Blanding: The Risk of Erasing Distinction - Burberry.

History gives brands their soul. Strip it away in the name of modernity, and you’re left with wallpaper.

The Nostalgia Trap

History is messy, imperfect, and often inconvenient. It’s also what makes a brand unforgettable. Fans love the quirks: the awkward old crest, the clunky logo, the stubborn refusal to change. But commercial teams see dead weight. They want global expansion, slick partnerships, scalable assets.

That tension defines branding today: what audiences treasure as identity, businesses frame as inefficiency. One side guards memory; the other chases growth. Both are right, and both can be dangerously wrong.

Design at the Fault Line

Rebrands are never neutral. They happen in public, and the audience is always loud. Every time a new logo drops, the reaction is instant: You’ve sold out. It looks like everything else. What happened to character?

The outrage is emotional, but the boardroom logic is brutal. When growth stalls, the safe play is to migrate toward the familiar. To look like the rest of the market. To reassure investors. That’s how distinctiveness gets sanded down.

The Myth of “No Risk”

Critics like to say bland redesigns are risk-free. That’s false. Throwing away decades of built equity is a massive gamble. You’re betting that sameness will scale faster than uniqueness.

The irony is that what feels outdated today often becomes rare tomorrow. Distinctiveness ages well. Sameness doesn’t. Erasing it isn’t a safe choice, it’s a miscalculation brands can’t easily undo.

History vs. Utility

Not all history is sacred. Logos once mocked as clumsy or irrelevant can later be rebranded as “authentic.” Like old buildings, they gain charm with time. But heritage also hides cracks. Some identities don’t scale across digital platforms, global markets, or product lines.

This is the hard calculation: preserve what makes you irreplaceable, or chase the efficiencies that make you marketable. Both paths come with loss. Both require courage.

The Burberry Effect

Burberry’s 2018 rebrand is the case study. Out went the equestrian knight and heritage logotype. In came a generic sans-serif. The move screamed modernity, and looked like every other luxury brand.

The backlash was immediate. A 160-year-old house had traded distinction for conformity. What made Burberry singular was stripped away, replaced with the design equivalent of background noise.

By 2023, Burberry reversed course. The knight and heritage typography returned. Not as nostalgia, but as recognition: distinctiveness matters. In chasing global scale, the brand nearly erased the very soul that made it powerful.

Why Blandness Wins Too Often

The problem isn’t that designers and CMOs don’t understand distinctiveness. It’s that blandness is easier to sell. Safe decks close deals. Familiarity feels like certainty. Agencies bottle “relevance” as a formula, clients pay, and sameness spreads.

Everything factual gets weighted more than everything subjective. Risk gets modeled out. Character gets rationalized away. The result: brands that look credible but feel interchangeable. Wallpaper logos for wallpaper companies.

Bottom Line

Rebranding is always a bet. Strip too much history and you erase distinction. Ignore the need for change and you calcify into irrelevance. The real danger isn’t risk, it’s pretending the decision is safe.

Burberry’s swing from heritage to bland and back again proves the point: history and modernity are not enemies, but the balance is fragile. Distinctiveness is the rarest currency a brand owns. Lose it, and no amount of “strategic alignment” will buy it back.

Smart design doesn’t smooth out the tension. It sharpens it, because tension is where brands stop being background and start being noticed.