A strategist I used to sit across from at my old agency once built a forty page deck arguing that a client's positioning was fundamentally broken. It was not broken. I had written it three years earlier and it was still doing exactly what we had asked it to do. But the deck was beautiful, the diagnosis was dramatic, and by December he had a title bump.
I have thought about that deck every fall since, because fall is when this industry starts assembling the case for its own impact. Self evaluations are open. Planning decks are due. Somewhere in your company a very good strategist is staring at a brand that is working fine and realizing there is no version of the form where you write, in the box marked accomplishments, that you left it alone.
So they find something. There is always something.
Most brand overhauls are not a response to a strategy problem, they are a response to a career problem, and the two look identical in a deck.
Here is the part that gets lost. The incentive structure inside brand teams rewards diagnosis, not stewardship. Diagnosis is legible. Diagnosis produces artifacts: a new architecture, a refreshed platform, a manifesto video with a piano in it. Stewardship produces a brand that is one year more familiar than it was, which is genuinely among the most valuable things a brand can be and is completely impossible to put on a slide.
Gap learned this in 2010, and the lesson cost them a week of internet ridicule and a full retreat to the logo they already had. Tropicana learned it in 2009 and gave back tens of millions in sales before restoring the carton with the orange and the straw. In both cases the old work was not failing. It was simply old, and being old had been mistaken for being tired by people whose job it was to have an opinion.
Patagonia is the counterexample everyone cites and almost nobody copies, because the interesting thing about Patagonia is not the values, it is the restraint. They have run essentially the same argument for decades. Somebody there has to keep saying no to the refresh.
What I ask now, when a team brings me a rebuild, is a boring question: what is the evidence this is broken, that is not simply evidence that we are bored with it? Boredom is real. Internal boredom arrives roughly four years before customer boredom, and confusing the two is the most expensive mistake in this job.
Internal boredom arrives roughly four years before customer boredom, and confusing the two is the most expensive mistake in this job.
Truffles has slept in the same spot on the same chair since 2021. Barnaby has never once suggested she reposition. There is a career lesson in there that neither of them will be recognized for.