Discover your brand’s Grip Gap

Let’s get one thing straight: Most brands don’t become irrelevant because they run out of things to say. They become irrelevant because they stop doing anything with what they’ve already got.

Look down. Whatever made your brand matter in the first place is sitting right there in your hand. It’s hard-earned, often built over years or even generations before you. And you’re gripping it so carefully that you’ve forgotten it’s meant to be used.

The space between what a brand owns and what it’s actually doing with it is where relevance goes to rot. I like to call that devilish distance “The Grip Gap” — the gap between what you’re holding and what you’re willing to do with it. And closing the gap has a lot less to do with finding the next big idea than it does with strategic nerve.

Every brand with a pulse has something worth fighting for. Maybe it’s a product truth competitors can’t touch, a hard-won equity, a legacy, or an edge that makes the brand unmistakably itself. That’s what you’re holding — the thing your brand has, the thing to hang onto.

But having something valuable and behaving like it matters are two very different things.

Too often, brands turn their equity into a museum piece. They polish it, protect it, put it in a deck, and then proceed to behave like everyone else. They repeat the same safe stories, make the same conventional creative, and show up in the same predictable places. And then they wonder why nobody is paying attention. That space — between the real advantage and the increasingly beige behavior — is the Grip Gap.

That’s how good brands go beige.

But brand equity was never meant to be admired. It’s not a trophy you protect. It’s your permission to play — and play to win, for that matter. The second you stop using your brand equity, you stop earning it.

The dangerous part about that is that it doesn’t feel dangerous at all. There’s no dramatic fall from relevance or brand obituary. You just slowly bore your way out of relevance until one day your brand is everywhere — and nobody sees it.

Closing the Grip Gap means knowing when to hold on and when to let go.

First, get a grip.

Grip is knowing exactly what made your brand matter in the first place — and refusing to let go of it just because something shinier came along. That doesn’t mean preserving your brand in amber. It means knowing the difference between what’s old and what’s yours. Whatever your brand has that competitors would kill to own, grip it.

Then, get gutsy.

Holding onto your equity isn’t enough. You must wield it like a weapon. Guts is the nerve to turn what you own into something people can’t ignore. Whether that’s killing the safe creative or putting an old truth in a new place, you should be okay with being disagreed with. Because owning something distinctive and doing nothing distinctive with it is a hell of a waste.

Getting a grip is one thing. Getting gutsy once is another. Doing both repeatedly? That takes tenacity, and it’s a terribly hard habit to keep. The pressure to let go never stops: new leadership, competitors, trend reports declaring everything you know is officially dead. There will always be a tempting reason to abandon what made you distinctive.

And having guts doesn’t get any more comfortable with practice. Bold work will always make rooms nervous, definitive claims will always need someone willing to sign their name to them, and standing out will always mean accepting that not everyone is going to like what they see. But then again, that’s show business.

A bold move turns heads, but it’s tenacity that turns the business. Equity you don’t use doesn’t just sit there — it atrophies. Like a muscle, it weakens the second you stop using it. And the minute you do, the Grip Gap starts roaring open again.

The goal isn’t to keep reinventing your brand every time the world moves. It’s to keep finding more interesting ways to be unmistakably yourself — and relentlessly relevant.