14/14
The Phoenix Effect: Three Principles to Revitalize Your Brand
I'll never forget my job interview with Samsung Mobile's charismatic CEO, DJ Koh. His question was deceptively simple: How could I help relaunch their brand on the global stage?
He referenced Apple, Nike, and Coca-Cola as benchmarks, but what really caught my attention was his curiosity about the work I’d done in helping revitalize the Coke brand in North America. What lessons had I learned that could apply to Samsung?
I remember being incredibly intimidated. Samsung's scale and ambitions were massive, and I didn't even know where to start with addressing that huge challenge and opportunity.
The answer came to me on day one of starting the job, buried within an HR orientation film. Samsung–one of the world's tech giants—began its journey to global dominance as a humble grocery trading store in 1938, emerging from Japanese occupation as a means to feed a starving country and employ its people. Hidden within their incredibly humane philosophy, "for the betterment of the country, its people, and eventually mankind," was a powerful image: founder Lee Byung-chul writing calligraphy that advocated taking risks and defying barriers to create progress.
We built Samsung's highly successful brand relaunch on the back of that foundational truth and three core principles.
The Three Core Principles of Brand Revitalization
1. Go back to your DNA and what made you great
2. Product. Product. Product.
3. Cultural Currency = Your DNA + Their Rules
It's amazingly simple—and of course, never as simple as that.
1. Go Back to Your DNA and What Made You Great
This is your starting point. It's a simple yet crucial step where many marketers fail.
They either try to impose their own brand DNA onto the company or imprint the latest cultural trend onto the brand. Both are cheap laminates that eventually come unglued.
Consumers reject inauthentic brands. In this age of social transparency, they can spot a pretender from miles away. The company follows suit—internal politics and systems reject both the person and the ideas they rode into town with.
So go back to what makes you authentically you as a brand, because that's where soul and business success converge.
Heinz executed this brilliantly in 2023.
The business dilemma was stark: precipitous sales decline as generic ketchups gained market share. Heinz was becoming the pricier alternative because "tomato ketchup is tomato ketchup"—especially during inflationary times, right?
Wrong. It has to be Heinz.
They returned to the core DNA of the "Slow Pour"—the thick, rich consistency that distinguished Heinz from runny generic alternatives. Going so far as to hilariously call out generic brands for committing "Ketchup Fraud," they made consumers viral accomplices in reporting establishments serving fake Heinz.
Result: 6.5% business increase. An absolutely brilliant reboot.
And speaking of brilliant reboots, look no further than the enormously successful Deadpool movie franchise for proof that this approach works just as well across completely different categories.
20th Century Fox wrestled with resurrecting the flagging X-Men franchise using Deadpool. An earlier 2009 attempt, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, had flopped. Too serious, too generic.
The 2016 reboot film is a masterclass in going back to your DNA and modernizing the brand for a new audience.
20th Century Fox returned to the comic book roots that made Deadpool popular originally: an antihero "Merc with a Mouth" who couldn't stop talking and constantly broke the fourth wall with meta-awareness that he was a comic book character—and a funny one at that. With Ryan Reynolds' significant contribution, Deadpool was reborn as an R-rated, foul-mouthed superhero prone to over-the-top violence, offering a stark contrast to the PG-rated conventional Marvel films of that era.
Audiences hungrily embraced it. The latest Deadpool brought in Wolverine to freshen the series while maintaining the same profane, gory formula. Box office result: $1.3 billion in global ticket sales.
So go back. Figure out what made you good. Put a modern twist on it, and you're ready to move forward.
Because the product alone won't get you there, though, having said that, let me immediately contradict myself in the next section.
2. Product. Product. Product.
Relying on the brand alone simply isn't enough.
I can't count how many CEOs I've met who thought revitalization only comes down to the right "emotional" marketing campaign that builds brand love.
That only gets you halfway. You also need product news to get people to look again and reappraise you.
At its most superficial level, this can mean a modernized visual identity system that gets you to reappraise a product.
We did this with Coke when we removed all the "muck" from the can—the greens, reds, yellow bubbles, and refreshment cues that had obscured an icon. We took Coke back to its original, clean look (even that was a fight internally). Crucially, this visual identity revitalization went past the packaging and extended to every consumer touchpoint to help modernize the brand.
Heinz did much the same thing.
But visual identity reboots are never enough.
You have to do something genuinely new with the product while offering a modern twist.
This can be flavor additions—Heinz nodded to Gen Z and Alpha's appetite for global fusion flavors like kimchi and sriracha.
Or it can leverage technology. Both Coke Freestyle and Heinz Remix allowed people to mix and match flavors at vending points, stimulating trial and repeat purchases.
At the most innovative extreme—my personal favorite because it has the greatest and most lasting impact—launch a series of product innovations that build news and business momentum. This was Apple's approach with the dizzying sequence of iMac, iBook, iCube, iPod, iPhone, and iPad innovations that proved beyond doubt they were back from the grave. A $3.2 trillion company followed.
3. Cultural Currency = Your DNA + Their Rules
Great brands occupy a disproportionate space in our cultural imagination. And they often do so by tapping into the irresistible tribal nature of our species.
As much as a collection of functional attributes, brands are signifiers of the social values we (all too literally) buy into, badges that telegraph the tribes we wish to belong to, and how we want to be seen. Psychologists call this ‘Identity Fusion’—as humans, we’re hard-wired to align ourselves with social groups. Alas, just look at contemporary politics.
Apple tapped into this impulse brilliantly and famously when it created the Creative Class/Creator archetype with the Think Different campaign.
But that was in the ’90s, when media was consumed in a homogeneous fashion. That kind of top-down image and brand building simply isn’t enough in today’s heterogeneous media landscape.
Today, culture and tribes are no longer formed only top-down; they’re also built bottom-up. From Substack to TikTok to Roblox, everywhere you look, top-down authority has been displaced by bottom-up authenticity.
This means that brands today must look down as well as up, as they seek to rally their tribes. In addition to searching for a bigger role in people’s lives, they must learn how to show up credibly in countless smaller spaces where today’s true social currency is created. Brands must master both purpose and participation. They must be both good hosts and good guests. Both roles demand authenticity.
When we spend time with different friends, we instinctively dial up different sides of ourselves, but our core values remain the same. There is a common point of intersection.
As a brand, the trick is combining your DNA with their rules.
Many brands get so sidetracked by achieving cultural buzz and fame that they ignore this simple rule and forget their core in the haste to collaborate or look cool. The chameleon results are transitory–only as good as the last viral initiative, TikTok video, or partnership.
But your brand DNA + their fandom rules = marketing gold that never loses its luster.
I’ve always loved Lego for getting this right.
Nearing bankruptcy in the early 2000s, Lego cut experimental product lines and returned to brick-based creativity and its core DNA of imaginative play, only this time it built a bigger business than ever before by taking the brand into countless corners of culture.
Beyond its brilliant entertainment IP collabs from Star Wars to Harry Potter, Lego extended its ‘brickprint’ into art and design sub-cultures with Ai Weiwei and Olafur Eliasson, into gaming culture with Minecraft and Nintendo, and drew in adult fans with more intricate sets inspired by everything from the botanical to the architectural. Imagination sat at the core of these fandom initiatives.
The result: from $800 million of debt to annual revenue over $10 billion.
Making Brand Revitalization Stick
1. It's not an à la carte menu. It's a disciplined process requiring all three elements: functional, emotional, and cultural, planned in sync for lasting business impact. You'd be surprised how many companies pick only one or two elements to relaunch a brand and then expect successful results.
2. The tighter your start point, the more places you can go. There have never been more opportunities for brand partnerships, innovations or extensions, nor media or audience spaces to fulfill. By ensuring you have a sharply defined DNA—and sticking to it—you ensure these opportunities become springboards to deepen the brand, not dilute it.
3. It's not just about marketing integration—it's about C-suite integration. Steve Jobs wasn't just Apple's CEO but its de facto CMO. His tight partnership with Jony Ive and Chiat/Day ensured that product, marketing, and CEO vision aligned perfectly. Marketing—no matter how brilliant—cannot breathe new life into a brand without product, innovation, and other C-suite functions working in tight lockstep and planned sequence.
Phoenix risen!
