Disrupt or Decline: Why Brand Relevance Has to Be Earned, Not Assumed

Why should your customer's pound go to you?

It sounds like a simple question. But at Leeds Digital Festival this week, it was the question at the heart of Disrupt or Decline: Brand Relevance in the Age of Digital Disruption, and it's one more brands need to be asking themselves honestly.

People are watching their spending closely. Businesses are scrutinising the value of every investment. In that climate, maximising profit for its own sake isn't a strategy. Brands that thrive will be the ones that can clearly answer why us, and then live up to that answer.

Yesterday's Loyalty Isn't Tomorrow's

One of the most important points from the session was this: assumptions about customer loyalty yesterday and today don't equal loyalty tomorrow.

Many brands treat loyalty as something they've banked. With a long-standing customer base, a recognisable name, years of repeat purchases it's easy to think loyalty is a fixed asset. But it's a relationship, and relationships need maintaining.

When customers have more choice than ever, and less money to spread across those choices, past loyalty is no guarantee of future spend. The brands that assume their audience will stick around are often the last to notice when they've quietly left.

Trust has to be built before it can grow and that groundwork - consistently delivering on your promise, showing up where your customers are, proving your value over time - is what makes expansion possible. If this vital step is skipped and any growth you chase sits on a fragile foundation.

Living Up to the Brand Promise

A brand promise is only as strong as the experience behind it.

It's easy to make claims in messaging. It's harder to deliver them at every touchpoint, from the first ad a customer sees to the way a complaint is handled months later. When the gap between what a brand says and what it does gets too wide, customers notice. And in a cost-conscious market, they don't stay to see if it improves.

For our clients, this means asking difficult questions:

• Does our customer experience reflect what our marketing promises?
• Would our customers describe us the way we describe ourselves?
• If we stopped advertising tomorrow, what would people say about us?

Living up to the promise isn't a campaign, it's a fundamental operating principle.

Heritage or Habit?

Legacy brands face a particular challenge. Their history is often their greatest strength, but it can also become the thing that holds them back.

The session posed a sharp question: when brands anchor back to their purpose, are they anchoring to heritage, or to habit?

Heritage is meaningful. It's the story, values and expertise that made a brand worth trusting in the first place. Habit is doing things a certain way because that's how they've always been done. From the outside, the two can look identical. But it can be the difference between a brand being grounded while it evolves, or keeping it stuck.

Legacy brands need to understand the modern customer as they are now, not as they were when the brand was founded. That means knowing which parts of your identity are essential and which are simply familiar.

Knowing When to Pivot - and When Not To

If relevance requires change, it's tempting to think the answer is constant reinvention. But, it isn't.

Pivoting all the time leaves no consistency, for the brand or its customers. If your positioning, messaging and identity shift every time the market wobbles, customers have nothing stable to connect with. Recognition fades. Trust erodes. You end up chasing relevance rather than building it.

The skill is knowing when a pivot is genuinely needed and when consistency is the smarter play. That decision should come from a clear understanding of your audience and purpose, not from fear of being left behind.

And often, the change has to start with mindset. Before a brand can evolve its offering, the people behind it have to be prepared to change. A new campaign can't fix a business that isn't willing to rethink how it operates.

Meeting People Where They're At

Having the lowest price isn't going to cut it anymore. Price can win a transaction, but it rarely wins a relationship.

What keeps customers coming back is emotional relevance - the sense that a brand understands their life, their priorities and the pressures they're facing right now. That means meeting people where they're at, not where you'd like them to be.

As marketers, this is where we can genuinely help brands. Performance data tells you what customers do. Emotional relevance comes from understanding why. The brands that combine both are the ones that stay relevant through disruption.

Provide Value Before You Extract It

Every brand wants something from its community: attention, time, money, data. But the session made a point that should be central to how brands enter any space - provide value before you extract from it.

This is particularly true for brands new to a market or community. Turning up and immediately asking for spend positions you as a taker. Turning up and contributing something useful - knowledge, support, experiences, genuine engagement - positions you as someone worth backing.

It also means adopting a humble position. Rather than assuming you belong in a space, ask why us, and put that question at the core of decision-making. If the answer isn't clear to you, it won't be clear to your customers either.

Co-Creating With Customers

One of the most practical ideas from the session was getting customers to co-create the products and experiences that help a brand survive.

Your customers know things you don't. They know what frustrates them, what they'd pay more for, what would make them recommend you. Brands that are creative in how they capture that knowledge - through feedback, community, testing, conversation - build offerings that are more relevant by design.

Co-creation also builds ownership. When customers have helped shape something, they're more invested in its success and that's loyalty built from the ground up, rather than assumed from the top down.

The Bottom Line

Disruption isn't new. But the pressure on brands to prove their worth has rarely been higher.

Relevance can't be assumed based on past loyalty, heritage or market position. It has to be earned through living up to your promise, meeting customers where they are, contributing before extracting, and staying consistent enough to be trusted while evolving enough to stay meaningful.

So the question remains: why should your customer's pound go to you?

The brands that can answer that honestly, and prove it every day, won't need to fear disruption. They'll be the ones leading it.