There was a Superman on an endcap at the Fred Meyer on Hawthorne on Sunday, and another one on a bag of tortilla chips two aisles over. Neither of them was the Superman I grew up with. Both of them registered instantly, from six feet away, at a bad angle, under fluorescent light. I did not have to read a single word to know what I was looking at.
James Gunn's film opened six days ago as a full reset of the DC slate. Not a sequel, not a continuation. A restart of a thing that had already been restarted, with a new cast, a new continuity, and a licensing push wide enough to reach the snack aisle.
By every rule we hand clients, this should have gone badly.
We tell brands that consistency is the asset. That every reset burns equity. That audiences punish you for changing the story out from under them. Then a character pushing ninety gets his fourth origin in three decades and people buy the ticket anyway.
Consistency is not what makes an old brand durable. Recognizability is, and those two things are not the same asset.
What actually survives a DC reboot is very small. A silhouette. Red and blue. The posture, arms down, chin up. One moral premise a child can state in a sentence. That is the entire load-bearing structure. Everything else, the costume, the tone, the timeline, the actor, has been swapped repeatedly without the brand losing a step.
Compare that to the brands that genuinely break. They rarely break from changing too much. They break from changing the one thing nobody was allowed to touch. Lego nearly died diversifying into everything and recovered by returning to the brick. Oatly can print a chaotic essay on the side of a carton precisely because the carton is unmistakable first. Salt & Straw adds a new flavor every month and has never once made you wonder what store you are standing in.
Here is the part that gets lost in the brand architecture deck. Most companies have the ratio inverted. They defend the changeable layer, the taglines, the campaign platforms, the exact blue of the button, with enormous ceremony, while the actual core, what the company is for, drifts a little every planning cycle. Then they are surprised when a refresh feels like a betrayal.
They break from changing the one thing nobody was allowed to touch.
The exercise I would run this week is unglamorous. List every element of your brand, then sort it into two columns: things a stranger could identify you by in one second, and everything else. Look honestly at which column the last three years of work went into.
Truffles and Barnaby have absorbed four apartments, two couches, and one regrettable automatic feeder. The food bowl has never moved. That is the whole theory.