Branding in a Time of Uncertainty
By Graeme MacDonald on 1st July 2026
Why the brands that hold their nerve are the ones still standing when the dust settles
When money gets tight, what's the first thing a business cuts? And what's the last thing a customer forgives you for losing?
More often than not, the answer to both is the same. Your brand.
It's worth sitting with that for a moment, because it points at something a lot of businesses would rather not think about. Uncertainty doesn't just test your balance sheet. It tests your identity. Who you are, what you stand for, and whether anyone would actually notice if you went quiet. We see the same pattern play out every time the outlook turns shaky. The businesses that treat their brand as a cost to be trimmed tend to fade into the background. The ones that treat it as an asset worth protecting come out the other side stronger, with a bigger share of the market and customers who never thought to look elsewhere.
This is the case for being in that second group.
First, let's agree on what "brand" actually is
Brand is not your logo. It's not your colours, and it's not the tagline someone signed off three years ago. Those are the visible bits, the surface. The brand itself sits underneath all of that.
The cleanest definition still belongs to Jeff Bezos: your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. It's the sum of every feeling, memory and expectation a customer carries around with them. Think about the brands you trust without having to think, the ones you reach for on autopilot. You probably couldn't explain why. That instinct is the brand, quietly doing its job in the background.
Put more simply: your brand is your reputation. You build it slowly, and you can lose it fast.
Wild Goose, an Aberdeen restaurant we worked with, is a lovely example of a brand that holds together as one complete idea. It all starts from a single thought: a wild goose knows its territory, it leaves and it returns, and that instinct of belonging to a place became the thread that the whole identity was pulled from. The philosophy runs on it, every supplier local, every ingredient traceable, the food unmistakably of Aberdeen. Even the logo carries the idea, a single mark that reads as a goose one moment and a wine glass and bowl the next, food and drink held in the same form without anyone forcing the point.
With foundations that solid, the menu becomes a place to deepen the brand rather than just dress it up. Each supplier page is built around a radar graphic, the logo at the centre, producers mapped outward by distance, under a light footnote that reads "distance: as the goose flies." It makes the sourcing story legible in seconds, but it only works because the idea beneath it was already settled. Guests feel what the place stands for before they've read a word, because every part of the brand is telling them the same thing.
What uncertainty does to all of this
When the economy tightens, people change how they behave, and they do it quickly and fairly predictably.
They become risk-averse. They lean toward what they already trust, because trust is a shortcut, and shortcuts feel safer when every pound matters. Discretionary spending shrinks, and the spending that's left gets a much harder look. Every purchase has to earn its place.
Loyalty gets properly tested, often for the first time. Will your customers stick with you, trade down to something cheaper, or switch out entirely? You're about to find out exactly how much goodwill you've actually built.
And here's where it gets risky. The instinctive response when the outlook darkens is to panic-cut the marketing budget, because it looks discretionary and the savings show up straight away. Historically, that's a mistake, and an expensive one. Brands that go quiet in uncertain times tend to find that by the time they feel ready to speak up again, the recovery has happened without them.
Tesco worked this out years ago. "Every Little Helps" was born out of recession-era thinking. Simple, warm, genuinely relevant to people watching their spend. Line up the early-90s ads against today's and the line is still doing its job, decades and several downturns later. That isn't luck. That's a brand idea built to weather hard times rather than hide from them.
The counterintuitive bit: spend into the storm
This is the part that tends to make finance directors wince, so it's worth bringing the evidence along.
That isn't a fluke, either. IPA data tells the same story over and over: brands that keep investing through the turbulence come out with more market share and stronger pricing power than the ones that pulled back.
The reason is almost embarrassingly simple. When your competitors go quiet, the room gets quieter, and share of voice quietly becomes share of mind. When confidence drops, the market compresses and the field clears, and the brands still showing up when it lifts again are the ones people remember.
Amazon is the obvious example. In the thick of the 2008 financial crisis, while nearly everyone else was contracting, it launched the Kindle and leaned hard into brand. Everyone else pulled the handbrake. Amazon put its foot down. Lay that timeline next to its competitors' and the gap speaks for itself.
The underlying truth is that brand is a long-term asset, not a short-term cost. Cutting it to make a quarter look tidier is selling the furniture to pay the heating bill.
What the smart ones do differently
Investing in your brand through a stretch of uncertainty doesn't mean carrying on exactly as before, only louder. The clever operators adjust. They just adjust the right things.
They revisit the brand promise and ask whether it still holds in this new environment. Relevance is everything, and what landed nicely in the good times can ring a bit hollow when everyone's on edge.
They lead with values, not just value. Price competition is a fight to the bottom, and customers connect far more with brands that stand for something beyond being cheap.
They stay honest and human. Anxious audiences have a finely tuned radar for tone-deaf messaging, and this is not the moment to look like you've missed the mood entirely.
They protect the core and flex the edges. You can move on products, pricing and promotions without abandoning who you are. The trick is knowing which is which.
And they communicate more, not less. Even on a trimmed budget, you stay present. Organic, content, community, it all counts. Silence is the one thing you really can't afford.
Patagonia is the masterclass here. Its "Don't Buy This Jacket" campaign, run in the years after the crash, told people to consume less, and in doing so said everything about what the brand stood for. Counterintuitive, values-led, and so on-brand it could only have come from them. It made customers think harder about their purchases and trust Patagonia more for being told to. It's the rare bit of advertising that earns you respect by talking you out of a sale.
The mistakes that catch brands out when markets wobble
Just as useful are the ways businesses get this wrong, usually all at once, and usually in a hurry.
Going completely dark, where silence quickly curdles into irrelevance. Chasing price wars at the expense of positioning, which is just a polite name for a race to the bottom. Rebranding out of panic and frantically fixing the very thing customers still loved. Making promises that quietly fall apart the moment cost pressure bites. And forgetting that your employees are part of your brand too, because internal culture has a habit of showing up on the outside whether you want it to or not.
BrewDog is an efficient cautionary tale precisely because it manages to hit several of these at once. Promises that proved hard to keep, well-publicised questions about internal culture, and a habit of reaching for controversy as a stand-in for substance. One brand story, several lessons, and a handy reminder that the loudest approach isn't the same as the strongest one.
The brand playbook for uncertain markets
If there's one thing to take away and actually act on, it's this short list.
Audit. Work out what your brand genuinely stands for, and whether it still resonates with where your customers are right now.
Stay visible. Show up consistently, even if you're showing up modestly. Presence beats absence every time.
Double down on trust. Reliability and honesty are the real currency of an uncertain market, so spend them generously.
Play the long game. The brands that come through uncertainty well are, almost without exception, the ones that were built properly before it arrived.
Lego is the full-circle proof. Close to bankruptcy in 2003, it used the crisis to strip back, refocus on the core of what made it Lego, and rebuild from there. Today it's one of the most valuable brands in the world. Clarity of brand is what saved it, not the cutting, but the refocusing.
Uncertainty will pass. The impression you leave during it won't.