Brand Strategist Says Premium Brands Should Sell Meaning, Not Specs
A brand consultancy argues that luxury and premium companies lose their edge when they lead with product specifications instead of meaning, and that most firms abandon rebrands during the difficult transition period when sales soften.
Premium brands that compete on specifications are ceding the one advantage machines cannot replicate, according to a brand strategist who argues that meaning, not product detail, should lead every campaign. Sooyoung Cho, founder and chief executive of the consultancy the bread and butter, makes the case in a new essay built around a project for a high-end eyeglass lens manufacturer whose marketing had long relied on refractive index figures, precision measurements and comparative charts.
Cho's firm spent months developing a rebrand for the client, which she describes as producing a product measurably the best in its category. The proposal mapped personas of high-end consumers and designed the brand they aspired to, positioning the company as the Hermès of lenses. The concept, called «profound vision,» treated the lens as a way of seeing rather than a product to describe. Instead of photographing the product, the firm photographed stone close enough that the grain recorded how long each plane took to form, and a leaf's ridge close enough to see how the line was made. The message was that the company pays the kind of attention customers do not have time to pay, and that attention is what they are buying.
The client has not made the jump. The work was received well and parts were produced, but the specification sheet came back. Cho attributes the retreat to a structural problem: the people who would have carried the decision are measured quarterly on a change that pays back over years. During the middle phase of any such transition, she writes, the old language switches off before the new one takes hold, sales soften, and someone in a quarterly review asks why the numbers dipped. The honest answer is that the dip is the price of the transition, and few organizations hold their nerve through it. Most reach for the specification sheet because specifications are safe, defensible and legible to a sales team.
To address that gap, Cho now sets one condition before creative work begins: the chief executive must be in the room where decisions are argued, not in a review at the end. A rebrand changes what a company says while it is selling, she argues, which makes it a revenue decision rather than a marketing decision. No marketing director can authorize a decision whose downside lands on this quarter and whose upside arrives after they have been reassigned. With the chief executive present, the dip becomes a shared decision rather than one person's risk, and everyone below stops hedging.
Cho lists three conditions companies should weigh before attempting the leap. The first is heritage translated for the present: find the choice from the company's past that still explains what it stands for, such as a standard it set, a shortcut it refused or a process it kept when cheaper options appeared, and say it plainly. The second is that the brand has to stand in the direction where it is pointing. If the people running a premium brand know their customer only from research decks, the work will not land, because taste is not a set of data points and a photographer cannot be directed toward a world the leader has never entered. The third is elasticity: a brand has to appear in a dozen places that behave nothing alike, holding the core fixed while letting storylines stretch.
The essay closes on a market irony. The product language these brands are trying to leave behind is what machines now generate at no cost and in volume. Cho cites an April 2025 Ahrefs analysis of 900,000 newly created web pages, which found that 74% contained AI-generated content. When every company can publish unlimited product descriptions, those descriptions stop being the differentiator. Meaning, she concludes, is the remaining move a machine cannot make on a brand's behalf.
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