Sometimes the best way to move forwards is to take a long, hard look backwards

Neophilia. A fancy word with a simple meaning: we humans are obsessed with shiny, new things. The latest and greatest. The cutting edge. The allure of new is hard to resist. It is the agent of change and progress. The enemy of monotony.

New marketing directors like new agencies and new campaign platforms. New is an opportunity to make a mark. To press reset and leave a legacy. But could this desire for a personal legacy actually put a brand’s true legacy at risk? Is new actually always better?

In the endless quest for novelty, we risk leaving behind the very things that made people fall in love with a brand in the first place. Products, names and even logos are retired. Visions and purposes are redrafted over and over to better fit the current zeitgeist. Growth audiences are relentlessly pursued at the expense of the core. In the most extreme cases, we’re left with a husk of a brand that owes very little to its origins.

What if instead, we built and rebuilt brands upon the foundations from which they were born?

At VCCP, we went back to Bournville for Cadbury, grounding our work in the Quaker roots of generosity that shaped the brand from the very beginning. With Co-op, we focused on the brand’s unique ownership and desire to enhance communities with our ‘Owned by you. Right by you.’ platform launched last year.

This is not to say that every brand must blindly cling to their original DNA in every instance. Tastes shift, new competitors emerge and culture moves on. But more often than not, when a well-known brand recedes from the forefront, it’s accompanied by a strong sense that something in that DNA has been left behind. When Kodak eschewed digital photography (despite essentially inventing it) in the 90s, were they staying true to their founder’s drive to make photography “as convenient as the pencil”? In a short matter of years, the drive that up to that point had successfully shaped their brand for decades seemed to have been entirely forgotten.

Revisiting a brand’s core principles is different to betting purely on nostalgia. Whilst the latter may be tempting and is certainly popular, it is rare that an old ad or mascot comprises the genuine essence of a brand (and if it truly does, it seems unlikely that it will have been entirely cast aside in the first place). We’re talking here about the core idea upon which the brand was founded. The one that sets that brand apart from its competitors. At its best, this is a ‘truth’ or vision that sits at the very heart of a brand. Consider the ways that Nike’s “If you have a body, you are an athlete.” has shaped so much of their brand over the past few decades.

Recently, we launched O2’s most significant new platform since its inception, ‘Essential for Living’. A platform grounded in the founding vision the brand was built around when we helped launch it in 2002 - that the services O2 provides are as essential to living as oxygen is to breathing. This vision gave the brand its name, its logo and core distinctive brand assets like the bubbles that are still alive and well today.

Thankfully, this founding vision was also eerily prescient. When gathering insights to launch O2 in 2002, a focus group participant told us that they’d rather lose their wallet and keys than their phone - a notion that must have seemed fairly radical five years before the dawn of the iPhone. Fast forward to recent history though and a similar study reveals that people would rather be separated from their significant other for a month than from their smartphone over that same time period. When you consider the fact that almost every aspect of the lives its customers lead in 2025 is enabled or enhanced by the services O2 provides, you can start to see why those spouses were spurned. In an age where everything from unlocking Lime bikes to working out which waterfront restaurant does the best seafood marinara is all powered by your phone, Essential For Living really does ring true.

When brands need to evolve, you should start by re-examining their DNA. Taking the very best of that original source code, splicing it with the current cultural context and giving yourself the double sucker punch of timeless relevance and current cultural resonance. By focusing on what a brand means in peoples’ lives and understanding that in the context of their current needs and desires, you should end up with something very powerful indeed. To put it another way, if you want to move forwards, sometimes the best starting point is to look backwards.