Brandy

More options don’t always give customers more reason to choose you.Reports that Starbucks explored buying Chipotle sparked a bigger question: when does expanding your business strengthen your brand, and when does it dilute what customers know you for?In this episode of Brandy, Reilly Newman explores how acquisitions, new services and menu additions can change a brand’s meaning. From Starbucks’ coffeehouse experien...

AI shopping agents are changing how customers discover, compare, and choose brands. If an AI assistant is researching options for your next customer, will your business make the shortlist?

For years, advertising has focused on capturing attention. But as people delegate more purchase decisions to AI, the advantage could shift toward brands that clearly fit what those buyers actually want.

In this episode of Brandy, brand strategist R...

With meat sticks at every store now, what happened to Slim Jim?In the 1990s, Slim Jim was everywhere. MTV. ESPN. WWF. Disney Channel. Randy "Macho Man" Savage shouting "Snap into a Slim Jim!" The brand was loud, it was everywhere, and it owned the category. Now the shelves are full of Chomps, Archer, and even Kirkland's clean-label alternative leaving Slim Jim as a memory of what a category king used to look like.In this episode, R...

A Twilight Zone episode from 1959 predicted the AI debate we're having right now....

A man imprisoned on a distant moon is given a robot companion; one that looks human, talks human, learns him, plays games with him. He rejects her completely at first. She's not real. She can't feel anything. She doesn't know what it means to be lonely. Then, slowly, he falls in love with her anyway.

This episode aired 67 years ago and it's playing o...

There's a reason you haven't fully committed to a specific market. And it's not because you don't know who your customer is....It's because your brain is wired to feel the loss of everyone you're saying no to more intensely than the gain of the customer you're saying yes to. Psychologists Kahneman and Tversky called it loss aversion; the documented human tendency to feel losses roughly twice as painfully as equivalent gains feel pl...

Apple just announced the iPhone Duo... a $2,000 foldable phone. The tech world has opinions, but the conversation nobody in the brand world is having yet is the more important one.In 2020, Microsoft released a foldable device called the Surface Duo. Apple just named their flagship product the same thing. For a company built on the idea that every detail is intentional, this is a pattern worth examining....But the naming conflict is...

AI agents aren't coming... they're here. And very soon, they won't just be working for businesses, they'll be working for consumers, making purchasing decisions, filtering out brands, and interacting with companies on behalf of the people you're trying to reach.

Most conversations about AI focus on tools and productivity. This one is different.Brand strategist Reilly Newman breaks down a concept he's been developing for the past sev...

You're doing more. You're delivering more. You care more. And somehow your competitor (the one you know isn't working as hard or bringing as much to the table) is getting the business.

That's not a work problem.... It's a brand problem.

In this episode, Reilly Newman and Scott Saunders break down one of the most common and frustrating situations founders find themselves in: creating real value for the market and not capturing it.

The...

Frustrated why the market still doesn't see your business the way you want to be seen?

The problem isn't the execution. It's the method.

In this solo episode of Brandy, Reilly Newman breaks down the real difference between brand strategy and positioning (two terms that get used interchangeably and mean completely different things.)

After 15 years of working inside brands and building company positioning from the ground up, he's lande...

Starbucks didn't enter the energy drink market. They were already in it.

Reilly Newman and Scott Saunders break down the caffeine arms race (Starbucks, McDonald's, Panera, Celsius, Red Bull, Dutch Bros, and more ) as they make the case that brand equity determines which brands belong in a new category and which ones are just chasing a trend.

They trace caffeine's strange history from a WWII substance once considered toxic and alien ...

BMW is putting movie ads on the dashboards of $80,000 cars. Founders are buying keyboards that sound like typewriters. Target is selling Y2K fashion drops. And somehow these things are all the same story....

In this episode, Reilly Newman and Scott Saunders unpack why the Y2K trend has taken over fashion retail and why it has almost nothing to do with clothes. What's actually happening is a cultural correction: consumers are reachin...

"Great food. Great drinks. Great times." Sound familiar? It should... because every restaurant, bar, and winery in your area is saying the exact same thing. And when everyone says the same thing, no one is actually saying anything.

In this episode, rebranding experts, Reilly Newman and Scott Saunders, break down one of the most common brand mistakes founders make: signaling the obvious. Table stakes (quality service, professional st...

Most businesses put all the pressure on sales.

The pitch has to be perfect. The follow-up has to be relentless. The close has to land. But what if the sale was already won (or already lost) long before the salesperson showed up?

In this episode, Reilly Newman and Scott Saunders make the case that most businesses are asking sales to do a job that brand should have already done. Using fishing and farming as their frame, they argue tha...

What if the closest thing to the philosopher's stone (the mythical substance that transforms ordinary materials into gold) already exists in business?

In this episode of Brandy, Reilly Newman and Scott Saunders make the case that rebranding is alchemy. Not the cosmetic kind. The diagnostic kind. Where you strip a company down to its most fundamental elements, identify what actually matters to your ideal audience, and rebuild into so...

Advertising tells people you're great. A sample proves it.

Free samples are one of the oldest conversion tools in business and consistently one of the most underestimated. While brands pour budget into ads that interrupt, sampling creates an experience that persuades. The ROI difference isn't close.

In this episode, Reilly Newman and Scott Saunders break down why sampling works, why it outperforms traditional advertising, and how bot...

Hello Q3! Every new quarter, founders feel the itch to rebrand, but boredom isn't a strategy.

Rebranding experts Reilly Newman and Scott Saunders of Motif Brands break down the real difference between brand adaptation (constant, healthy) and a true rebrand (rare, evidence-driven) with the inclusion of the four signals from Motif's Brand Deficit™ model that actually justify a real rebrand.

Based on decades of experience, this rebrand...

Most brands don't die from bad design. They die from becoming indistinguishable.

Blanding is what happens when a brand strips away everything that made it recognizable (the personality, the heritage, the visual distinction) in pursuit of looking cleaner, safer, or more modern. The result is a brand that's easier to compare than to choose.

In this episode, Reilly Newman and Scott Saunders break down what blanding actually is, why it's...

Most brands don't choose their theme... their category chooses it for them.

In this episode, rebrand experts Reilly Newman and Scott Saunders break down why brand themes aren't decoration; they're the operating system behind every distinct brand experience. And when you abandon them, you pay for it on the shelf.

From Pirate's Booty's rebrand mistake to Liquid Death's category-defying contrarianism, from Rainforest Cafe's total sensor...

Harvard Business Review studied 597 logos and declared a winner, but we're not buying it.

In this episode, rebranding experts, Reilly Newman and Scott Saunders unpack why HBR's descriptive vs. non-descriptive framing is a useful starting point and a misleading endpoint.

Yes, descriptive logos can aid recognition and brand processing. But collapsing logo strategy into a binary choice ignores everything that makes a brand actually wor...