The brand lag: why some innovations ignite culture and others drop off the radar

Lessons on how to keep your brand and product synced as your customer base grows.

This is OFF Brand – a newsletter by Koto. We are a team of brand specialists and optimists made up of designers, strategists, writers and art directors based in five major cities around the world.

Here you’ll find our point of view on things we’ve learnt, heard and experienced while interacting with a huge range of global brands day in, day out. You’ll come away hopefully having learnt something new and with a bunch of tips and techniques for your armory. As ever, there’ll be plenty of examples from the best of the best (and all the rest).

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In this edition of OFF Brand, we’re looking at the role branding plays in the adoption of new products and services – what it can do, what it can’t, and how that role shifts as an innovation moves from niche curiosity to mainstream habit.

Introducing ‘the brand lag’

Work in branding long enough and you’ll get pretty good at spotting when a product is built to last. Like branding’s own Shark Tank, from early conversations we can predict the sure-fire winners; the ones poised to shift behavior, reshape a category, become part of daily life…or the ones we’ll never hear from again.

Ingenuity doesn’t guarantee success. After the hype, the funding and the first flow of customers, a bright young business can just…fizzle. When that happens, the post-mortem usually starts and ends with the product. The product team builds something, the marketing team sells it, and when adoption flatlines everyone blames the roadmap.

But it’s almost always a brand problem too. Specifically, it happens when your brand and your product fall out of step, when your product pushes towards a mainstream audience while your brand stays stubbornly rooted where it started. Or the reverse: a brand positions for the mainstream before the product has earned the right to be there.

At Koto, we call this ‘the brand lag.’ And you can see exactly why it happens: your early brand identity feels precious. The scrappy origin story, the insider language, the cult energy, is what made it work, and it’s hard to know when to let it go. Harder still when the people who got you here, your earliest fans, are still cheering you on in the language you’ve always spoken. But here’s the problem: the very things that made you catnip to that first audience are often what’s blocking the next one from walking through the door.

This newsletter is all about avoiding this trap: how you can update your brand in line with your growth, and find your next customers in the process.

• First, a little theory: why some innovations sweep through society while others fall at the first hurdle.

• Then, the two brand pivots that matter most: how to build early heat, and how to scale without losing what made you interesting.

• After that, an honest look at what branding can’t fix, and the products that found out the hard way.

• Finally, a practical playbook to diagnose your own brand lag, and how to get ahead of it.

Making the first leap

Think about the last time someone tried to get you to try something new, like an app they swore would change your life, or a restaurant that didn’t look like much from the outside. Chances are your first instinct might have been mild resistance, maybe even suspicion.

We are, at our core, creatures of habit, wired to treat novelty as risk, and risk as something to be managed carefully. Which makes it all the more remarkable that any new product manages to break through at all.

So how do they? In 1962, sociologist Everett Rogers set out to answer exactly that. His theory of diffusion of innovations – now so widely referenced it’s practically a branding cliché – maps the rate at which new ideas and technologies move through society. The key insight wasn’t just that adoption takes time, but that different people adopt innovations for completely different reasons, at completely different moments. Rogers split the population into five groups: innovators (2.5%), early adopters (13.5%), early majority (34%), late majority (34%) and laggards (16%), each one requiring a different kind of permission to say yes.

Rogers identified five questions consumers ask themselves when considering something new. How a business answers each one shapes how fast adoption happens, or whether it happens at all.

• Advantage: does it actually work better than what I already have? Dyson’s cyclonic, bagless vacuum design made the product’s advantage immediately visible: customers could literally see the dust collecting.

• Compatibility: does it fit my life, my values, my sense of self? Early Tesla answered this not just for its own buyers but for the entire EV market, using branding to blend sustainability with slick design so that choosing one felt less like buying a car and more like choosing a future-facing identity. The fact it hit a perfect price point didn’t harm things, either.

• Complexity: is it easy to use and keep using? Anyone who remembers their first Uber ride recalls the slight disbelief of stepping out without paying. That frictionless product feel, combined with aggressive early discounting, is what turned first-timers into habitual users.

• Observability: will this make me look good, or will I look foolish? Monzo’s hot coral bank card turned this into a branding masterclass. Handing it over in a bar signalled membership of a new kind of club, and word of mouth did the rest.

• Trialability: can I test this before I commit? OpenAI launched ChatGPT as a free research preview, removing the barrier to entry almost entirely. One hundred million users signed up within two months.

That each of those five companies went on to be genuine game-changers is no accident. By landing on the right combination of product features, brand smarts and marketing instincts (the coral card, the frictionless ride, the free trial), they managed to pull in an early audience and, crucially, hold on to momentum as they grew.

But it’s easier said than done. In 1991, Geoffrey A. Moore identified what he called a ‘chasm’ sitting between the early adopter and the early majority. It’s the single most treacherous gap for any business to cross: the early fans are on board, the hype has done its job, and then what? The crossing has to happen for a business to get real purchase in broader culture, and without that crossing, even the most promising products can quietly disappear.

It’s a challenge product teams, brand leads and marketers have wrestled with ever since: the levers that excite an early adopter – novelty, risk, the thrill of being first – are almost entirely different from what makes a sceptical, time-poor mainstream consumer stop and pay attention. Where early adopters want to feel ahead of the curve, the majority wants reassurance that something will slot seamlessly into their existing life without drama or disruption.

What makes this hard is that, in many cases, the product itself doesn’t meaningfully change, so it’s the brand that has to do the work of speaking to completely different psychological needs at different moments, without losing its identity in the process.

In the next section, we look at how to do exactly that: how to use branding to take your product across the two critical phases of the adoption curve without falling into the brand lag trap.

The phases

The adoption curve demands different things from your brand at each stage. Below is our blueprint for navigating the two that matter most.

Phase 1. Building the hype

Every product or service begins its life as a stranger, but somewhere out there are the people who will find it first. They are your innovators and early adopters, and they’re not waiting to be convinced so much as looking for something worth believing in early. At this stage the brand has two jobs: make the unfamiliar feel worth the risk, and give the right people a reason to feel ahead of the curve for choosing it.

That starts with radical clarity – a compelling USP and a clear origin story. When Waymo launched its first brand campaign in 2017, it led with a question: Let’s Talk Self-Driving. Partnering with safety and disability advocacy groups, it anchored autonomous vehicles in human benefit rather than engineering achievement. Airbnb’s early brand story did the same work in a single image: two founders charging strangers to sleep on air mattresses on their apartment floor during a San Francisco design conference. A neat solution to a real problem, told simply, that made the use case immediately obvious.

1X Technologies took an equally deliberate approach to introducing Neo, their humanoid home robot. Shot on grainy Super-8 film in warm, lived-in interiors – a robot loading a dishwasher, watering plants – the brand launch video looked nothing like a tech reveal. Advanced technology, presented in a context that already felt familiar.

Getting noticed is one thing. Getting talked about is another. The most effective early-stage brands target a small but vocal community and give them something worth sharing – a signal of belonging, a badge of membership. From day one, Strava built its community through the shared culture and rituals of competitive cycling, adopting insider language like KOM and QOM – King and Queen of the Mountains – borrowed directly from the professional peloton. Tapping into the camaraderie of elite cycling tours gave Strava a two-fold advantage: motivating users and fostering a sense of belonging.

Zoox, Amazon’s purpose-built robotaxi company, earned early attention through wit. Their San Francisco OOH campaign – How to Zoox – used deadpan instructions to demystify a genuinely unfamiliar experience. “How to: call shotgun in a Zoox. Relax, it’s all shotgun.”

Sometimes the most powerful social proof is simply visibility. Bird scooters didn’t launch with a brand, they just appeared on sidewalks, outside stations, or propped against railings.

When entering markets with existing trust deficits, borrowing positive brand association gets you there faster. Polestar leaned into Scandinavian design codes and Volvo’s safety heritage on arrival in global markets, because trust takes time and association is the fastest shortcut.

The final lever is trialability – the lowest barrier to entry you can manage. When Miro broke through during COVID, digital whiteboarding was still an unfamiliar concept for most teams – the kind of product that had to be experienced to be understood. A generous free tier and ready-made templates removed the friction entirely, letting teams adopt it immediately as remote work forced new ways of collaborating. The product sold itself, once people could actually get their hands on it.

A word of caution, though. The same qualities that make a brand magnetic to early adopters can become a ceiling on future growth. Liquid Death built one of the most talked-about brand identities in recent memory – heavy metal aesthetics, irreverent humour, ‘murder your thirst’ – and it worked brilliantly to cut through and build a cult following. But that edge is also a constraint; the mainstream that drinks Evian won’t be vibing with the severed heads. Liquid Death’s earliest fans, who love it precisely for what it is, may not follow if it ever tries to broaden. Building hype is the easy part. Building hype that doesn’t trap you is the real trick.

Phase 2. Establishing the habit

While your first challenge is to bring in the early adopters, holding onto them while you grow is an entirely different one, and this is where brand lag does its most damage. Your product may be ready for a mainstream audience, but your brand is still speaking the language of niche early adopters.

When this happens, the temptation is to wipe the slate clean and cross the chasm with a new brand aimed at the mainstream. But this is a common and costly mistake; to cast off what made you special risks alienating your early fanbase in favour of customers that don’t yet care.

The goal is to broaden the appeal of your brand without losing its soul. The moment your first audience feels betrayed by your growth is the moment your brand has moved too far, too fast.
So what does getting it right actually look like? The brands that navigate this moment successfully share one quality: they stop selling their product and start selling the life it enables.

Shift the narrative. The mainstream doesn’t prioritize researching and acquiring innovative tech – it is concerned with solutions to problems it already recognizes. When Google acquired Nest, the smart thermostat stopped being a cool piece of hardware and became something more useful: a friendly, reliable energy advisor for anyone who’d ever been confused by a heating bill. Ring, an Amazon company, made the same move, repositioning from “caller ID for the front door” – a tech feature – to “reducing neighborhood crime” – a universal human concern. Airbnb reframed the anxiety of staying in a stranger’s home into a simple idea: belonging anywhere, a shift Koto’s founders worked closely on over a decade ago.

Evolve your brand assets, don’t abandon them. The pink moustache that adorned Lyft’s early fleet was a stroke of early-adopter genius: playful, human, impossible to ignore. But a brand that wants to become everyday urban infrastructure can’t wear a costume forever. When Lyft turned to Koto as it entered a more mature phase – expanding into autonomous driving, launching Lyft Silver, and acquiring FREENOW – we sharpened rather than reinvented. The moustache went, but the pink stayed, and with it the warmth that had always set Lyft apart.

Indeed, brands with flexibility and a strong sense of self baked in from day one do well at crossing the chasm. Another Koto client, BackMarket, softened the edges of its anarchic brand identity while keeping its rebellious tone of voice to bring pre-loved electronics to the mainstream. Its subversive ‘downgrade now’ campaign may be pitched at a mass audience, but the values it expresses, and tone with which it expresses them, remain consistent.

Make it culturally relevant. The brands that successfully cross the chasm stop asking people to adopt a technology and start embedding themselves in the way people already see themselves. Oura made this shift by moving away from bio-hacking language entirely, repositioning the ring as connected jewellery, something you’d wear for how it looks as much as what it tracks. Google Glass failed because it did the opposite, presenting itself as a piece of engineering in search of a social context. Meta learned that lesson, partnering with Ray-Ban for lifestyle credibility and Oakley for sports performance, then placing the glasses on cultural figures like Doja Cat – people whose taste does the persuading, so the technology doesn’t have to.

Widen your reach without losing your roots. Duolingo built habits through gamified UX design choices and Duo the owl as a brand mascot making language learning feel like fun rather than a chore. Zoe, the personalized nutrition platform, having built scientific credibility with its core audience, extended its reach through grocery partnerships and its own Science & Nutrition podcast, meeting new audiences on their own territory.

When the barrier is practical rather than psychological, address it practically: Peloton widened its market by launching a rental scheme; and Tesla built its own charging infrastructure to remove the anxiety that had been holding EV adoption back.

Phase 3. Brand for dominance

Rogers puts the start of the late majority at 50% market share; in practice, depending on your category, you might hit dominance earlier. At this point branding shifts from conversion to maintenance, and a different kind of brand lag becomes the risk. The question is no longer how to grow your audience, but how to keep faith with the one you have.

Organize and unify. Amazon’s story is a masterclass in the brand lag that can accumulate at scale. Founded on a single idea – unlocking the power of internet commerce – it grew over 30 years into something vast and sprawling: products, services, devices, health, grocery, entertainment, and a constellation of sub-brands, endorsed brands and independent acquisitions.

The Amazon brand became fractured, hard to execute, and inconsistent. Customers moving through the Amazon ecosystem couldn’t always be sure what they were getting, or didn’t realise they were in an Amazon product at all. Koto partnered with Amazon on what became the most ambitious brand evolution in the company’s history: building a unified architecture across every touchpoint, a new typeface in Ember Modern, a refined logo, a disciplined colour system, and design standards that could scale across every market and product line. The result is a brand as confident as it is human: ‘Delivered with a smile.’

Stay authentic at scale. Weekly community event Parkrun has maintained its grassroots feel across global growth by never losing sight of what it fundamentally is: a free, welcoming, weekly run for anyone who shows up. Nike’s recent clash with Parkrun shows how quickly scale can erode that kind of trust – and how badly a dominant brand can misread a room. In April 2026, Nike ran a copy-led marketing campaign at London-area Parkrun events, with ads carrying the slogan, “You didn’t come all this way for a walk in the park.” The backlash was swift. Parkrun’s community – built on the radically inclusive idea that, running or walking, it’s the taking part that counts – found the message tone deaf and elitist, especially from a global athletic organization supposedly rooted in inclusivity and participation. At scale, the gap between what a brand says and what it does becomes very easy to see.

Embed yourself in culture. KFC, established in 1930, has stayed current across nearly a century by understanding that cultural relevance is earned continuously, not declared once. Using a playbook that looks different in every market, in the UK they’ve built an entire worldview around a very British kind of disillusionment: politicians lie, the weather betrays you, crisp packets are half full, but chicken has never let you down. ‘Believe in Chicken’ moved KFC beyond product marketing into something closer to a cultural stance, sharp, funny, and unmistakably local. The fact that it’s a game-changing social-first strategy from a heritage bricks-and-mortar brand makes it even more impressive.

The reality check: when things still go wrong

Brand can accelerate adoption but it cannot rescue a product that hasn’t earned its place. Even with the best intentions and the strongest identity, early brand lag can snowball into full failure to launch. Here’s what to watch for:

The most straightforward trap is a confusing or mediocre product. When Google+ launched in 2011, millions signed up on the strength of the Google name alone, but the engineering-only product gave no compelling reason to abandon Facebook, and the halo effect faded fast. That it happened to one of the most powerful brands in the world only amplified the sense of failure and proved that even the biggest players aren’t immune.

Then there’s behavioral friction. Oculus and Meta Quest VR headsets launched with massive hype and credible brand backing, but users dropped off quickly. The hardware was bulky and the payoff didn’t justify the physical reality of strapping a headset to your face. Brand could generate the first wave of curiosity but couldn’t sustain behavior the product hadn’t earned. The Metaverse has wound up as an extraordinarily expensive lesson in the limits of brand alone.

Sometimes the problem is a brand too invested in what it already is to embrace what it could become. Kodak’s engineers built one of the world’s first digital cameras in 1975. When they presented it to management, the response was relative indifference. Film was ‘too profitable’ and too central to what Kodak believed itself to be. The brand had become so synonymous with a single medium that it couldn’t conceive of itself beyond it. Digital photography was not taken seriously, right up until the moment it became unavoidable, by which time the window of opportunity had closed.

Occasionally, the problem is simply poor timing. Vine launched in 2013 with a genuinely original idea of six-second looping video, built for mobile. It created a format, grew a community of inventive creators, and proved there was a real appetite for short-form video. But it arrived before the conditions existed to sustain it: smartphone cameras weren’t good enough, mobile data made frictionless viewing unreliable, and the creator economy hadn’t matured enough to reward the people making the content. Creators left for platforms that paid them, and Twitter, which owned Vine, didn’t move fast enough to keep them. By the time TikTok launched with its sophisticated recommendation algorithm and influencer engine, it benefited from the audience behaviors learned from Vine, which by this time had already bowed out.

The playbook

Every example in this piece, whether they crossed the chasm or not, comes down to the same question: did the brand evolve in step with the product, or did it lag behind? Here's a quick framework to help you diagnose where you are, and what to do about it.

The disruptor’s cheat sheet, for brands in the early stages of adoption

If your answer to these questions is ‘yes’, you’re on the right track.

1. Are you leading with emotional pull rather than technical detail? Even the earliest adopters want a simple story, a concrete USP, and a frictionless experience. If your marketing reads like a spec sheet, you’ve already lost them.

2. Have you named the fear and made your brand answer to it? Every new product asks something of its user. If you don’t know what’s stopping people from trying yours, you can’t address it. Identify the perceived risk, then make your brand the reason it doesn’t matter.

3. Does your brand give early adopters something worth talking about? Your first users are your most powerful marketing channel. Give them a story to tell, a signal to wear, a reason to feel like they got there first.

The grown-up’s cheat sheet, for brands ready to cross the chasm

Once again, the answer to these questions needs to be ‘yes’.

1. Do you have more to say than ‘we were first’? Novelty doesn’t travel to the mainstream. Easier, safer, more trustworthy does. If your brand story is still built around being the original, you’ve already lost the narrative to whoever came second and did it better.

2. Have you connected your product to a wider life? If you’re still speaking exclusively to a subculture, you’re capping your own growth. The goal is to broaden the conversation without abandoning the roots that made you credible in the first place.

3. Is your brand distinctive enough to stand out, but accessible enough to earn mainstream trust? This is the tightrope. Audit every element of your brand and ask honestly what’s still working for you, and what’s become a barrier to the next audience walking through the door.

4. Will it stretch? Does today’s brand provide a genuine platform for growth and mass appeal? Ensure you’re laying the foundation for long-term momentum, not prioritizing quick wins.

Go deeper with further reading

• Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A Moore

• Find Your Red Thread by Tamsen Webster

• How the Walkman, Game Boy, Liquid Death, and Pokémon Became Surprise Hits, published in HBR

Let us know what you think

Have you lived through a brand lag moment, or watched one happen from the outside? Hit reply and tell us. We’d also love to know: which brands do you think are most at risk of falling into the trap right now, and who’s navigating it well that we haven’t mentioned.

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See you in a few weeks for the next edition of OFF Brand!