The brand pivot: Why Surprising Consumers Can Prove Positively Effective
From a subtle, yet distinctive, change to a complete overhaul - brand shake-ups serve many roles
15 January 2025
Brand pivots are the makeover shows of advertising – they can be divisive but they inspire a wide audience to debate whether the new look and direction is right or a complete faux pas. Everyone has an opinion.
There have been several recent examples of legacy brands ringing the changes; Tesco’s ICONS billboard, Scottish Widows ditching its mascot after 40 years or the infamous Jaguar rebrand debate.
Recently UK marketers have had to navigate the cost-of-living crisis, the need for businesses to evolve after the pandemic while keeping up with new generational trends. But as they craft their brand-building strategies, marketers must navigate a fine line between revitalising tired assets and losing their way altogether. If they don't, they risk declining sales.
Consequently, the brand pivot endures despite recent research from System1 and the IPA looking at 56 brands across 44 categories over six years. It has been estimated that inconsistency could cost brands nearly £3.5 billion over the next five years. For BBH executive creative director Felipe Serradourada Guimaraes, who worked on Tesco’s “Icons” billboard, the recent break with convention aimed to refocus the brand around food. The billboard switched up the letters of the brand’s name with corresponding food items and left consumers to fill in the gaps.
“We kind of stumbled on this idea that our logo is iconic and asked if there was a way of making food stand for the brand as much as we stand for the food,” he says.
The art of the micro-pivot
Guimaraes says Tesco achieved its primary goal of generating conversation and shifting the dial to focus on quality. “On the horizon we have a big focus on quality. That’s the mission of the brand: looking at how we can instil some confidence into the public about the quality of Tesco food,” he explains.
Guimaraes acknowledges that one of the beauties of working on a major account such as Tesco, is “much more license” to play with brand assets. “The white background with the blue chevrons are iconic and we have one of the most famous brand lines ever to exist in “every little helps”. Just being able to have those little signifiers allows you to have much more confidence in how you play with a brand,” he says.
“The food stands really confidently,” Guimaraes adds. He believes that it works but admits that placing grocery products without plates seems unconventional. “There was a big leap of confidence from the client to be able to allow us to present good quality food without cutlery and without all of the contractions”.
Guimaraes explains that a lot of the work’s success was centred on choosing the right moment and based around feel: “A lot of BBH’s best work is because we often show up knowing the work is right for the brand and what we’re doing. The level of debate we got was pleasantly surprising. We got a sense that people were yearning for really simple bold work, and I think that’s kind of what we did.”
"Don't let off fireworks, build a bonfire"
Chris Birch, executive creative director, VCCP
Guimaraes also notes that brands may need to micro-pivot when things aren’t going as planned or they need to re-focus - for Tesco this was associated with shifting the costs of Covid-19 and moving on from a moment where convenience above all else was important.
Similarly, Cadbury wanted to refocus on its core principle of generosity for its 200th anniversary. Spearheaded by VCCP, the campaign’s strategy revitalised a much-loved campaign entitled 'Mum’s Birthday', employing artificial intelligence (AI) to allow users to place themselves within a vintage Cadbury poster and a print iteration of the Cadbury logo with the number 200 contained within it.
VCCP executive creative director Chris Birch, says: “It gave us this lens where we could reflect on the changes that have taken place in the country over the last 200 years – political, social, technological. But we could anchor it all on this little shop that has remained constant and also the consistency of Cadbury throughout the years.”
The other half of the VCCP executive creative duo, Johnny Parker, adds that the move was about providing the public with a reason to care about the brand. “Don’t let off fireworks, build a bonfire – they last longer and they make everyone feel warm,” he continues.
System1’s research supports this notion. It uncovered a trend known as “compound creativity” which showed that brands ranked as the most consistent also achieved an increased rate of growth in star rating over five years (a 1.8 improvement in star ranking, which is measured out of five, for the most consistent brands, versus 1.1 for somewhat consistent brands and 0.8 for the least consistent brands) highlighting that consistency pays off in the long run.
A leap of faith: navigating the brand shake-up
Nevertheless, the ability to conduct a bold and noise-generating brand shake-up is crucial when a business is suffering. Jaguar’s recent rebrand saw the car manufacturer drop its heritage look and slogan in favour of a new “copy nothing” tagline. With sales of the classic car falling from just over 180,000 a year in 2018 to around 67,000 in 2023 the firm had a major problem on its hands which it needed to fix fast.
After the big announcement at the end of last year it was criticised by industry insiders and marketing experts for prioritising short term traction and losing touch with its heritage altogether. But despite the flack Jaguar has received, Guimaraes argues that its perception problem was so great that it ‘needed changing overnight”. “That’s when brands do need to pivot because just doing the same thing over and over again isn’t going to get them there,” he continues.
Yorkshire Tea strategy and innovation director Dom Dwight who helped the tea firm become the UK’s leading tea brand in 2019, three years after taking up the marketing director role in 2016 says he is “wary” of invoking "the Jaguar word" but says the “abrupt change” feels like “an epic move” whether it’s for better or worse, deliberate or not.
Dwight has had to take his own fair share of bold plunges. He admits that when the brand’s agency of record Lucky Generals suggested that Yorkshire Tea should embrace celebrities, the team felt uncomfortable to do so. “We took a leap of faith and it worked,” he adds. The brand famously tapped into Olympic triathlon legends Alistair and Johnny Brownlee who both herald from Yorkshire in 2017, after they featured in the Rio 2016 Olympics.
Dwight notes that any time the business has pivoted it has maintained a link to its “proper” tagline and Yorkshire identity to the extent that it’s become a welcome weight to bear. “Sometimes we feel we’ve gradually become almost the poster child of Yorkshire so we have this slightly terrifying responsibility to not let the county down,” he says.
Having worked at Yorkshire Tea owner Bettys and Taylors for over 16 years, Dwight believes in building long tenures at the business and the relationship with its agencies (Yorkshire Tea has worked with Goodstuff and Lucky Generals since 2016.) He has helped it balance a need to shapeshift while retaining consistency. “I think there’s a healthy tension between us pushing to make sure the ad is as entertaining as possible and [that it] is going to have as much cut through as it can,” he says.
"We've gradually become almost the poster child of Yorkshire so we have this slightly terrifying responsibility not to let the county down"
Dom Dwight, strategy and innovation director, Yorkshire Tea
The importance of a consistent team is also noted in System1’s “Compound Creativity” report. The effectiveness rating agency has a set of metrics out of five: its star rating predicts the ability of an ad to create future demand based on how consumers react after seeing it. Its spike rating measures the predictive ability of an ad to capture in-market audiences in the short term based on the overall emotional reaction to advertising. Finally, its fluency rating measures distinctiveness and recognition.
Based on its rankings System1 found that brands that change creative agencies more often have a lower star rating, correlating with a loss of ad distinctiveness. Senior vice president Andrew Tindall says marketers and agencies can feel the need to make a big impact immediately but before doing so should ask the following questions: "Are there signs we need to change? Are you seeing rapid market share decline? Has there been stagnation in the category for years? Otherwise it's best to look at what can be kept consistent".
The power of a satisfying slurp
When they do embark on a new direction, brands can easily lose track leading them to revisit more successful days gone by. Speaking at Most Contagious festival last year, Adam&EveDDB planning director Liora Ingram explains that when the agency’s client Pot Noodle was once in dire need of a shake-up. Having been around since 1977, it had become something of a pariah. At first the brand didn’t get it right: in the era of purpose it tried to create an identity centred around the idea that Pot Noodle gives you time to pursue your goals. Alongisde the agency, the Unilever-owned brand created campaigns featuring the tagline “Less time cooking, more time chasing your dreams”.
It followed this strategy by creating an Asian Street Style range. However, it soon discovered that this market was already well-served: “We were masquerading as a career coach, and when it came to our product, we were trying to play the competitors at that end game,” Ingram says.
In response, the Adam&EveDDB team had an “aha” moment when they spoke directly to Pot Noodle fans to find out what people most loved about the brand. The responses highlighted a simple affection for the ritual of opening a pot and then tucking in.
This led to the creation of the “Nothing Satisfies Like A Pot Noodle” brand platform – which featured a woman slurping for 20 seconds. Some loved the advert but it also received a lot of hate. Catering to those with a case of misophonia, Pot Noodle then created a range of alternative adverts with more bearable sound effects and issued a public apology. The move away from aspirational messaging helped the brand reassert its core message that the product can satisfy hungry consumers. This helped Pot Noodle towards a 50 per cent year on year sales rise and renewed virality on TikTok.
This indicates that brand revamps are an important part of any long-running business’s story and serves multiple purposes from bringing a legacy brand back into the public’s attention to shaking up brands that are past their heyday.
As brands evolve they may need to ride those waves to retain relevancy but they must also not lose touch with what made the product successful in the first place. As Guimaraes puts it: “You should be writing the next chapter, not a different book”.