In Brief
Every few years a company with no heritage, no advertising history, and no place in anyone’s brand tracker takes serious market share from businesses that have spent decades and fortunes building their names. The industry response is always the same: confusion, then rationalisation, then a think piece about whether brand still matters. It does. That is not the interesting question.
The Wrong Diagnosis
BYD had 1% brand recognition in Britain in 2023. By mid-2026 it had registered over 44,000 cars. Oatly built a category on the back of a font and a provocation. Airbnb took lodging market share from hotel groups that had spent a century accumulating trust. In each case, the established players looked at what happened and asked: how did they build their brand so fast?
That is the wrong question. It assumes brand is what won.
The confusion is understandable. Brand is the vocabulary the industry has. When something wins in the market, the instinct is to explain it in brand terms — awareness, equity, distinctiveness, trust. And those things are real. They do matter. The problem is that they are downstream of something more fundamental that rarely gets named clearly.
Relevance.
Not brand relevance — the marketing department version, which usually means “does the advertising feel right for us.” Genuine commercial relevance: is this the most fitting choice for this specific person, in this specific context, against these specific alternatives, right now.
That is what wins. Brand is one of the inputs. It is not the mechanism.
What the New Entrant Actually Did
The Jaecoo buyer did not make a brand-light decision. They made a differently weighted relevance decision.
A segment of the car-buying market had already restructured what they were optimising for. Not badge. Not heritage. Not the reassurance that comes from thirty years of advertising. They were optimising for: does this do what I need, is it demonstrably good, and does the value equation make sense? Against those criteria — and against a European competitive set that had spent decades competing on identity signals while letting product and value drift — a well-made Chinese EV at a compelling price point is not a surprising choice. It is the obvious one.
The mistake is reading that as evidence that brand doesn’t matter. It is evidence that for a meaningful and growing segment, the brand dimensions that matter most are product integrity and value delivery. Functional outcome. Experience quality. Not social status, not identity enhancement or transformation. We’re not all buying into that side of “brand value”. Although I must confess I personally tend to. But not all do. And that’s great for business.
It is relevance architecture. Different customer, different weights, different winner.
The European incumbents are not losing because they have weaker brands in any absolute sense. They are losing because their brands are optimised for a choice architecture that a growing portion of the market has quietly abandoned.
The Differentiation Trap
Here is where the industry debate gets genuinely unhelpful.
You might have heard it. Byron Sharp vs. Mark Ritson. Or whatever is the right way to frame it.
One person/school says: build distinctive assets, maximise mental availability, don’t worry about differentiation — most buyers don’t care, they just need to think of you first. Another school says: find your defensible position, own a territory, be meaningfully different. Both are describing real phenomena. Neither is asking the prior question. Neither is asking the most relevant question, that of relevance.
Different from what, for whom, on what dimension, and does that difference map to something the ICP actually uses to make their decision?
Distinctiveness without relevance is memorability without consequence. You are recalled and not chosen. Differentiation without relevance is positioning without purchase. You have a territory and no customers in it.
The new entrant that wins without an apparent brand is almost always highly relevant to a specific ICP that the established players had stopped paying close attention to. They did not win despite having no brand. They won because they had precisely the right value proposition for a customer whose choice architecture the market had misread.
BYD did not sneak past inattentive incumbents. It addressed a customer who wanted an EV, wanted demonstrable quality, and was not prepared to pay a £15,000 premium for a badge. That customer existed in volume. Nobody was talking to them well.
The Question Worth Asking
When a new entrant takes share without an obvious brand advantage, the useful question is not “how did they build trust so fast.” It is: which customers did they understand better than everyone else, and what were those customers actually choosing between?
The answer is almost never “they had better marketing.” It is almost always “they had better relevance to a specific customer the market had underserved or misread.”
Brand matters enormously in that story — as the signal of relevance, as the carrier of trust, as the reason a customer tells someone else. But it is not the source of the win. Relevance is the source. Brand is the residue that relevance leaves behind.
Companies that build brand first and hope relevance follows are doing it backwards. The ones that engineer relevance precisely — for a specific customer, at a specific moment, against a specific competitive set — find that brand accrues almost as a byproduct.
That is the lesson the new entrants are teaching. Not that brand is dead. That relevance is the engine and brand is the exhaust.