We had a client who shall remain nameless, who waited too long. As a last gasp, they contacted us for a rebrand, but they’d lost touch with their audience (and any new ones) long ago. Their products weren’t solving anyone’s problems, and their innovation pipeline was full of category copycats. The brand was talking to a bygone era. We did the rebrand; it even won awards. The company shuttered within two years.
As a creative, those big-reveal rebrands are seen as the best projects. Selfishly, the agency gets the grand unveiling of all the changes they made and how it’s “better” and “thoughtful.” A case study shows off the bells and whistles, some of which never get produced or are barely used day to day. These projects are great for an agency, but not entirely successful for the client. Usually, a massive 180 indicates the brand stopped evolving somewhere along the way or avoided evolving altogether. They have to take one big swing and hope to find relevance
(most aren’t as successful as Mother to Poppi).
We strive to be a better creative partner. We have created and will always create great work, but the changes we make to a brand have to respond to what’s changing in culture, the category, and the business itself. Ultimately, it's our responsibility to create success for the company.
This is an all-too-common pattern. A brand creates a massive new monument of their brand over months or even years, shouts from the rooftops, “Hey, we’ve changed, isn’t it great!” inviting eyeballs, only to go quiet, hoping it succeeds in market…then scrambling once the scrutiny, the feedback, and the feels roll in. Cracker Barrel
dropped its new logo about a week after unveiling it in 2025. Was the backlash driven by bots? Probably. But do they wish they’d approached change a bit differently? Absolutely.
It happens to brands at every age:
• A new brand launches with little planned after day one.
• A challenger brand moves into a new aisle and leaves its core belief behind because a retailer asks.
• A heritage brand rushes to rebrand based on slumping sales and puts decades of equity at risk.
These moments in themselves are fine; hell, they sometimes succeed. The trouble comes when a brand treats these as one-off events and waits until change becomes an emergency. They haven’t continually assessed the changes happening around the brand and how to capitalize on them preemptively. A brand needs to know where change is happening and how to act on it.
There’s the old saying that
the only constant is change. A Danone exec at
Groceryshop gave the updated version…“the only constant is insanely f*cking rapid change.” Change happens to everyone and therefore every brand…whether or not you have planned for it. So, you either master change or accept chaos. When we change on purpose, adapting becomes a habit instead of an emergency.
Brands are built every day. Our research, processes, and capabilities make small and deliberate adjustments to our clients’ brands over time; that’s how you master change. We root ourselves in data and cultural insights, where we evolve strategy, messaging, identity, and activations. These actions address change where it is needed most to stay relevant and successful.
Dunkin’ dropped “Donuts” from its name in 2018 to match the coffee-first business it had already become. Doritos has
redesigned its logo again and again since 1964, but the triangle has stuck around since 1985.
We’ve worked this way with TaylorMade Golf for more than a decade. Every year, well ahead of the new season, we evolve their golf ball portfolio. It evolves to where the sport is going and always leads with TaylorMade’s signature technical performance. We will sometimes make larger changes, but mostly they are creative reintroductions to the consumer, enticing them to try the latest golf advancements. Since we’ve produced their golf ball packaging, the brand has
3x their market share in golf balls, going from 6% to 18%, and sales have grown 176%. The company
sold for $425 million in 2017, and in 2025 its owners were
reportedly asking $3.5 billion. Those are the types of results being constantly tapped into market and technology shifts can make, and the type of success we strive for in every relationship.
We call this way of working Brand Flux, our formula for growth through constant change. We define it with three components: Core, Culture, and Action.
• Core is the conviction at the heart of a brand, plus the equities people recognize it by. It’s the heart of the company that makes it differentiated and unmistakable.
• Culture is the environment a brand operates within, made up of the people who engage with it, work for it, and believe in it.
•
Action is how a brand shows up through strategic and creative execution, from impactful moments to sustained movements. This is how a brand stays relevant over time.
We’re in flux, too, always have been.
Moxie Sozo has spent more than 25 years watching brands go through change, and it pushed us to ask a simple question. Why do some brands thrive through change while others lose relevance? The ones that struggled rarely lacked talent or money. They struggled with change. When I started here as an
unpaid intern, we couldn’t do a fraction of what our amazing team executes today. The agency changed a little at a time, adding what our clients actually need. We still maintain our Core: grit, determination married with intelligence, creativity.
A brand might launch once, but it’s built every day. And handling change starts with knowing what your brand should never change.
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