Make it weird: the case against safe branding in 2026
Safe branding feels low-risk. The data from Cracker Barrel, Jaguar, and Airbnb says otherwise. Forgettable is the one mistake you cannot recover from.
The safest branding decision you can make in 2026 is also the most dangerous one. Be inoffensive. Round the corners. Mute the palette. Sand down anything anyone might dislike. Avoid anything that could generate a reaction. Congratulations: you are now invisible.
We are living through an epidemic of okay. Scroll a year of rebrands and you will find a thousand identities with nothing technically wrong and nothing emotionally alive. Everything is competent. Almost nothing is distinctive. The tools have raised the floor so high that looking professional no longer means anything, because everyone looks professional now.
This is not a crisis of execution. It is a crisis of conviction.
The fear behind the flattening
Part of the sameness is tooling. Everyone has access to the same competent defaults: the same design systems, the same type libraries, the same generative AI producing the same commercially safe aesthetics from the same training data. Quality stopped being a differentiator the moment quality became universally accessible.
But a larger part is fear. Branding has become a spectator sport. Every significant identity change is immediately processed by the internet — analysed, graded, mocked, defended, and relitigated in public within hours of launch. That visibility has changed how brand decisions get made inside organisations. Not because the internet is smarter than it used to be, but because the downside now arrives in public, fast.
A brand that changes nothing generates no reaction. A brand that changes something can generate a front page. So brands have become risk-averse. And risk-averse branding produces forgettable branding. And forgettable branding is the actual death.
Here is the distinction that matters: controversy is survivable. Forgettable is not. A brand people argue about is a brand people can see. A brand nobody reacts to has already disappeared — it just does not know it yet.
The real risk:
In a market where everything is technically correct, the brands that default to safety become invisible. Noise fades. Invisibility compounds.
We wrote an entire piece on what is driving the sameness, with the research to back it up.
The wrong lesson from Cracker Barrel and Jaguar
Two rebrands defined how the industry talked about identity risk in 2024, and the industry took the wrong lesson from both of them.
Cracker Barrel introduced a new logo in August 2024 that removed the barrel — the literal referent of the brand's own name — from its visual identity. The response was immediate and severe. Restaurant traffic dropped 8% in the weeks following the announcement and fell as much as 10% in the worst week. The brand lost approximately $262 million in market value between August and October. By October 2024, Cracker Barrel had reversed the rebrand entirely and returned to the original logo. Investors cheered. The stock recovered.
Jaguar launched its rebrand in November 2024 to a reaction that was louder still. CARMA, a media intelligence firm, tracked the sentiment impact: positive sentiment fell from 23.1% to 8% following the campaign launch. Negative sentiment rose from 21% to 40.3%.
Every brand watching these two stories took the same lesson: controversy is dangerous. Do not stick your neck out.
The lesson they should have taken:
Cracker Barrel's failure was not controversy. It was that the brand destroyed its most distinctive asset — the barrel — the element its most loyal customers were emotionally attached to. Destroying a distinctive asset is not the same as being bold. Jaguar is a brand in genuine transition, moving from combustion engines to electric vehicles and targeting an entirely new buyer profile. Whether the execution served that brief is a reasonable debate. Whether other brands should respond by retreating to the safest possible identity is not.
The mistake in both cases was not making a choice. It was making the wrong choice for the wrong reasons, without a brief strong enough to defend it. That is not the same as being weird. Treating both as arguments against distinctiveness is exactly the reasoning that produces the epidemic of okay.
What the record actually shows
The longer record on brand boldness points in the opposite direction.
When Airbnb launched its Bélo symbol in 2014, the internet processed it loudly. The logo was mocked relentlessly and accused of resembling a series of things it probably should not look like. The brand did not retreat. It is now simply Airbnb: one of the most recognisable symbols in consumer technology, instantly understood without a word next to it. The conversation lasted weeks. The distinctiveness has lasted a decade.
Burger King's retro flat redesign, created by Jones Knowles Ritchie and launched in 2021, was met with strong opinions on launch. Four years later it is considered one of the most effective brand identity moves of the decade — globally consistent, immediately recognisable, nostalgic without being imitative. The debate has been settled by longevity.
Online noise dies down. Distinctiveness compounds. A brand that generates controversy survives the conversation. A brand that generates no reaction has nothing to survive.
Weird with discipline
The case for being weird is not a case for being chaotic, random, or loud for loudness's sake. It is a case for distinctiveness and intentionality: being weird with discipline.
Hendrick's Gin is the example you can run for decades. The brand built its entire visual identity on a Victorian engraving system — intricate apothecary-style illustration, a dark palette, the specific combination of cucumber and rose as its flavour signature. The aesthetic is unmistakably strange for a gin brand competing in a category that trends toward clean labels and modern simplicity. It is also unmistakable. You do not need the brand name to know it is Hendrick's. The retro quality of it (Victorian in register, deeply playful in sensibility, completely deliberate in execution) means it has aged backwards: more distinctive now than when it launched, because the category converged toward the contemporary and left Hendrick's alone in its own corner.
Olipop makes the same argument in a different register. The prebiotic soda brand leaned deliberately into joyful early-2000s maximalism: bright colour blocking, retro-illustrated characters that give each flavour its own distinct personality and feel, an aesthetic that would look completely at home on a shelf from twenty years ago. In a premium health beverage category that had converged almost entirely toward clean lines, muted palettes, and aspirational minimalism, Olipop chose to be loud. It chose a specific person — someone who associates feeling good with fun, not with restraint, and made an identity built around that person. That specificity is the source of the brand's recall.
Both brands made a choice that excluded people. Hendrick's is too esoteric for buyers who want something approachable and approachably modern. Olipop's maximalism is not for consumers who associate premium with minimal. That exclusion is not a failure of the brief. It is proof that the brief was working.
Want to see what weird with discipline looks like for SaaS brands?
The brief that makes it possible
Weird with discipline requires a brief that knows what it believes, who it is for, and what it is willing to exclude. Those are not comfortable decisions. They require someone in the room willing to say: this is not for everyone, and that is the point.
Most brand briefs are written to be approved, not to be defended. They accommodate the widest possible internal consensus, which produces the narrowest possible external distinctiveness. By the time a brief has passed through enough stakeholders to be agreed, the thing it is asking for is usually something nobody objects to — which is usually something nobody notices.
Most brand briefs operate in a narrow band of what is actually possible. Weird is not a risk category. It is a design direction, one that starts with a decision about who specifically the brand is for, what it is willing to look like to that person, and what it is comfortable not being for everyone else.
People do not know what they like until they see it. And often, before they like it, they react to it. That is not a reason to retreat to the middle. It is the cost of making something with a centre of gravity.
The question before a rebrand is not: what will generate the least reaction? The question is: what could this brand look like if we decided to be legible to a specific person, and accepted what that exclusion costs? The worst outcome is not that people argue about your new identity. The worst outcome is that nobody notices it at all.
TheBullseye Perspective
We work with SaaS brands at the point where they have outgrown their first identity and are deciding what to become. The brief conversation we have most often is not about what looks good. It is about what the brand is willing to exclude. Every identity we have seen cut through in the market — across categories and budget levels, was built on a brief that said: we are specifically for this person, and not for someone else. Brands that try to remain open to everyone produce work that connects with no one. Conviction is not a design deliverable. It is a brief decision. The design follows from it.
But you can fix it before it compounds. Book a conversation with TheBullseye.
Sources
- CARMA media intelligence. Jaguar rebrand sentiment tracking, November 2024. Reported in Marketing-Interactive: https://www.marketing-interactive.com/jaguar-sentiments-dip-bold-rebranding
- Restaurant Dive. 'Cracker Barrel traffic nosedived after logo backlash.' 2024. https://www.restaurantdive.com/news/cracker-barrel-traffic-down-10-percent-September-logo-backlash/802176/
- Airbnb. Belo logo launch, designed by DesignStudio. 2014.
- Burger King / Jones Knowles Ritchie. Brand identity redesign. 2021.
Nitya Shukla Paharia
Creative Director & Head of Brand
Leading creative & design at TheBullseye, solving for clarity-first storytelling for SaaS and AI companies. Operating at the intersection of narrative, design, and video to translate complex products into high-conversion content across GTM, product marketing, and brand systems. Focused on building design that doesn’t just look good, but drives understanding and decision-making.
FAQs
Safe branding is the practice of designing brand identities to be broadly appealing, inoffensive, and unlikely to generate negative reactions. It is risky in 2026 because the visual landscape has converged dramatically — democratised design tools and generative AI have raised the floor for quality so high that looking competent no longer differentiates a brand. In a market where everything is technically correct, the brands that default to safety become invisible. Controversy is survivable. Forgettable is not.
Cracker Barrel introduced a new logo in August 2024 that removed the barrel from its visual identity. Restaurant traffic dropped 8% in the weeks following the announcement and fell as much as 10% in the worst week. The brand lost approximately $262 million in market value between August and October 2024. By October 2024, Cracker Barrel reversed the rebrand and returned to its original logo. The failure was not caused by controversy — it was caused by destroying the barrel, a distinctive asset its most loyal customers were emotionally attached to.
Jaguar's 2024 rebrand generated significant controversy. CARMA, a media intelligence firm, tracked a fall in positive sentiment from 23.1% to 8% and a rise in negative sentiment from 21% to 40.3% after the campaign launched. Many brands interpreted this as evidence that bold identity choices are dangerous. The more accurate reading is that Jaguar is a brand in genuine transition — from combustion to electric vehicles, targeting an entirely new buyer profile — which requires a real creative pivot. The question is whether the execution served that brief, not whether other brands should retreat to safe identities as a result.
The evidence suggests short-term controversy does not reliably harm long-term brand performance when the identity is genuinely distinctive. Airbnb's Belo symbol was widely mocked when it launched in 2014 and is now one of the most recognisable symbols in consumer technology. Burger King's retro flat redesign by Jones Knowles Ritchie was debated strongly on launch in 2021 and is now considered one of the most effective brand identity moves of the decade. Online noise dies down. Distinctiveness compounds.
Brand distinctiveness is the quality that makes a brand immediately recognisable without its name present — a visual system, a colour, a tone, a set of assets designed to survive in memory rather than just look correct in a pitch deck. It is different from differentiation, which is a category claim. In a market where design tools and generative AI have made visual competence universal and free, distinctiveness is the primary way a brand can earn attention and recall. Hendrick's Gin is distinctive. You know it without reading the label. That recognition is built through decades of consistent, conviction-led creative — not through consensus.
Weird with discipline means building a brand identity that is deliberately and intentionally distinctive — not random or chaotic, but specific and consistent in a way that sets it apart from category defaults. Hendrick's Gin built a Victorian engraving visual system that is unmistakable in its category. Olipop built an early-2000s maximalist aesthetic with distinct illustrated characters for each flavour, standing apart in a premium health beverage category that had converged toward minimalism. In both cases the strangeness serves a brief: it is legible to a specific person and accepts that it will not be for everyone else.
A brief for a distinctive identity requires three decisions that most brand briefs avoid. First, who specifically this brand is for — not a broad demographic target but a specific person with a specific relationship to the category. Second, what the brand is willing to exclude — which people, which aesthetics, which category conventions it is choosing not to pursue. Third, what the brand believes specifically enough that someone could disagree with it. A brief that has been through enough stakeholders to have no edges is a brief that will produce a forgettable identity. The brief is the work.
The most common branding mistake SaaS companies make is optimising for inoffensiveness rather than distinctiveness. SaaS brand decisions are typically made by committee, which produces internal consensus and external invisibility. The second most common mistake is treating the visual identity as a design deliverable rather than a brief decision. Distinctive SaaS brands — the ones that cut through in a market where every competitor looks competent and clean — are built on briefs that decided what to exclude before they decided what to make.
