The Relevance Gap - Why Brands Fall Behind
Ignorance is bliss. Until it kills you.
Every brand has to fight the same enemy: Irrelevance. It’s what kills brands, faster than anything else. Yet, every brand seems to think it’s relevant. Inside companies, people think the market “just doesn’t get it.” If they just knew more about us, surely they would buy.
Ignorance is bliss. Until it kills you.
Brands don’t die because they lose awareness. They die because they lose relevance — they drift so far from what the world wants that their message still sounds polished while the audience has moved on. It’s like updating your MySpace bio while everyone else is on TikTok.
Welcome to The Relevance Gap.
One of the iron laws of brand-building is that people will choose the most relevant option to them. Yet, brands that lose ground tend to loose relevance with its core audience, creating a gap between “what they want” and “what our brand offers”.
It’s the distance between what’s happening out there (culture, consumers, competition) and what you’re still doing in here (your product, positioning, promise).
It’s not theoretical — it’s measurable. (I built Original Minds Intelligence™ on this very idea - on connecting external signals with strategy and brand experience).
When your offer, story, style, and/or behavior no longer fit the values and decision criteria people actually use to choose, you become irrelevant. You might still be known, respected, even loved — but nobody cares enough to choose you.
Kodak had 90% awareness the day it went bankrupt. Relevance gap: terminal.
The same story happened to other brands we used to choose, from Nokia to Blockbuster, Yahoo, and many, many more.
How It Happens
The World Moves Faster Than You Do
Culture shifts. Values evolve. The things people used to signal identity change. You’re still optimizing last year’s campaign while your audience redefines what “cool,” “healthy,” or “authentic” even means.The Market (Category) Reshapes Itself
New entrants redefine what “good” looks like. You call it disruption; they call it Tuesday. While you’re benchmarking against old competitors, the category rules change.Your Brand Stays Comfortable
You keep delivering what worked. Familiar. Efficient. Safe. Except “safe” is code for “boring,” and boring is how irrelevance creeps in.
The Anatomy of Relevance
Relevance isn’t a brand asset; it’s a fit equation. It’s about being the best option, given the criteria of your ideal audience.
People choose based on criteria — functional, emotional, identity, stylistic, distance, time, moral, etc. The more boxes you tick for the people who matter, the more relevant you become. The fewer you tick, the faster you fade.
It looks like this:
{Relevance = Fit to What People Care About × How Much They Care}
The trick? What people care about changes constantly.
That’s why Old Spice’s deodorant didn’t get better, nor worse. Time changed, and the brand got reframed. They stopped selling hygiene and started selling confidence and irony to a new generation of men who grew up on memes, not Marlboros. Relevance restored.
The Cost of Drift
The moment your brand no longer fits the world’s new criteria, three things happen:
You fight price wars. Because when you’re not different in any meaningful way, the only lever left is discounting.
You lose talent. No one wants to work for a brand that feels like homework.
You fall out of conversation. The worst part isn’t that people hate you — it’s that they stop talking about you.
How to Close the Relevance Gap
Read the room.
Stop benchmarking yourself against last quarter. Look at the culture, not your category. Where are values, aesthetics, and desires migrating?Define your “who.”
Relevance isn’t universal. It’s always “relevant to whom.” If you can’t finish that sentence, you’ve already lost.Recalibrate your offer.
Your product and promise must evolve with your audience’s new criteria. Functional fit gets you in the cart; emotional and identity fit keep you there.Create energy.
Stale brands can be perfectly aligned on paper and still invisible. Energy is what signals life — innovation, participation, cultural presence.
Measure, don’t guess.
The Relevance Gap can be quantified. Track how your brand fits against cultural, market, and consumer shifts. Don’t rely on gut; it’s been wrong since 2010.
Why This Matters Now
Because the gap is widening everywhere.
AI is rewriting productivity. Sustainability is redefining virtue. Culture flips faster than strategy decks can render. The brands that survive won’t be the ones shouting the loudest — they’ll be the ones most in sync.
Relevance isn’t about being first. It’s about being aligned — with the world, the market, and the people who matter.
Final Thought
Most brands think they have a communication problem.
They don’t. They have a relevance problem.
Your customers don’t wake up wondering if your brand is differentiated. They wake up wondering if it’s still for them.
Close the gap — or they’ll close their wallets.
Want to learn more? We built the Brand Relevance Diagnostic™ to measure exactly that — how in sync your brand is with culture, market, and customer. Because the future doesn’t wait for anyone still polishing their old relevance.
Original Minds Intelligence™ was built to connect signals with strategy and brand expression. It works as a subscription, and you can plug your brand and consumer/customer profile into it - enabling you to get ongoing, non-stop insights, ideas, opportunities, and strategic plays.