around the same time as the Post It was being invented, Bill Bowerman, co-founder of Nike who was at the time still a track and field coach at the University of Oregon, was trying to come up with a new shoe for runners to train in on the newly installed Polyeurethane track at the University. The track, which Bowerman had had installed himself, was proving problematic for runners as flat shoes weren’t getting enough grip, while studded shoes were digging in too deep into the track.

Which explains why, one morning, the idea occurred to him to pour liquid polyeurethane straight onto the surface of his wife’s waffle iron, a wedding gift the couple had received over three decades earlier. Now, not unsurprisingly, applying liquid polyeurethane to a waffle iron did not, in fact, result in a perfect running sole and instead destroyed what seems to have been a very sturdy and reliable kitchen appliance but nevertheless, and if Bowerman had though a bit harder about it he might have also considered the fact that pouring the plastic into the waffle mold would end up with concave indents rather than the rubber studs of the Nike Moon Shoe, but it was the idea that mattered.

After many more attempts and many more waffle irons, Bowerman cracked the technique which ended up giving rise to the iconic Nike waffle sole pattern.

Fed-Ex Logo

When Lindon Leader was hired to redesign the Logo of Federal Express as it was known at the time, not only did he convince the company to let him rebrand it as ‘Fed Ex’ but, as he noticed after over 200 iterations of the logo design, he figured out he could hide a clever nod to the company’s operations in the negative space of the lettering itself.

If you’ve ever noticed the arrow between the E and X in the FedEx logo you know what we’re talking about, it’s one of the most iconic ‘hidden’ messages in a corporate logo.

But the fact that it was an initially unintended result of the shapes of the letters and their narrow spacing shows the value of creative iteration. Giving the creatives leeway to test out 200 versions of the new logo might seem excessive but it paid huge dividends in this case. Sometimes genius takes time.

Make it Part of Your Workflow

These three examples all have something in common. As much as they were accidents, they were accidents which were facilitated by very intentional philosophies at the companies where they happened. By baking experimentation into the culture and processes of their companies, these businesses set up the conditions for creative innovation to lead to new products.

Nike approached shoemaking not as an artisanal craft with best-practices and principles to be followed because of tradition and heritage but as an engineering puzzle.

3M maintained a corporate policy that specifically allowed employees to pursue idividual passion projects on company time. That’s how the invention of one engineer ended up being transformed into a completely different product alost a decade later, the philosophy as well as the structures were in place to promote innovation.

And in the case of FedEx, it was the willingness to embrace iteration, and a gradual and slow movement towards refinement, as opposed to cost-cutting exercises and a race towards the bottom that led to their iconic logo. It took looking at the word ‘FedEx’ 200 times for the designers to notice what was there from the very beginning, that space between the E and X.

So when you’re thinking about creativity, don’t think about it as something tacked on to your company or as a branding buzzword. Baking creative play into the core of your business processes leads to innovations that you can’t necessarily define ahead of time but which can be fundamental.

Rocky Balboa, 2015/16 Leicester City FC, Frodo Baggins etc. etc. Everyone loves an underdog. So it should sound pretty obvious that being a challenger brand in a category dominated by champions can be as much of a branding asset as a business disadvantage.

But how exactly do you leverage that innate desire people have to back the little guy? Well let us be the Mickey Goldmill to your Rocky, the Ranieri to your Leicester. Because we’ve got five key strategies for turning your challenger status into a cheat code and if not unseating the reigning champs, at least making them sweat up on their perch.

It’s the classic tale of David vs. Goliath. A story paradigm that dates back across ages and cultures and encapsulates that affinity we share for the underdog.

Here are five strategies for leveraging branding to exploit the fact that your brand is the underdog, and some companies that executed these strategies successfully to steal market share.

1. Reframe What the Category Is For

Giants get trapped by their own positioning. They’ve invested so much in a singular story that changing it would mean losing the audience they’ve spent decades building. Challengers don’t have that problem. Their only loyalty is to finding a better story.

If the vodka industry is dominated by brands leaning on Russian heritage, aristocratic crests, and claims of purity, how do you compete? Those are inherently non-fungible brand assets, right? That’s why Absolut went about it differently. They put premium Swedish vodka in a distinctive bottle inspired by 19th century medicine bottles and handed it to Andy Warhol. The bottle became pop art. In one branding move, they had moved vodka away from its old associations and turned it into a badge of modern creative culture.

Oatly took the same approach in the alternative milk industry. No pictures of cows in green pastures, no competing on nutritional credentials. They treated their carton as a canvas for irreverent copy, embracing sarcasm, absurdity, and comedy. Instead of trying to out-milk milk, they leaned into what a deeply traditional industry wouldn’t think to do.

Liquid Death took it furthest of all. Water in tallboy aluminium cans with heavy metal branding. The juxtaposition isn’t just appealing to consumers, it makes the product stand out on shelves. The Goliath was Big Water’s marketing of snow-capped mountains and soft purity. The slingshot was turning plain water bottles into an edgy statement piece for the sober-curious.

2. Weaponise the Object

Sometimes the slingshot isn’t the story. It’s the product itself.

In prestige categories it’s common to imitate the trappings of luxury and quality in order to lay claim to legitimacy. Graza doesn’t use old-world iconography or glass bottles to signal quality. Instead its humble squeeze bottles suggest a different way to engage with the product entirely. Change in form leads to a change in use. Olive oil becomes a fun garnish to be experimented with rather than a serious Old World ingredient you’re afraid to actually use.

Whip Vacation applied the same logic to whipped cream. Selling 80s Miami nostalgia, Whip engineered its bottle to spray like mousse. The nozzle isn’t just distinctive on shelf, it’s an integral part of how the product is experienced.

3. Make the Mundane Aspirational

Challengers often take a product category that markets itself on manipulation (you ought to use this product) and reframe it as an inspiring one (you want to use this product).

Big Laundry speaks to beleaguered parents and stained sports kits. Enter Dip, which reframed this purely utilitarian product by embracing laundry not as a chore but as a part of self-care. Dip’s laundry sheets come in packaging that looks like it belongs on the bathroom shelf alongside Aesop or The Ordinary. Sterile plastic hidden away under the sink became aspirational, design-forward branding that reframed laundry as part of a home wellness ritual.

Fishwife did the same for canned fish. Boring pantry tuna, the definition of commodity survival food, became a viral status symbol through bright, story-driven illustrations and a gift box sleeve that gave a standard tin room to tell a story.

4. Cut the Friction

Sometimes the most powerful David move isn’t a better product. It’s identifying the thing that makes the dominant experience quietly miserable and removing it entirely.

Incumbents build their models around assumptions about how their category works. Over time those assumptions become invisible to them, obligatory for consumers, but obvious to anyone looking in from the outside.

Blockbuster’s model depended on late fees, a friction element which made them money but baked punishment into the customer experience. Netflix, as an outsider, understood that building a business around negative customer experience was a recipe for disruption. Kill the friction, introduce a subscription model, remove the late fees, and suddenly customers no longer felt like they were being scolded by the place they went for entertainment. The cinematic branding helped too.

The same logic applied to banking. Branches, confusing fees, clunky corporate apps. Monzo’s slingshot was a hot coral card and instant, emoji-filled spending notifications. Financial transparency stopped feeling formal and anxiety-inducing and started feeling warm, social, and oddly fun. Casper did it for mattresses. One perfect product in a box with a 100-night trial turned buying a mattress into an aesthetic, viral unboxing event.

Just because audiences put up with incumbents, that doesn’t mean they won’t flock to a challenger who offers them an alternative.

5. Out-Human the Giant

Mid Day Squares encapsulates our fifth strategy. Brand activations that emphasise the fact that they’re not limited by the slow-moving machinations of corporate snack brands. A founder reality show? Sure, why not. Polished ads were replaced by real human content that put real humans forward.

Gymshark is the multiplier effect of this approach taken to its logical conclusion. Think about what goes into making Nike and Adidas work. It’s not just the mental market share built off decades of advertising, it’s the logistical machine. Tonnes of merchandise in premium retail fronts on prime real estate the world over. The counter move for a startup is to lean into the fact that you’re not a global mega-corp. Sponsor relatable fitness YouTubers. Sell online, because that’s where real people shop. Build a massive, agile digital community grounded in gym-floor authenticity. You know what it feels like to swipe in after a long day at work in a way that ad execs on multi six-figure salaries with vested stock in legacy sports brands can’t necessarily relate to.

The Wheel Keeps Turning

Here’s one more thing to consider. Many of today’s Goliaths started out as Davids.

Airbnb and Netflix, once your prototypical California tech startups, are now established billion-dollar public companies. The same innovations that position a challenger brand can become established standards ready to be subverted by the next wave.

So keep thinking within this framework even as your company grows. Because there will always be new angles opening up for challenger brands to approach their incumbents.