Chapter 8: Managing the Brand Over Time

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

1. Explain why consistency of promise, not consistency of format, is what sustains a brand, even across the collapsed contexts of social media.
2. Use the brand review to detect gaps between brand identity and brand image and classify each gap as a communication failure, drift, or a discovered value.
3. Distinguish brand drift, brand evolution, and brand extension, and evaluate whether a proposed change keeps the brand’s promise.
4. Explain how reputation is built and damaged, and what a credible response to a broken promise requires.

The Most Relatable Girl on the Internet

In the summer of 2017, Emma Chamberlain was a sixteen-year-old in San Bruno, California, coming out of a sophomore year that had ended in depression. She started posting a video a day on YouTube (Morris, 2023). Her early uploads drew about a thousand viewers each. Then, on July 27, she posted a parody of the luxury shopping-haul genre. Filmed at a dollar store, it cataloged Frozen-themed cotton swabs and a fur-covered pen with mock reverence. The video reached half a million views (Lorenz, 2019).

“You have to start by emulating what’s out there,” she said later. “You can’t come out of the gate with a unique idea. But what happened was I got so sick of that. I grew up watching a lot of people that I envied, like, ‘Oh, I envy your bedroom,’ or ‘I envy your makeup collection,’ or I envy this, or I envy that. And I was like, ‘What happens if I go the complete opposite direction? What about somebody who you don’t envy, who you just want to be friends with?’” (Morris, 2023). That is a position: the opposite of what the creators she had grown up watching made, described as how a viewer would feel about her. The same choice shaped her editing: the sudden zooms, stamped text, and mid-edit reaction shots that became her signature.

Two years in, she had roughly eight million subscribers, one of the fastest-growing channels in the country, and a wave of imitators large enough that fans called the style “relatable YouTube” (Lorenz, 2019). The Atlantic ran a profile of her titled “Emma Chamberlain Is the Most Important YouTuber Today” (Lorenz, 2019). The New York Times went further, claiming that in two years she had “invented the way people talk on YouTube now, particularly the way they communicate authenticity” (Bromwich, 2019). By November, Time had put her on its 100 Next list, crediting her editing style with spawning “a subgenre of young creators following her lead” (Greenspan, 2019).

Read those same 2019 articles again, though, and the strain was already showing. The casual look was punishing work, twenty to thirty hours of editing per video, often in ten- and fifteen-hour stretches, roughly every week. It was enough to give a teenager back pain and a need for reading glasses (Bromwich, 2019). The imitation wave had a cost too. “It got to a point where I wasn’t in uncharted territory anymore and people were calling me unoriginal,” she said. “I definitely freaked out” (Bromwich, 2019).

Her brand’s premise was that she was ordinary, but her own success undermined it. The more popular her ordinary life became, the less ordinary it was, until she was a multimillionaire living in Los Angeles performing relatability she no longer lived. It became, as Rolling Stone put it, “hard to figure out how to evolve and to get ahead of her own trend” (Morris, 2023).

The weekly schedule held for two more years. In December 2021, with more than eleven million subscribers, she posted a video and then stopped. She later described the standard she had been serving as “the rules of an imaginary YouTube rule book,” and told Fast Company she needed to “step back and rethink what my strategy and formula needs to be” (Ifeanyi, 2022). During the pause she explained her reasoning on her podcast and in interviews (Ifeanyi, 2022).

What happened next is the reason she opens this chapter. The vlog never came back on schedule, but the brand continued in other formats. Her podcast, Anything Goes, delivers the same unscripted, self-interrupting candor, and in 2022 it was the third-most-listened-to podcast on Spotify (Morris, 2023). Her coffee company, soft-launched in 2019 and rebranded the following year, extends an association her audience had formed. In her words, “people saw me drinking coffee 4 million times a day and then started associating me with coffee” (Ifeanyi, 2022). In fashion, she went from attending her first Paris Fashion Week to interviewing on the Met Gala red carpet for Vogue in 2021, with the same unfiltered voice (Morris, 2023). Her partnerships moved upmarket, from a mall retailer to Louis Vuitton, Cartier, and Lancôme (Morris, 2023).

She had stated the direction before any of it happened, at the peak of the old brand, when Time asked about her future. “I think people are going to just hopefully see me maturing into an adult” (Greenspan, 2019). The YouTube channel she no longer posts to weekly still holds twelve million subscribers (Chamberlain, 2026).

Here’s the question this chapter asks you to consider. What, in all of that, stayed the same? The answer is the brand, and keeping it through six years of constant change is what managing a brand means.

8.1 The Promise and the Format

Chapter 7 defined a brand as expectations earned through repetition. This chapter is about the discipline of keeping them:

Definition: Brand consistency. Brand consistency is keeping the brand’s promise in every encounter, so that the expectations the audience has built continue to be met. It is consistency of promise, not sameness of content.

The definition’s second sentence separates the promise from the format. The format is what the audience sees: the weekly vlog, the review video, the newsletter. The promise is what the audience would say if you asked them what they come back for. The two feel identical to the creator, because the format is how the promise gets delivered, but they are not.

Chamberlain’s format was the vlog. Her promise, in her own words, was to be someone you’d want as a friend, not someone you’d envy (Morris, 2023). Her audience’s word for that was “relatable” (Lorenz, 2019). When the vlog became unsustainable, the promise continued in the podcast. As Rolling Stone put it, scripts were never part of the brand (Morris, 2023).

Losing the promise while keeping the format is more common. A creator posts on schedule long after the care that made the uploads worth watching is gone. Chamberlain said as much about her own last stretch of weekly videos. The pressure to post was producing work she wasn’t proud of (Ifeanyi, 2022).

Chapter 7 made the point that a brand is earned, not declared, and the same holds for any change to it. The promise is what the audience expects, so only they can say whether a change kept the brand the same. That question is tested like every claim about the audience in this book, with lens evidence. If the regulars who followed you into a new format still describe the venture the same way, the promise survived. If they say something changed, it did.

Marques Brownlee’s career shows what brand consistency looks like over the long term. In the fifteen years after his first video in 2009, everything about the operation changed. A bedroom webcam became a 7,000-square-foot studio, and a solo teenager became a fourteen-person company. Formats were added along the way, but the promise never changed. His standard, set when he went full-time in 2015, was to make videos he would want to watch (McCracken, 2023). Fifteen years of one kept promise is why his audience trusts his reviews.

Keeping a brand consistent is difficult, though. Chapter 5 introduced the imagined audience through the work of Alice Marwick and danah boyd. The same study identified a second problem:

Definition: Context collapse. Context collapse is what happens when social media collapses the separate audiences of a person’s life into one. The same post reaches the inner circle, the regulars, the strangers, and the critics at once.

In person, you adjust your self-presentation to the room. Everyone does, and nobody thinks of it as pretending. You bring a different version of yourself to a job interview, to trivia night, and to dinner with a partner. Online, however, every one of those audiences sees the same post. As Marwick and boyd (2011) put it, a platform “flattens multiple audiences into one” (p. 122), and this flattening creates two traps.

The first trap is writing for the “nightmare reader,” their term for the most sensitive audience member imaginable. A writer who keeps that reader in mind settles for a “lowest-common-denominator philosophy of sharing,” posting only what is safe for every possible reader (Marwick and boyd, 2011, pp. 125-126). The result is bland content that offends no one and positions nothing. Work aimed at everyone addresses no one in particular, as Chapter 6 showed.

The second trap is the opposite. The creator adopts a different persona for each audience segment, such as one voice for the strangers and another for the regulars. But the platform shows both voices to both groups. Authenticity, Marwick and boyd (2011) argue, is judged by the audience. A creator shifting between two selves struggles to come off as authentic to either (p. 124).

The answer to both traps is the document you wrote last chapter. A positioning statement is one promise, specific enough to serve your niche, stable enough that every audience sees the same person. Chamberlain’s audiences show this. The viewers who found her as teens in 2017, the fashion editors who met her at the Met, and the strangers who know her only as a coffee brand all recognize the same person today. That’s not an accident but the visible result of one promise kept with every audience.

8.2 Three Ways a Brand Changes

Time will change your brand. The only question is whether the changes are chosen by you or happen to you. This section gives you the vocabulary for telling the difference: brand drift, brand evolution, and brand extension.

Definition: Brand drift. Brand drift is the slow, unplanned movement of a venture away from the position it claims, one reasonable-seeming decision at a time.

What distinguishes brand drift is that it is not intentional. Each movement away from the brand’s position seems justified at the time. The algorithm rewarded one video, so you made three more like it. A sponsor asked for something just off your position, but it seemed like easy money, so you went along with it. The pressures that create drift are the platform incentives you audited in Chapter 4, and they are constant.

Two cautions before you diagnose drift everywhere. First, drift is not growth. A venture can expand enormously while still holding a position. Second, drift is measured, not felt. It’s the distance between what your positioning statement promises and what a stranger would conclude from your recent work. Feelings of drift are unreliable, which is why you should check for drift on a schedule rather than trust yourself to notice it.

Definition: Brand evolution. Brand evolution is deliberate change to the brand, based on evidence and the creator’s goals, and communicated to the audience.

The same change to a brand can be drift or evolution, depending on how it happened. Three questions separate the two:

1. Was the change chosen? Brand evolution is a decision you can date, not an accumulation of small steps you discover afterward.
2. Is the change based on evidence or your goals? The decision should trace to evidence, whether from the three lenses or from the discovery cycle, or to a change in what you want from the venture. These are the same sources your positioning statement drew from.
3. Was the change communicated to the audience? The audience should hear the reasoning from you before or as the change happens. A change the audience has to detect on their own looks like drift from the outside, no matter how deliberate it was from the inside.

Chamberlain’s change of position, from the relatable teenager of her vlogs to the adult thinking out loud on her podcast, passes all three questions (Morris, 2023). First, the change was chosen, since she decided to leave the relatable-teenager position behind and, in December 2021, ended the weekly vlog that delivered it. Second, it was based on her own goals, since she no longer lived the ordinary life the old position promised and wanted to make work she could stand behind. Third, the reasoning went out to her audience as it happened, on the podcast she had been running alongside the vlog since 2019 (Ifeanyi, 2022).

Fear of evolving is usually fear of losing the audience (“they’ll leave if I change”). YouTube’s own data contradicts that fear, however. When the company’s product team studied millions of channels, it found that channels averaged more views after a break than right before it, a finding the chief executive published in an open letter (Wojcicki, 2019). The reason is one Chapter 6 gave you. A niche is an audience served, not a topic covered, and the relationship with that audience survives a pause in the work.

The third kind of change takes the brand somewhere new while keeping the audience it has:

Definition: Brand extension. A brand extension takes a brand into a new product, venue, or kind of content, betting that the expectations the audience already holds will transfer.

The test of a brand extension is whether the audience could have predicted the new offer. Chamberlain Coffee passes it. After years of vlogs with coffee runs in them, Chamberlain says, the audience had seen her drinking coffee so often that the association formed years before the company did (Ifeanyi, 2022). Passing the test is only the beginning, though. The promise has to be kept in the brand extension, and Chamberlain set that standard herself. The company would not be “just something that I slap my name onto and stepped away from” (Ifeanyi, 2022).

The same discipline holds when the extension is new content rather than a product. One example is Binging with Babish, the channel you met in Chapter 6. Andrew Rea first won his intersection niche, the food of film and television. Then came the extensions, into general cooking instruction and eventually into a multi-host channel. The expansion followed audience evidence (Han, 2021; McGurk, 2022).

Note the sequencing in both cases, because it’s easy to get wrong. A new creator is often tempted to extend early, launching merchandise or a second channel before the audience has any transferable expectations, in the hope that the extension will build the brand. It cannot, though, because the success of an extension depends on expectations the audience already has. In other words, extension is a reward for consistency, not a substitute for it. Each extension is another place the promise can be kept or broken, so a venture that cannot keep its promise where it already is should not expand. (We’ll cover brand extension as a revenue strategy in Chapter 17.)

8.3 The Brand Review

To catch brand drift, you need to regularly check the brand image (the brand as the audience sees it) against the brand identity (the brand as you intend it), the comparison Chapter 7 introduced. The brand review does this in four steps:

1. Gather: Collect evidence by applying the three lenses from Chapter 5 to your work and the audience’s response to it, covering what you published since your last brand review. Observe what got watched, finished, and shared. Ask how regulars describe the venture in their own words. Listen to what comments and outside mentions say about you, unprompted.
2. Compare: Weigh what you gathered against the brand you intend, in two ways. (a) Compare the brand image with the brand identity. Does the audience’s response reflect the brand you chose? (b) Run the stranger test. Would a stranger who saw only your work since your last brand review arrive at the same positioning statement you wrote? To test this, find someone who has never seen your channel, show them your recent work, and ask them what they think the channel is about. (The test requires a stranger because your audience views new work through what they already know of the brand.)
3. Classify: A no to either question in the compare step is a gap, and each gap gets a verdict: communication failure, drift, or discovered value. A communication failure means the work is not communicating the brand identity you chose, and the fix is to revise the work. Drift means the work has unintentionally moved off position, and the fix is either to correct course or to make the move deliberate. Discovered value means the audience has found something in your work that your brand identity never claimed. It is not an error to correct but evidence for possible brand evolution.
4. Decide and record: The verdicts from the classify step point to three possible moves: correct, which attempts to bring the work back to the position you claim; evolve, which involves changing the position deliberately and telling the audience; or hold, which changes nothing. Holding is an appropriate move when the gap is small or when you want another period of evidence before acting on it. Whatever you decide, the positioning statement gets a dated note recording what the review found and what you decided. The next review then starts from that note (see the discovery cycle from Chapter 3). A positioning statement with no revision history after a year of work is a statement nobody is using.

Consider Threadbare, the repair-and-rescue knitting channel whose positioning statement you saw drafted in Chapter 7. Imagine it runs its first brand review six months in:

1. Gather: The three lenses turn up three findings. Watch time concentrates in the part of each video where a ruined project is diagnosed before it’s fixed. Regulars asked to describe the channel keep saying “she never makes you feel stupid.” And the comments affectionately call the fix-it episodes “autopsies.”
2. Compare: (a) The audience’s response fits the brand identity (patient repair-and-rescue) with one surprise: the identity never claimed diagnosing problems, but the audience clearly wants that. (b) The venture mostly passes the stranger test. The exception is three yarn-review videos from the last month, made because a supplier sent free samples.
3. Classify: The two gaps get different verdicts. The desire for videos that diagnose problems is a discovered value. The yarn reviews are drift (unplanned and off position).
4. Decide and record: Add diagnosing the damage, not only fixing it, to the brand identity as a candidate for brand evolution, and tell the audience in a short update video that every rescue will now start with the diagnosis. Drop the yarn reviews. Date the revision note.

If you have been keeping up with the three lenses, as Chapter 5 recommended, the brand review takes perhaps an hour, and you now know things about the venture that six more months of unexamined uploading would have hidden.

How often should you conduct a brand review? For most ventures, quarterly is a reasonable default. A venture that publishes several times a week may want to review monthly, because three months of work could lead to substantial drift. Some events call for a review ahead of schedule, such as a video that outperforms everything before it or a sponsor request that might weaken your position.

The Semester Project asks you to write a brand review plan, a one-page statement of how you will run the review, how often, and what would make you run one ahead of schedule.

8.4 What the Years Add Up To

When your work consistently matches your position, the audience learns to trust your brand. That accumulated trust is both the most valuable thing a venture owns and the easiest to damage:

Definition: Reputation. Reputation is what the audience collectively remembers of a brand’s kept and broken promises. It is passed on to new viewers through comments, mentions, and word of mouth before they have watched a single video.

Reputation builds slowly, because it’s made of kept promises, and promises take time to keep. It can be damaged in a day, because a single broken promise calls all the others into question. That asymmetry may seem unfair, but it’s what makes reputation informative. Chapter 7 stated that a brand value is real only if you would keep it even when keeping it costs you something. Reputation is the audience’s memory of which promises you kept and which you didn’t.

Reputation has to be earned, and, after a broken promise, re-earned. A clear creator-economy case of a brand surviving a broken promise is the Try Guys. The four-member group built its brand over eight years, from a media-company spinoff into an independent production company with nearly eight million subscribers. The test came in the fall of 2022, when a founding member’s workplace relationship violated the group’s stated values (Variety, 2022).

What makes the case instructive is not the offense but the response. The remaining members removed the founding member from work the day they learned of it. They engaged an HR professional to review the facts, and once the review was complete they formally removed the founding member as a manager and employee of the company. Then, when public speculation moved faster than their process, they explained the timeline on camera in a video addressed to their audience (Variety, 2022).

The Try Guys also incurred costs the audience could see. Finished videos were judged unreleasable and shelved. As Zach Kornfeld, one of the remaining members, put it, “That’s a decision that cost us lots of money. We will not be able to recoup that money, but it’s a decision we stand by proudly” (Variety, 2022). The audience accepted the response because it was consistent with the values the brand had always claimed and because it was expensive.

Three requirements for a credible response follow from the case. First, acknowledge what happened promptly, and assume the audience already knows, because in collapsed contexts it usually does. Second, act in a way that is consistent with the brand’s stated values, and follow a procedure the audience will trust. Third, bear a visible cost that proves the values were real. A response without a cost is a statement the audience has no reason to believe. (Sustained deception of an audience is a different subject, which we will discuss in Chapter 20.)

Summary

This chapter covered what happens to a brand after it has been defined. Brand consistency means keeping the same promise, not the same format. The format is how the promise is delivered, and the promise is what the audience comes back for. The two are separable, as Chamberlain’s arc showed over six years and Brownlee’s across fifteen. Under context collapse, every audience sees the same posts, so the promise has to hold for all of them at once (LO1). The brand review is the regular check that looks for gaps between the brand you intend and the brand the audience sees. Its four steps are to gather with the three lenses, compare the brand image with the brand identity and the work with the positioning statement, classify each gap as a communication failure, drift, or a discovered value, and then decide on and record a course of action (LO2). Brand drift is an unplanned accumulation of small steps away from the position, and brand evolution is change that is chosen, based on evidence or goals, and communicated. Brand extension takes the brand into a new offer the audience’s expectations would already predict, a reward for consistency rather than a substitute for it (LO3). Reputation is what the audience remembers of kept and broken promises. A credible response to a broken promise requires prompt acknowledgment, action consistent with stated values, and a visible cost that proves the values (LO4). The unit’s four documents now form one set: an audience profile, a niche statement, a positioning statement, and a brand review plan that keeps it all current.

Questions for Discussion and Application

1. Chamberlain’s brand promised that she was ordinary, and the promise worked until her success made her extraordinary. What were her options in 2021, and what would each have cost? Consider at least three options (including changing nothing).
2. Identify one brand you follow that changed without losing you. How did it change? Was the change announced?
3. Pick a creator who has been publishing for at least five years and compare their earliest available work with their most recent month. List every difference you can find, then classify each as drift, evolution, or extension using the questions from Figure 8.1. Which difference was hardest to classify, and what evidence would settle it?
4. A creator’s positioning statement promises “rigorous, beginner-safe strength coaching,” but their last two months are mostly reaction videos to fitness influencer drama, which outperform everything else on the channel. Run the brand review: what would each lens gather, what does the stranger test say, how would you classify the gap, and what are the two defensible decisions? What would each decision require the creator to say to the audience?

Semester Project

Write your brand review plan in one page. Address each of the following:

1. Schedule: How often you will run the brand review (quarterly is a reasonable default, monthly if you publish often).
2. Lens evidence: For each of the three lenses, the type of evidence you will gather and where you will find it for your venture.
3. Stranger test: Who you will ask (it should be someone who has never seen your channel), how many of your most recent videos or posts you will show them, and what you will ask them.
4. Triggers: Two triggers that would make you run a review ahead of schedule, such as a video that outperforms everything before it or a sponsor request that might weaken your position.

The brand review plan accompanies the three Unit 2 milestone documents, and the unit review checks that the four agree with one another.

References