Brand strategy

Brand Drift: the gap that opens before the numbers move

Jacqueline Tarry · 16 July 2026 · 8 min read

We've been thinking a lot about what we're calling "Brand Drift" and the impact it has — often slowly — on brands over time. Sales are slower than they used to be. Marketing costs more and converts less. And somewhere in your category there's a name you'd barely heard of two years ago, and your customers are choosing it more often, even the ones who still choose you.

If that sounds familiar, most teams read it as a marketing problem. Spend harder. Rebuild the website. Brief a new agency on paid. More activity, better executed, and the numbers should come back.

Usually they don't, because the problem isn't how well the marketing is working. It's a gap that has opened underneath it.

The gap nobody decides to create

The gap works like this. Over time, a distance grows between what a market now wants and what a brand still offers. Nobody decides it. The brand keeps doing what worked. The market moves on. And in the space between the two, the brand slowly stops being the obvious choice for the people it was built to serve. We call it Brand Drift, and it's a relevance problem long before it's a revenue one.

Relevance is invisible on a dashboard

The hard part is that relevance is invisible on a dashboard. What you see instead are the symptoms, arriving late: sales softening, acquisition getting more expensive, campaigns that landed last year going quiet, a competitor you didn't rate gaining ground, growth that won't accelerate however hard you push. Every one of those is a lagging indicator. By the time they're loud enough to raise in a leadership meeting, the Brand Drift behind them started months earlier.

You can watch it happen in public

Estée Lauder spent decades as the name in prestige beauty. Then the market moved, and the company was slow to move with it. Its share price fell more than 80% from its 2022 high, and in 2025 it announced the need to spend between $1.2 and $1.6 billion dollars on a multiyear turnaround.

Simply said, we lost our agility... we hadn't moved quickly enough on new channels, markets and price tiers, and too often ended up behind trend.— Stéphane de la Faverie, CEO, Estée Lauder

The products didn't get worse. The brand stopped keeping pace with the people it was there to serve.

Nike is the same story, further along. Still the biggest name in sport, still making excellent products, and still losing ground to On and Hoka, two brands most runners couldn't have named a few years ago. Each found an opening Nike had left. Hoka built its name on maximal cushioning, thick, plush soles that started with trail and long-distance runners and spread to everyday ones who simply wanted their feet to feel good. On came from another direction, Swiss design and a look that worked as well on the street as on a run, until people were buying it as much for style as for sport. Nike was slow to answer either, and its market share has slipped three years running while both grow double digits.

Neither of these is a story about a bad product or team. That's the point. Relevance doesn't erode because a brand gets worse. It erodes because the market gets different, and the brand doesn't notice in time.

Catch it early and the gap is small

The good news is that Brand Drift is one of the easiest problems to catch early, if you go looking before the numbers force you to. It leaves a trail. You can see it in where your audience's attention is going, in how the category is shifting around you, in whether the brand still looks like itself or like everyone else, and in the early commercial signals that show up well before the annual results do. Catch those early and you can close the gap while it's still small, which is far easier work than clawing back ground you've already lost.

• Where is your audience's attention moving?
• How is the category shifting around you?
• Does the brand still look like itself, or like everyone else?
• What early commercial signals are showing up before the annual results?

That's why Lunar exists

That's the whole reason Lunar exists. We help brands catch Brand Drift early and act while there's still room to. If you want a quick read on where you stand, our five-minute Brand Drift scorecard is built to surface the warning signs fast. If the answer is worth going deeper on, our audit digs into what's actually driving the drift and gives you a clear call on what to do about it now, not a menu of options to weigh up later.

The question to put to your team

So here's what to put to your team. If your category has quietly moved, and the numbers won't tell you for another two or three quarters, how would you know today?