Brand tuning: how small, coordinated shifts change the game
Wash your hands to win the gold
British cycling wasn’t always dominant. As James Clear recounts in Atomic Habits, the team’s transformation began when Sir Dave Brailsford introduced a simple, powerful idea: improve everything by 1%. Not just the typical training, but improved sleep routines, handwashing to reduce illnesses, even testing different massage gels to see which worked best.
He theorized that all these “marginal gains” were hidden opportunities to beat the competition—and that they would eventually “aggregate” to a big impact. He gave this approach the catchy name “aggregation of marginal gains.”
It worked astoundingly well, and the team started bringing home Olympic gold.
On a surface level, the takeaway for brand owners is pretty simple: pay attention to the details, improve things when we can, and we’ll stay competitive. So what, right? You’re probably already doing that as well as possible.
But I think that’s only half of the takeaway. There’s another critical part that is implied by the story, but easy to miss.
Random acts of improvement can flatline your progress
You might be thinking “we already do what Brailsford did - we’ve tweaked our logo, updated our messaging, etc.” Here’s the catch: all brand optimization requires change, but not all change is brand optimization. Random brand improvements made in isolation from a clear, unifying strategy will only have an isolated effect. They won’t “aggregate” in a constructive way, and they may even cancel each other out.
Did you know how noise cancelling headphones work? It’s pretty counterintuitive. They listen to the sound in your environment then play a slightly adjusted version of those sounds back to you. But instead of two sounds being twice as loud, the result is quiet. Why? Because the sound that’s played back is precisely the opposite of the sound in your environment. So the two waves cancel each other out.
Destructive interference is what you get with random brand improvements
In a similar way, uncoordinated brand improvements may seem helpful individually, but when they interact at the point of customer experience, they cancel each other out.
Five examples of destructive “brand improvements”
The comparison to sound waves may feel abstract, so here are a few examples of how uncoordinated brand efforts can partly or totally cancel each other out. These are all situations I’ve come across many times, and I’m sure they’ll feel familiar to you too:
Internal misalignment: Leader A is working hard on executing their vision. Leader B is too, but their vision is totally different. They cancel each other’s efforts.
The positioning pendulum: After a short time trying to position as A, the brand is changing focus to position B. Because the changes happen faster than a new position can be established, the position is perpetually unclear.
Fragmented audience focus: Half of the company is chasing audience A. Half is chasing audience B. Both audiences correctly conclude that the brand is not really for them.
Identity crisis: The brand got visual facelift A, followed by visual facelift B. Neither was comprehensive or satisfactory, so both are still in use, resulting in a confusing, disjointed identity.
Message mirroring: With no messaging strategy, the brand A copies the messaging of brand B. Both brand messages cancel out in the mind of anyone comparing them to each other.
Great brands don’t just practice constant improvement. They practice cumulative improvement. The next section explains how.
Components of brand tuning
Brand tuning—the kind you might engage in during a rebranding project—is goal-oriented, comprehensive, and precise.
In cycling, the goal is crystal clear: essentially, get from A to B in the shortest time. It’s easy to know what constitutes success. In a brand refresh, the goal is often too subjective, e.g. “modernizing” the brand. What constitutes modern? According to whom? Establishing a clear rebranding strategy is a prerequisite for successful change.
In cycling, the example effort was comprehensive. Every imaginable element that was within the control of the team was assessed and aligned to the goal. In a brand refresh, aspects of the brand are too often considered in isolation from each other. A comprehensive brand update should align every part of the brand experience, internally and externally. That includes targeting, positioning, visual identity, communication, and every brand touchpoint.
In the cycling example, each change was considered and precise. Different massage gels were tested, and the best-performing was selected. Often, this kind of precision isn’t practiced (or even considered) in brand efforts. Instead, teams rely on a mix of personal taste, intuition and authority to make brand decisions. They might work well, they might not. And it’ll be hard to ever know the difference.
In contrast, I recommend testing any major shifts with audience surveys to see which changes work well in driving toward a clear goal. The winning shifts are added together, resulting in amplification of the right brand signals.
Constructive brand efforts amplify each other
I love being in the ocean. On a recent trip, the water was extra choppy. It was fine most of the time, but every now and then one wave would overtake the wave in front of it and the two would merge to form a super-wave.
This is the opposite of what’s happening with noise-cancelling headphones. Two waves piled on top of each other in just the right way create constructive interference and the result is bigger than its parts.
Constructive interference is what you get when brand improvements are perfectly aligned
That effect is what Referent is aiming for in any brand change. It’s not just about designing a nicer logo, writing a more polished tagline, or even clarifying company values. It includes those things, but the actual deliverable at the end of a smart rebranding project is the sum total—the uplift in brand momentum and value for everyone involved.
That’s why measuring performance on end-to-end customer journeys is 35% more predictive of overall customer satisfaction (and 32% more predictive of churn) than performance of individual touchpoints (McKinsey). And according to Bain & Company, increasing retention by 5% could boost profit by as much as 95%. In short, the aggregate brand experience of your audience is powerfully connected to profitability.
There isn’t a good English word for this “aggregate experience”, but there happens to be one in German: gesamtkunstwerk. It means something like, “the total work of art.” In practice, an example would be an architect who also designs the furniture that goes in the building to ensure that the “total work” has the intended effect on visitors. A brand is a gesamtkunstwerk, an identity with many interrelated parts. To change one part is to change another.
Gesamtkunstwerk unifies disciplines under a shared creative goal for cumulative impact
All brands must change to survive and thrive. As you engage in that process, remember that changes must be goal-oriented, comprehensive, and precise to achieve “aggregation of marginal gains” and amplify each other. I started Referent after years of obsessively trying to sort out how this works in practice. After working with dozens of brands, frameworks, approaches, and teams, I’m confident that Referent’s approach really can deliver a bigger wave than less specialized efforts. But even if you’re not ready to work with a rebranding agency, I hope these principles can help you build the impactful brand you dream of.
Sources and further reading
McKinsey – The three Cs of customer satisfaction: Consistency, consistency, consistency
Bain & Company – Retaining customers is the real challenge
By Aaron Tovi
10/27/25
