Legacy FMCG brands often become trapped by the associations that once made them successful. Over time, a brand can become shorthand for a particular audience, place or occasion: the petrol station pick-up, the between-meetings bite, the children’s lunchbox staple or the drink reserved for Christmas.
Those mental shortcuts help consumers make decisions and establish a brand, but after a while they can limit growth by making it harder to reach new consumers or occasions. Research by Kantar found that increasing the number of usage occasions by just 10% can drive 17% revenue growth, highlighting the commercial opportunity in broadening how consumers think about a brand.
It isn’t easy; brands can be reluctant to move away from what has worked so far and a new identity risks alienating current customers. But done right, it can be incredibly successful for brands.
Snickers, for example, deliberately shifted from young male, on-the-go snacking to a universal insight about hunger changing people’s personalities, helping generate a reported $376 million in additional sales over two years. Peperami also broadened its appeal beyond children’s lunchboxes and young male snackers, with a 2020 rebrand centred on more playful family snacking occasions helping value sales grow 20% to £99.2 million in the year to September 2021.
So, how can brands evolve without losing the qualities that made consumers choose them in the first place?
Find a new story to tell
The first task is to identify the story that can take the brand beyond its existing stereotype.
For Ginsters, convenience had become the dominant narrative. That had helped build the brand, but also confined it to forecourt lunches and grab-and-go purchases. Convenience is difficult to own when every supermarket own label and bakery chain can make the same claim.
The more distinctive story lay elsewhere: taste, proper food and Cornish provenance. Those were authentic strengths that had always existed but had become overlooked.
That became the foundation of our work together. Rather than simply talking about Cornwall, we built a richer brand world around it, drawing on its landscape, seaside locale, creativity and food culture. This saw it add more than half a million new households in the last quarter of 2023 and a 17% increase in volume of slices and pasties.
Once you’ve found the right story, it should shape the consumer experience: packaging, advertising, innovation and communications should all reinforce the idea. Consumers don’t encounter brands in one place anymore, so they shouldn’t hear a different story every time they do.
‘Living heritage’
Heritage brands rarely need to invent an entirely new identity. More often, they need to rediscover the most relevant part of the one they already have. This doesn’t mean leaving heritage behind. It means keeping it alive.
The first question is: what work is your heritage doing? Is it communicating craftsmanship, provenance, care, or trust? The answer tells you what to preserve and what can evolve.
Heritage is valuable because it reassures consumers. The challenge is that it can also age surprisingly quickly. Packaging that once felt traditional can start to feel old-fashioned, making the brand appear stuck in the past.
We often talk about ‘living heritage’. Instead of preserving history in amber, you retain the assets people instinctively recognise while refreshing everything around them.
With Ginsters, the red oval logo barely changed because it already carried decades of recognition. The bigger shift came in the world surrounding it. Heavy historical illustrations gave way to artwork that still celebrated Cornwall but in a more timeless style.
The Quaker brand follows a similar principle. The Quaker figure has evolved only subtly over the years, preserving one of the brand’s strongest assets. Around it, however, the visual language has become brighter, warmer and more colourful. That’s important because oats can still carry outdated associations with older consumers and cold weather. The heritage remains, balanced with cues that make the brand feel relevant today.
Heritage should communicate craftsmanship and authenticity, not make consumers feel the brand belongs to another era.
What’s the purchase motivation?
A refreshed story and identity will only work if they connect with the reason people buy the category.
Food and drink brands can become so absorbed in provenance and heritage that they forget the fundamentals. Consumers usually buy because something looks delicious, feels indulgent, solves a convenience need, or fits a particular occasion. Heritage is a valuable point of difference, but it isn’t the purchase motivation. That balance will vary from brand to brand.
Tabasco, for example, already had an iconic pack. To grow, it needed to showcase the product’s versatility. Its visual identity became louder and more energetic, with campaigns and extensions creating new occasions while the bottle remained reassuringly familiar. Tabasco is now sold in 195 countries, with labels in 36 languages.
Other brands competing with own label and established rivals must make both the product and the occasion feel more desirable by understanding not only who buys it, but when else it could be relevant.
Baileys is a clear example of the narrow-occasion trap. For years, it was strongly associated with Christmas, limiting it to one seasonal moment. By promoting serves involving coffee, desserts, cocktails and more informal occasions, the brand has given consumers additional reasons to think about it throughout the year.
The aim is not to replace one restrictive association with another; it is to create a wider repertoire of moments in which the brand feels natural.
Heritage brands already possess something many newer competitors spend years trying to build: familiarity and trust. But those advantages only create growth when they are connected to a relevant story, expressed through a living identity and grounded in what motivates people to buy.
The brands that succeed will be the ones that know which parts of it to carry forward.
About the author
Ed Hayes is the chief strategy officer at Bloom. He has spent over 20 years advising clients on strategy, positioning, architecture, innovation and design.
His key focus is on using strategy and cultural know-how to grow client and agency businesses - a concept he has brought to his work with the likes of Heineken, KP, Diageo, Britvic, Pladis, and Virgin.