The greatest threat facing most brands today isn’t a lack of differentiation or distinctiveness. It’s a loss of relevance.
In previous articles, we’ve explored the importance of differentiation and distinctiveness in building strong brands. Differentiation is about occupying a unique and relevant place in customers’ minds, while distinctiveness helps people quickly recognise and recall a brand. Both are essential, but they only create value if customers continue to care about them.
Customer expectations, behaviours and priorities are constantly evolving. As a result, brands can find themselves continuing to promote strengths that once mattered deeply but are now taken for granted, overlooked or no longer valued. In a world of constant change, losing relevance is often a far greater threat than a lack of differentiation or distinctiveness.
Relevance is not a destination
Brand strategy often treats relevance as an outcome to be achieved rather than an advantage that must be continually earned.
Organisations invest in customer research, identify unmet needs, develop compelling propositions and establish positioning strategies designed to create competitive advantage. Once embedded, these strategies often become the foundation for years of brand-building activity.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach. The problem arises when relevance is treated as a fixed outcome rather than an ongoing challenge.
Expectations evolve. Behaviours shift. New technologies create new possibilities. Economic and social factors reshape priorities.
A brand can therefore remain consistent while becoming progressively less important to the customers it serves.
This is how irrelevance usually occurs. Not through dramatic failure or strategic misjudgement, but through a gradual divergence between what a brand continues to offer and what customers increasingly value.
The brand remains visible. It remains recognisable. It may even retain strong levels of awareness. Yet its influence on customer choice slowly diminishes.
The rising challenge of customer expectations
The pace at which customer expectations evolve has accelerated dramatically over the past decade.
Customers no longer assess brands solely against direct competitors. Their expectations are increasingly shaped by the best experiences they encounter anywhere. The convenience offered by Amazon, the user experience delivered by Apple, the personalisation provided by Netflix and the responsiveness enabled by Uber all contribute to a broader understanding of what good looks like.
The standards that define relevance are no longer set solely within categories. They are shaped by experiences, technologies and behaviours that transcend traditional market boundaries.
What was exceptional yesterday quickly becomes expected today and inadequate tomorrow.
Banking provides a useful illustration. For decades, traditional banks competed on trust, scale, product breadth and branch networks. Those attributes still matter, but changing customer expectations created opportunities for a new generation of challengers.
Brands such as Monzo, Starling Bank and Revolut did not succeed because they reinvented banking. Current accounts, debit cards and payments already existed. Their success came from recognising that customers increasingly valued simplicity, transparency, real-time control and mobile-first experiences.
Features such as instant spending notifications, automated budgeting tools, app-based account management and frictionless onboarding reflected those changing priorities.
What began as a source of differentiation has since become an expectation across much of the industry. Spending notifications, card controls and mobile-first account management no longer feel innovative because customers now assume they should be there.
Why brands lose relevance
Most brands do not lose relevance because they stop investing in marketing or brand building.
More often, they lose relevance because they become increasingly focused on protecting existing advantages rather than identifying emerging ones.
The difficulty is that success rarely encourages self-examination. Organisations naturally become more confident in the choices that helped them grow, even when the conditions that made those choices effective are beginning to change.
While entirely rational, this behaviour can create blind spots. Internal confidence grows while external expectations continue to evolve. Over time, brands can become more focused on defending their position than questioning whether that position remains as relevant as it once was.
BlackBerry’s decline is often presented as a technology story. In reality, it was also a relevance story. The company continued to excel at the things that had made it successful: security, enterprise communication and physical keyboards. Meanwhile, customers increasingly valued something different.
People were becoming less interested in optimising email and more interested in carrying a connected digital ecosystem in their pocket.
BlackBerry did not suddenly become a worse product. It became better at solving problems that customers increasingly cared less about.
Its differentiation remained intact. Its relevance did not.
This helps explain why some highly differentiated brands struggle despite having clear positioning, and why some highly distinctive brands experience declining preference despite remaining instantly recognisable. The issue is not differentiation or distinctiveness. It is that the relevance underpinning both has weakened.
The role of differentiation and distinctiveness
None of this diminishes the importance of differentiation or distinctiveness.
Differentiation remains essential because customers need compelling reasons to choose one brand over another. Distinctiveness remains equally important because customers need to recognise and recall those choices when making buying decisions.
But both only create value when customers care about them.
If a point of difference stops mattering, it ceases to be an advantage. And distinctive assets attached to an offer that customers no longer value will have limited commercial impact, however memorable they may be.
The BlackBerry example highlights the relationship between all three concepts. The company remained differentiated and recognisable. What changed was the importance customers attached to those advantages.
That is why debates about differentiation versus distinctiveness can sometimes miss the point. Neither creates value in isolation.
The question that matters most
For brand leaders, the challenge is not simply to create relevance. It is to sustain it.
This requires viewing brand strategy not as a periodic exercise but as an ongoing process: continually understanding how customer needs, expectations and behaviours are evolving, and being willing to question whether the assumptions behind your positioning still hold.
Microsoft offers a useful contrast to BlackBerry. Rather than protecting the products and business models that made it successful, it repeatedly adapted, expanding from desktop software into cloud computing, subscription services and AI-powered tools.
What remained consistent was not the offer itself, but the organisation’s willingness to evolve alongside changing customer needs.
Staying relevant doesn’t mean abandoning what made a brand successful. It means continually testing whether the reasons customers choose you still hold true.
Because while differentiation helps customers understand why they should choose a brand, and distinctiveness helps them remember it, relevance determines whether either advantage matters at all.
Without relevance, differentiation and distinctiveness are simply noise.
