Brand strategy in 2026: why reinvention isn’t the answer.
2026 is not the year to reinvent your brand or change direction every six months.
Yet that’s exactly what 2025 delivered:
Brand redesigns
New logos
Inconsistent tone of voice
Canva templated brand identities
Chasing Gen Z
Campaigns chasing the trend of the month
And, quietly, brands sanding off the very things that once made them recognisable.
Somewhere along the way, consistency became confused with complacency and branding became trendy.
The uncomfortable truth about strong brands
The brands that will outperform in 2026 won’t be the busiest or the loudest. They’ll be the ones that are clear, familiar and easy to recognise.
Strong brands win because they:
Stay anchored to a clear positioning
Have a clear and defined target market
Invest in distinctive brand assets (not just “nice design”)
Build memory structures over time
Optimise for mental availability, not momentary attention
None of this is new thinking.
It has simply become unfashionable in an environment obsessed with speed, clicks, novelty and short-term results.
Why familiarity wins
The work of Byron Sharp reminds us of an uncomfortable reality: most people think and care very little about the brands they buy and even less about the ones they don’t.
Which is exactly why familiarity wins.
When decisions are low-involvement, memory does the heavy lifting.
Brands that feel known, easy and mentally available are chosen. Those shouting about their latest reinvention may drive short-term gains, but consumers’ brains will quickly shortcut back to what feels familiar.
The real risk heading into 2026
The biggest risk for brands right now isn’t standing still.
It’s blending in.
As I touched on in a previous post about the Crisis in brand marketing, when everyone:
Chases a generic target market
Uses the same visual cues
Sounds equally “authentic”
Borrows the same cultural references
Brands don’t look modern. They look interchangeable.
This is the quiet danger of trend-led brand strategy: it erodes distinctiveness while convincing teams they’re being progressive (or simply flattering their own egos).
This is where brand strategy earns its keep
Brand strategy isn’t about chasing novelty. It’s about deciding what never changes and executing it relentlessly.
As Mark Ritson puts it:
“The simplest thing you can do to make marketing more effective is to resist change, and take advantage of the associations your brand has built up over time.”
The questions brand leaders should be asking in 2026
If you’re planning for the year ahead, ask yourself:
What assets are we actually building memory around?
What would a shopper recognise with half a second of attention?
And what are we changing out of boredom rather than strategy?
Trends will come and go.
Your role in 2026 isn’t to chase them it is to be the brand guardian, protecting the long-term build of awareness, memory and meaning.