There’s nothing worse than an irrelevant solution.
You have an incredible product/service that solves a problem better than most, but the way your business shows up in the world has little relevance to those seeking it.
As customers, the solution is there, but we can’t see it. We fly past it too quickly to take the time to understand whether it solves our problem. We judge and assume it's not for us. It doesn’t sound, look, or feel like what we’re seeking. There’s no intrigue or gravitational pull to make us stop. The decision has been made. It’s irrelevant.
Bit dramatic, but that’s what happens when great ideas are wrapped in irrelevance and thrown into the world with no direction.
While that’s a nightmare way to start and launch a new business, what might be worse is established companies ending up in a similar position via the slowest slippery slide you can imagine (negative slippery), and they don’t even know they’re on it. One day, you find yourself scooching your way down, stretching your legs, gripping the slide, tucking your knees, working harder than you ever have, only to move in the direction you’re trying so hard not to go.
Next to your friction-filled slide to irrelevancy, there’s an escalator going up. You can’t see the top, but it’s continuously breaking through glass ceilings, and you can hear the echoes of, ‘We’re exceeding our potential. Life is amazing’.
More dramatics, and a touch heavy on the slide metaphor. But that’s the position so many founders find themselves in when what used to work no longer cuts it.
They had a great idea, backed themselves, fought for funding (from family to investors), and went through the complete shitshow of developing a product.
Now, the business has grown, the product is better, the customers are more sophisticated, and the ambition has expanded. But the brand hasn’t kept up. It’s lagged behind, fallen out of touch, and remains closer to where it was created than to where the business is headed.
That’s brand atrophy: the gradual loss of a brand’s ability to accurately represent the business it has become.
So, how do you avoid shitting the bed when you’ve fallen asleep on brand? First, we need to chat about what precedes the need for some fresh sheets.
How Brands Atrophy
Brand Complacency
Originally, brand complacency was going to be the topic of this article. But on reflection, complacency is only half the story.
Brand complacency is the behaviour of not tending to your brand. Brand atrophy is the consequence of complacency.
While brand complacency can bleed through from pure neglect, it also occurs when everything in the business becomes more chaotic than usual. When you’re stretched that extra inch, beyond what’s felt barely manageable but comfortable enough.
Understandably, your focus is on what matters in the moment (likely making money or ensuring the thing that makes you money is ready and available to make said moolah). In these moments of tunnel vision, brand and marketing naturally take a back seat (if we’re being cliché, it’s when the marketing budget/team might get the snip).
Over time, those decisions start to form the habit of brand complacency and shape the pattern that follows.
Complacency leads to inconsistency, and inconsistency leads to uncertainty.
Bred from a lack of conviction and trust, most would agree that uncertainty about your brand is a sinful state to place customers in. But if we look past the obvious, one of the more overlooked costs of complacency is bubbling up within your team.
Everyone knows what the product or service does. Hopefully, they know what it does better than your competitors. But there’s no longer a shared understanding of why your customer should care (the strategic insight that helps inferior options beat superior solutions).
What starts as confusion about what’s on-brand (surface-level cost) deepens into a total misalignment on your positioning, perspective, and promise. When teams start making decisions that pull brand and business in different directions, your brand shifts from an asset to a liability. Often reaching a point where you’re saying a whole lot of nothing to a whole lot of no one (which is a whole lot of what’s the point).
The good news about complacency is that it’s within your control. The damage starts from the inside (team/culture) before it’s felt outside (your customers/market). Once you have shared understanding and alignment, it’s all standards and systems. Raise both and empower your team with clear direction and an idea to rally around.
This is easier said than done, but I've included some questions below to help assess where your internal alignment stands (see point 4 below).
Growth Induced Atrophy
Sometimes it’s less about a complete lack of attention to the brand and more about what all business owners want: growth (maybe better cash flow too).
But in this context, we’re looking beyond revenue growth, even beyond product range and category expansion (though this is important to note later). Instead, focusing on the more abstract or hidden forms of growth, such as time in market, increased competition, and, most importantly, evolving customer expectations.
These are some of the areas that fly under the radar if you don’t actively stay engaged with your market and brand. New competitors are the easiest to clock, but it’s usually not until they’re somewhat embedded in your market that you take notice. One day they pop up on your feed, you think ‘fuck, they don’t look half bad’, and then the sweaty self-doubt spiral starts to spin and suck you in.
While acknowledging that each industry has its nuances, put simply: if your customers’ expectations shift and you don’t notice or adapt, you risk losing them along with market share.
Your product/offer is still the solution they seek, but you no longer meet their needs/wants/standards. These expectations aren’t logical. They’re often emotional, usually shaped by status. While the product serves the rational need, the brand serves the emotional need. Brand confirms their identity or who they hope to become by choosing you. If you feel like your brand has slipped here, don’t be hard on yourself—it’s one of the hardest aspects of brand building (but also kind of the whole point).
That’s why new product features, sharper offers, or better design don’t make a difference in the long run. The issue is rooted in brand, and brand is illogical, emotional, and human.
Sometimes all it takes is time, and without a pulse check on how you stack up within your market, you might find yourself squeaking your way down the slide of irrelevancy.
Emerging vs Established Brands
While brand complacency and atrophy don’t discriminate between B2B and B2C sectors, it’s worth noting how they play out differently for emerging and established brands.
If you’re an emerging brand, you’re naturally more fragile. If your brand starts to drift early, customers move quickly because there’s little equity or memory holding them. You don’t have the legacy strength to cushion the early effects of misalignment.
For established brands, you have a buffer of trust and habit. You can think of brand atrophy as a slower, more dangerous leak. You can coast, cashing in your equity, until one day you make a flat-earther's dream come true and coast off the edge of your brand world.
So, let’s sense-check where you’re at.
Reigniting Relevance
First off, don’t jump to a rebrand. Running a brand studio, you might think that’s the whole point of this article. Maybe a little. But it’s important to recognise the difference between irrelevance and customers having no idea you exist.
If your business is performing well (positive trends across sales, acquisitions, repeat purchase and referral), your brand positioning is clear, and your identity is cohesive and consistent across touchpoints and channels, then you’re likely looking at an awareness problem. Good news, you’re most of the way there. Bad news, no one knows about you.
On the other hand, if sales are down, performance marketing owns you, and you’re discounting out of desperation, then it might be time to consider a bigger change.
I won’t touch on what makes a successful rebrand here, but I will acknowledge it can feel risky. It’s a spicy move, especially for the person pushing it. Even if they know something needs to change, it doesn’t make it any easier to carry the weight of that decision.
That said, a rebrand can be great when the brand is fully off the tracks, and you want to fast-track a positive shift in brand perception, gain clarity, and align the brand with your business strategy, team/stakeholders, and customers.
So before you go running to your new favourite brand studio (👀), it’s important to have an honest look under the hood.
It’s rough to acknowledge that how your business shows up in the world has slipped. Maybe embarrassment has been hitting the gym at the back of your mind, getting bigger and stronger, and it’s finally flexed its shame-filled muscles enough for you to feel the squeeze of required change. The sooner you embrace that something needs to happen, the sooner you can make your competitors sweat (and who doesn’t love that).
Atrophy Audit
This isn’t something you pass or fail. It’s a way to discover where the distance between your business and your brand has grown, and where to focus your attention and effort to close it. If you can, involve your team, key customers, and trusted partners. And my number one tip: be brutally honest.
Business Performance
Is your brand creating positive or negative momentum?Market Relevance
Does the brand still connect with the current market?Perception & Reputation
Is the market seeing what you intend it to see?Internal Alignment
Does everyone in the team know what you stand for?Brand Expression
Is your brand experience and expression consistent and effective?Growth & Potential
Can your brand help you exceed your business ambition?
1. Business & Performance
Is your brand creating positive or negative momentum?
Let’s start with the business. Your numbers won’t tell the whole story, but they can reveal when the business is starting to lose momentum. Healthy brands have a positive impact on commercial traction, so we want to look for negative changes in key areas (sales, acquisition, retention, referrals, average order value, and promotional activity).
Have sales stalled or is revenue down (outside normal year-on-year trends)?
Has customer acquisition become harder or more expensive?
Are repeat purchases, referrals, or average order value down?
Are you discounting or running promotional offers more frequently?
Why it matters: When a solid product and consistent marketing no longer translate into sustained performance, your brand might be what's weighing down effort and making it harder for customers to choose, trust, remember, or dish out their hard-earned cash for you.
2. Market Relevance
Does the brand still connect with the current market?
Unfortunately, customers and categories don’t stand still. The people you serve today may be different from the people you started with. Their expectations, along with category standards, may have shifted along the way.
Who was your original true fan (the ideal customer you built everything for), and who is your most valuable customer today?
How different are those audiences in their needs, sophistication, and expectations?
Is your brand in touch with your current customers’ world, aspirations, and category standards?
Are there new cultural or category expectations that your brand under-communicates or has no affiliation with?
Does your brand have a clear perspective or point of view for customers to align with?
Why this matters: As we touched on, a brand can remain internally clear and still become externally irrelevant. If your visual and verbal communication don’t reflect the new reality of your market’s expectations, the brand starts attracting the wrong people, deflecting the right people, or working harder for nearly no attention at all.
3. Perception & Reputation
Is the market seeing what you intend it to see?
‘Your brand is not what you say it is, it’s what they say it is.’ — Marty Neumeier
Marty has one of the best summaries of how brand is defined. While you may have clear intentions about how you want to show up, it’s your customers and the wider market that have the final say on what they actually believe about you.
Does your brand align with the way customers describe you?
Does their description match the attributes you intended to own?
Are you finding recurring objections or associations that keep appearing (confusing, expensive, risky, small, or dated)?
Has the brand accumulated associations that once helped but now limit growth (legacy, boutique, only for [highly specific market segment])?
Why this matters: If perception has drifted from the intended reality, you may be making decisions based on the brand you think you have rather than the one people actually experience. Confusion, objections, and false associations compound over time, leaving a market holding on to an outdated or weaker version of your brand.
4. Internal Alignment
Does everyone in the team know what you stand for?
Your team should share the same understanding of why the brand exists and how it shows up. It should help them make decisions, empowering them to respond and act with confidence, particularly in new situations or environments.
Chat with your team across all areas and levels, and see whether they share the same understanding of who you are, who you’re for, and why your customer should care.
Can everyone on your team accurately articulate your positioning?
Is everyone as clear on who you’re not for as they are on your ideal customer?
Does your team reference or use brand behaviours as a guide for decision-making?
Why this matters: If the team can’t articulate or use the brand, customers experience that confusion externally. People start to fill the gaps with their own version or best guess at what the brand would do. Inconsistent decisions create internal and external confusion, and the business slowly stops feeling like one coherent company.
Maybe obvious, but important note to add: the benefits of effective branding aren’t just felt by customers. A clear, intentional brand can also give employees a stronger sense of belonging, identity, and belief in the business they’re helping to grow. This sentiment extends to attracting super smart talent, which can drastically improve your business's chance of success. Most businesses would be nothing without the people that helped shape and lift them up. Give them something to connect with and be proud of.
5. Brand Expression
Is your brand experience and expression consistent and effective?
Surface-level snap judgments dictate whether people engage or move on. Strategy and design go hand in hand, but even a strategically sound brand can lose strength and cut through from poor or inconsistent expression.
Does your brand system support how the business operates today?
Is there a consistent, recognisable visual and verbal identity across your product, website, sales materials, socials, events, and customer experience?
Do all areas of your business (sales, marketing, product, support, leadership) sound and act like the same company?
Why it matters: Inconsistency makes a brand harder to recognise, understand, and trust. Smart, consistent brand building improves recognition, earns mental availability (brand salience), and helps you stay front of mind when a purchasing decision is made. How you express your brand comes down to standards and systems. Make sure your team has the resources to consistently deliver the standard your business deserves, and your customers expect.
6. Growth & Potential
Can your brand help you exceed your business ambition?
Brands should be designed for where the business is going, not where it began. Make an honest call on whether it has the clarity, credibility, flexibility, and pull to support new products, higher prices, evolving audiences, and the next stage of growth.
Has the business changed or expanded (model, product range, offer, ambition, audience, channel, or maturity) without any intentional adjustment to the brand?
Does your current pricing accurately reflect your quality and value? Could your brand command a higher price point?
Could your current brand take you into the next market, segment or stage of growth? Does it have the flexibility for future offerings and expansion?
If a competitor launched tomorrow with a similar product and aesthetic, would you feel threatened?
Can your brand credibly compete with the business you most admire or envy?
Why it matters: I started by saying there’s nothing worse than an irrelevant solution. What’s nearly equal to that is a brand that can’t match the ambition of the business. So many incredible founders and products have been limited by poor brands. What should be an asset can be a liability. Limiting expansion, weakening consumer and team confidence, and leaving room for sharper competitors to own the future you’re working toward.
Final Note
A lot of this boils down to how much you trust your brand.
I’m a big believer that brands are a growth asset. An asset that drives desire in customers, evokes envy in competitors, and most importantly, influences commercial success and viability. If your brand does that, congratulations! Thanks for taking the time to read this in between popping bottles, throwing cash in the air, and ruminating on how great life is.
If you’re on the fence, think of it this way: if you had a scary big budget for a brand awareness campaign, would you let it rip? If you feel hesitant, it might be time to realign the foundations, refresh the identity, and maximise your brand’s strength.
Running a business is too hard to have your brand working against you. Give the audit a crack this week, and ask yourself, ‘Does our brand accurately represent the business we want to become?’
Thanks For Reading
Hi, I’m Jack O’Sullivan. I’m trying to get some ideas out of the notes app while running Melbourne-based brand studio Side By Side Studio.
If you found this helpful or think it’s a load of shit, please let me know.
If you liked what you read, please share it with people building exciting things (happy for you to share it with those building boring things too—maybe we can help make them a little more sexy and exciting).
Reach out to hello@sidebyside.studio to get in touch.