Your Brand Probably Changed This Year. Did Anyone Notice?
Updated: 2 days ago
A brand can change even if no one approves a new logo, launches a new website, or calls an all-hands meeting about “the next chapter.” Side note: I do love a dramatic company reveal.
What is less visible about brand changes is when the business adds a new product or service, or when the audience’s priorities shift as a result of significant market adjustments. The impacts of those examples to a brand begin to signal internally as different areas of the organization start telling slightly different versions of the story.
No one sets out to create brand drift.
Yet here we are anyway.
A brand audit helps us look at the brand we have, which may be different from the one we think we’re presenting, after a whole year of shifting priorities, new and advanced tools, new competitors, and evolving customer expectations.
In 2026, that drift is easier to accelerate. Gartner found that CMOs are allocating 15.3% of marketing budgets to AI, while only 30% say they’re ready to scale AI capabilities. The same survey found that 56% of CMOs say their marketing organization lacks the budget required to deliver its 2026 strategy, while 54% report insufficient resources. More teams are being asked to produce faster, with fewer resources, using similar tools to solve similar problems. Gartner
That’s a pretty efficient recipe for sameness.
Brand drift often seems normal as it happens.
Most brand problems don’t announce themselves as brand problems. Big surprise.
We see them in sales decks that tell slightly different stories depending on who made them (what marketer among us has never dealt with the dreaded Frankenstein presentation). Campaigns that use the proper colors but push out the wrong messaging. Homepage copy that still reflects last year’s business strategy. Expert content that sounds polished but could have come from any one of your competitors.
One of my favorites during the discovery phase of a brand audit project is when everyone says the brand is “clear,” but five staekholders describe it to me in five different ways.
Very stable. Very aligned. No notes.
A brand audit helps close the gap between what we intend to communicate and what people actually experience. That gap is important because brand shapes how people understand us, whether they trust us, what they remember, and whether they can explain the business to someone else without needing a whiteboard and emotional support.
Kantar’s BrandZ methodology gives us a practical way to think about brand health by looking at whether a brand is meaningful, different, and salient. In plain speak: does the brand meet a real need, does it stand apart, and does it come to mind when it should? Kantar connects those dimensions to demand, pricing power, and future demand, which makes the model useful beyond a brand workshop where everyone nods thoughtfully and then goes back to the same homepage copy.
Perspectives In Practice
Ask five people across the organization to answer these three questions without looking at the website, sales deck, or brand guide:
What do we want to be known for?
Who are we most valuable to right now?
Why would someone choose us over a reasonable alternative?
If the answers are wildly different, you don’t necessarily have a brand crisis, so please, no panicking. What you do have is a useful place to start.
Brand drift usually shows up as small inconsistencies before it shows up as a big problem.
Consistency is just one part of the job.
Brand audits are often reduced to consistency checks. With actual checklists (I've seen them).
Are we using the right logo? Are the colors correct? Does the voice sound similar across channels?
Did someone stretch the icon in PowerPoint again? Probably.
I know I just spent some time earlier in this post talking about the importance of consistent, and it is important. Consistency absolutely matters because it helps people recognize and trust the brand over time. But a static checklist for consistency on its own won’t tell us whether the brand is still relevant, differentiated, or useful. A brand can be consistent and still irrelevant. Polished and still strategically weak. Professional and still forgettable.
A good audit looks beyond whether the brand parts match. It also asks whether the brand still fits the business and whether it remains meaningful, different, salient, and trustworthy in the market.
That means asking better questions:
Has the offer changed?
Has the audience changed?
Has the market changed?
Has the buying process changed?
Has the organization’s real value outgrown what the current brand story can support?
Many brands get left behind when the business changes but the brand message stays frozen. Teams rely on familiar, approved language because it’s safe, available, and already in the folder labeled “final.” Meanwhile, the market keeps moving with absolutely no respect for our file naming conventions.
Which also brings me to one of the many hills where I have planted a flag, this one being that someone representing marketing should always be in the room where decisons are made about the business. But I digress. A topic for another time.
Perspectives In Practice
Pick one important page, deck, campaign, or sales asset and review it twice.
First, check consistency:
Does it look and sound like the brand?
Is the language aligned?
Are the visual elements right?
Then check relevance:
Does it reflect the current business?
Does it speak to the audience we need now?
Does it make our value easier to understand?
Does it say anything specific enough to matter?
The second review is usually where you find the good stuff. So, remember: twice is nice. We like consistency, and we also like relevancy.
Consistency helps people recognize the brand. Relevance helps them understand why it matters.
AI is making it easier for brands to look the same.
AI has made it much easier to create more content, and to do it faster. That’s useful. It’s also risky when the brand system underneath it is weak.
I've said it all over this website, and in every blog post, and I will probably bring it up until y'all recite it in your sleep.
Gartner reported in 2026 that marketing leaders expect AI-driven automation of marketing work to more than double, from 16% in 2026 to 36% by 2028. The same analysis warned that marketers who don’t use AI for differentiation risk blending into a “sea of sameness.”
So, yes: AI can help scale a strong brand. It can also amplify a generic one with terrifying efficiency.
A brand audit in 2026 should look at the AI layer:
What content is being created with AI?
Who is reviewing it?
What has changed in tone, claims, quality, accuracy, or originality?
Are the tools being guided by a real brand system?
Could a competitor publish the same thing with minimal changes?
I'm not pushing an anti-AI narrative. My concern during an audit will always be whether the brand is strong enough to guide the tools. If the brand voice is vague, AI will make it vaguer. If the positioning is generic, AI will make it efficiently generic. If the organization hasn’t defined what it believes, who it serves, what it does best, and how it should show up, the output will reflect that uncertainty.
Perspectives In Practice
Pull three recent AI-assisted pieces of content and ask:
Does this sound like us?
Is the claim accurate?
Is the point specific?
Could a competitor publish this with minimal changes?
Did AI make the work better, or just faster?
If the answer is mostly “faster,” the brand system probably needs more work before the tools get more freedom. IMO the best test of any content (AI-generated or otherwise) is the one about competitors. Whatever your brand creates, and how it's created, should look and sound distinctively like you.
AI can scale a strong brand. It can also scale a generic one with terrifying efficiency.
People experience the brand through more than the message.
People experience your brand through the product, sales process, service model, onboarding emails, customer support, data practices, follow-up, and yes, those aggressive nurture emails someone set up in HubSpot in 2022 and then quietly abandoned.
So a brand audit should look beyond messaging. It should ask whether the experience gives people a reason to believe the promise.
Forrester’s Brand Experience Index measures brand perception through salience, fit, and trust, and links those dimensions to outcomes such as future purchasing, purchase preference, price premium, and advocacy. Its 2025 launch found that customers and non-customers are more likely to purchase from, recommend, prefer, and pay a premium for brands with strong brand experience scores. Forrester
Forrester’s Total Experience work also points to the connection between brand, customer, and employee experience. In 2026, Forrester reported that companies delivering strong total experience saw higher returns from retention and enrichment, including a 2.6x revenue lift for automotive firms and 3.8x for retailers in the U.S.
This is where brand work becomes operational. Which is usually where things get more interesting during an audit.
If the brand promises simplicity, does the process feel simple? If it promises partnership, does the sales process feel consultative? If it promises innovation, does the customer experience feel current, or is it held together by three heroic employees and a spreadsheet named FINAL_final_v7?
These are brand questions.
They’re also systems questions, service questions, sales questions, technology questions, and leadership questions. This is why a real brand audit can’t stop at the logo, the tagline, or the approved adjectives in the voice guide.
Perspectives In Practice
Choose one brand promise and trace where people actually experience it.
For example, if the promise is “simple,” look at:
website navigation
inquiry forms
sales handoffs
onboarding
customer support
reporting
billing
renewal
Mark each touchpoint as supporting, weakening, or contradicting the promise.
A brand audit should catch the places where the business is teaching people something different than the message is promising.
A useful audit connects the brand to the business.
A strong brand audit should help leaders see where the brand still fits, where it has drifted, and what needs to be adjusted before next year’s strategy gets built around last year’s assumptions.
Look at the brand from seven angles:
Business What are we trying to grow, protect, change, or become?
Audience Who matters most now, and what do they need to understand or believe?
Market Where are competitors getting stronger, weaker, louder, or more similar?
Offer Are we explaining what we sell in a way people can understand and value?
Experience Do our interactions support or undermine the brand promise?
Message Are we saying something specific, useful, and differentiated?
System Can teams use the brand without needing a special committee to approve every sentence?
That last one matters more than people admit. The "brand police" is a great office joke that's been around since the Renaissance, but a brand strategy that only works when one specific person is in the room to interpret it isn’t much of a system. It’s dependency with nicer typography.
Perspectives In Practice
Pick one current initiative for next year and run it through the seven angles above.
Ask whether the brand supports:
the business goal
the audience need
the market reality
the offer
the experience
the message
the internal system needed to use it consistently
If the brand doesn’t support those things, the issue is bigger than the campaign plan.
A useful brand audit asks whether the brand still fits the business.
Your current brand is worth a closer look.
A lot can change in a business over a year.
The audience changes. The category gets crowded. AI changes how content gets made. Internal teams adapt the brand in practical ways that make sense individually and create confusion collectively.
That’s normal. Brands are living systems, not museum pieces.
A year-end brand audit gives us a chance to pause before building next year’s strategy on outdated assumptions. It helps us see what still holds, what has drifted, and what needs to be adjusted so the brand reflects the business, audience, and market we’re actually dealing with now.
Useful information.
Occasionally inconvenient, sure. Still useful.
References
Forrester. (2025, June 24). Forrester’s Brand Experience Index reveals a stark perception gap between customers and non-customers across industries and regions.
Forrester. (2026, June 9). Forrester reveals the top 10 highest-performing brands in its 2026 global Total Experience Score rankings at its CX events.
Gartner. (2026, May 11). Gartner 2026 CMO Spend Survey finds CMOs allocate 15.3% of marketing budgets to AI, but only 30% are ready to scale AI capabilities.
Gartner. (2026, May 11). Gartner survey reveals marketing leaders expect AI automation of marketing work to double by 2028.
Kantar. (n.d.). BrandZ brand valuation methodology. https://www.kantar.com/Campaigns/BrandZ/Methodology
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