Brand Relevance Is Not About Being Liked

Brand relevance is the degree to which a brand continues to matter to the people it needs to reach, in the context of decisions they are actually making. It is not the same as brand awareness, brand affinity, or brand love. A brand can score well on all three and still be losing ground, because relevance is about whether your brand is in the consideration set when it counts, not whether people recognise it or feel warmly toward it.

Relevance decays. Markets shift, categories evolve, and customer priorities change. Brands that were dominant a decade ago have been reduced to nostalgia plays not because they stopped being liked, but because they stopped being needed. The work of maintaining relevance is ongoing, commercial, and often uncomfortable.

If you are working through how your brand is positioned relative to competitors and audiences, the broader thinking on brand positioning and strategy covers the structural decisions that sit underneath relevance.

What Does Brand Relevance Actually Mean?

The word gets used loosely. In most marketing conversations, relevance is treated as a synonym for being current, culturally connected, or talked about. That framing is misleading, because it conflates visibility with utility.

A more useful definition: a brand is relevant when it is considered a viable option by the people who matter to the business, at the moments when those people are making category decisions. That definition is deliberately narrow. It strips out sentiment, awareness, and cultural cachet, and focuses on what actually drives revenue.

I have sat in enough brand reviews to know that this distinction matters more than most teams acknowledge. A brand can have high awareness, strong net promoter scores, and a loyal existing customer base, while simultaneously losing relevance with the next generation of buyers, in adjacent categories, or in markets where the competitive set has shifted. The metrics look fine until the pipeline quietly empties.

The BCG work on brand strategy across global markets points to a consistent pattern: brands that sustain commercial performance over long periods are not necessarily the most loved. They are the ones that remain in the active consideration set across changing conditions.

Why Relevance Erodes Without Anyone Noticing

Relevance does not collapse overnight. It drifts. And the drift is almost always invisible in the metrics that most marketing teams track regularly.

Awareness holds steady because existing customers still know who you are. Satisfaction scores stay high because the people who chose you are still happy. Revenue looks acceptable because the base is large enough to absorb the churn. But underneath all of that, the brand is losing ground with new entrants to the category, with customers whose needs have evolved, and with segments where a competitor has moved faster.

When I was running an agency and we were growing the business from a small regional operation into something that competed at a European level, I watched this happen to several of our competitors. They had strong reputations built over years. Clients respected them. But the category was changing, digital was restructuring how clients bought and valued agency services, and those businesses were optimising for the clients they already had rather than the clients they needed to win. By the time the revenue impact became visible, the relevance gap had been building for two or three years.

The same dynamic plays out in consumer markets. Consumer brand loyalty is more fragile than brand teams tend to assume, particularly when category conditions shift. Economic pressure, new entrants, or a change in how the category is used can all accelerate relevance decay that was already underway.

The Difference Between Relevance and Awareness

This is worth being direct about, because the two are routinely conflated in briefs, in board presentations, and in agency recommendations.

Awareness is a measure of recognition. It tells you whether people know your brand exists. Relevance is a measure of fit. It tells you whether people think your brand is appropriate for their situation.

You can have high awareness and low relevance. Blockbuster had near-universal awareness in its market when Netflix was beginning to take share. Kodak was one of the most recognised brands in the world when digital photography was making its core business structurally irrelevant. Awareness did not protect either of them, because the relevance problem was not a communications problem. It was a positioning and category problem.

Focusing on brand awareness as a primary objective can actually mask relevance decay, because it keeps the metrics looking healthy while the underlying positioning drifts. I have seen this in category after category. The brand is well known. The brand is liked. The brand is not being chosen.

The distinction also matters for how you measure. Tracking brand awareness with recall surveys tells you something, but it does not tell you whether your brand is in the consideration set at the moments that matter. For that, you need different data: share of search in category terms, competitive switching research, and the category entry points your brand is and is not associated with.

How to Diagnose a Relevance Problem

The first step is separating the signal from the noise. Most brand tracking data is designed to measure awareness and sentiment. It is not well suited to diagnosing relevance gaps. To get a clear picture, you need to look at a different set of indicators.

Share of consideration is the most direct measure. In markets where you can run structured research, asking category buyers which brands they would consider for their next purchase, without prompting on your brand specifically, gives you a much cleaner read on relevance than awareness or preference scores. If your brand is well known but not consistently in the consideration set, that is a relevance problem.

Category entry points are another useful diagnostic. These are the situations, needs, and triggers that prompt people to engage with your category. If your brand is strongly associated with some entry points but absent from others that are growing in importance, you have a relevance gap even if your overall position looks stable. Search data can help surface this, because the queries people use when entering a category reveal the mental frames they bring to it.

Competitive switching data is the third signal worth examining. Where are you losing customers to, and where are you winning them from? If you are consistently losing to a particular competitor, and that competitor is newer or positioned differently, that is often a relevance signal rather than a pure performance or pricing signal.

When I was judging the Effie Awards, one of the things that separated the entries that stood out from the ones that did not was this: the strong cases could articulate a specific relevance problem, not just a general awareness or sentiment challenge. They knew which customers they were not being considered by, and why. The weaker cases were solving for visibility when the actual problem was fit.

Why Category Leaders Are Most at Risk

There is a counterintuitive pattern in how relevance erodes. The brands most exposed to relevance decay are often the category leaders, not the challengers.

Challengers are structurally forced to earn consideration. They cannot rely on habitual purchase or category default. They have to be genuinely relevant to the people they are targeting, or they do not survive. That discipline keeps them close to what their target customers actually need.

Category leaders, by contrast, tend to optimise for defending their existing position. They invest in reinforcing the associations they already have, with the customers they already serve, in the contexts where they are already chosen. That is rational in the short term and dangerous over time, because it means the brand is not tracking the evolution of the category.

Existing brand-building strategies tend to optimise for the conditions that made the brand successful, not the conditions that will determine its future. For a category leader, that means the relevance gap often builds quietly while the core business looks healthy.

The brands that sustain relevance over long periods tend to have a discipline around monitoring the edges of their category: which new entrants are gaining traction, which customer segments are behaving differently, which needs are going unmet. They treat the category as something that moves, not something they have already mapped.

Relevance Is a Positioning Problem, Not a Communications Problem

This is the part most marketing teams get wrong. When relevance starts to slip, the instinct is to fix the communications. Refresh the creative. Run a new campaign. Find a cultural moment to attach to. Change the tone of voice.

Sometimes that is appropriate. If the brand is genuinely well positioned but has become visually or tonally dated, a communications refresh can help. But if the relevance problem is structural, which it usually is, changing the message without changing the positioning does not solve it. It just makes the irrelevance more visible, because you are drawing attention to a brand that people do not have a strong reason to consider.

Structural relevance problems require positioning work. That means going back to the questions that sit underneath the brand: who is the audience, what do they actually need, how has that need changed, and what does the brand offer that is genuinely differentiated in that context? A brand strategy that holds up commercially has clear answers to those questions, not just a compelling narrative.

In practice, this kind of work is harder to sell internally than a campaign refresh. It takes longer, it involves uncomfortable conversations about what the brand is not, and it often requires revisiting decisions that were made years ago by people who are no longer in the room. But it is the work that actually moves the needle on relevance.

I have managed hundreds of millions in ad spend across thirty-odd industries, and the clearest pattern I can point to is this: brands that invest consistently in positioning clarity outperform brands that invest in communications volume. Not always in the short term, but reliably over a three to five year horizon. The communications compound when the positioning is right. They dissipate when it is not.

The Role of Agility in Sustaining Relevance

Relevance is not a one-time achievement. It is a condition that requires ongoing maintenance, and that maintenance requires the organisation to be able to move when the category moves.

The structural challenge for most large brands is that the processes and governance that make them efficient also make them slow. By the time a relevance gap has been identified, validated through research, approved for action, briefed to agencies, and executed in market, the gap has widened. Building agility into the marketing organisation is not just an operational preference. It is a relevance requirement.

This does not mean chasing every trend or reacting to every competitor move. It means having the infrastructure to detect relevance signals early, the authority to act on them without a twelve-month approval cycle, and the discipline to distinguish between signals that matter and noise that does not.

When we were scaling the agency, one of the things that gave us an edge over larger competitors was precisely this. We could see a shift in how clients were thinking about a service area, and we could reposition our offer and our conversations within weeks rather than quarters. That speed was a relevance advantage, not just an operational one.

What Rebuilding Relevance Actually Looks Like

If you have diagnosed a relevance gap and accepted that it is a positioning problem rather than a communications one, the work ahead is structured and sequential.

Start with the audience. Not your existing customers, but the customers you need to win. What are they trying to do? What are they choosing instead of you, and why? What would need to be true about your brand for them to consider it? This is research work, not assumption work, and it is worth doing properly rather than inferring from internal data.

Then look at the category honestly. How has it changed? What are the new entry points that matter? Which competitors are gaining ground, and what does their positioning tell you about where unmet needs exist? The erosion of brand equity often tracks directly to a failure to monitor how the competitive frame has shifted.

From there, the work is about finding the positioning territory where your brand can be genuinely differentiated and genuinely relevant. Not just credible, not just likeable, but specifically suited to the needs of the people you need to reach in the context of the decisions they are making. That territory may require the brand to move. It may require the product or service to change. It almost certainly requires some honest internal conversation about what the brand is willing to give up as well as what it is reaching for.

None of this is quick. But it is the only kind of work that produces durable results. Campaigns wear out. Positioning, when it is right, compounds.

The full framework for working through these decisions, from audience research to competitive mapping to positioning statement, is covered across the articles in the brand strategy hub. If you are working through a relevance challenge, the positioning and competitive landscape pieces are the most directly applicable starting points.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

Frequently Asked Questions