Why Brands Are Opening Hotels & Cafés • Columbia's Impossible Campaign • The New Era of Sustainability-Led Branding

Welcome to the seventh edition of our weekly roundup of branding news, thought leadership, and insightful articles on brand strategy.

Each week, we curate and summarize the most relevant stories from the branding industry, so you can stay informed without having to search for them yourself. Enjoy!

• How Recess Is Rebuilding Its Entire Creative System Around Stillness
  Beverage brand Recess conducted a comprehensive creative audit after realizing its ad library had been diluted by aggressive click-through-rate optimizations. To restore its original promise of wellness, the brand rebuilt its entire visual framework around the concept of stillness.

• Q&A: Ed Nelson – Brands Have Evolved From Being What ‘Products Do’ to What ‘Products Mean’
  Ed Nelson of Dalziel & Pow discusses constructing cohesive brand systems for evolving markets. He explains why modern brand management must focus on what products mean rather than what they do, making experience the core mechanism of brand building.

• Behind the bucket: How KFC cooked up its new brand experience
  This analytical case study explores how JKR rationalized KFC’s extensive portfolio of distinctive visual assets. By assigning clear strategic roles to the bucket, the stripes, and the Colonel, the system avoids creative dilution across its 150 global markets.

• How Southwest Airlines is looking to bring hospitality to the skies
  Southwest Airlines’ leadership discussions focus on transforming the transit experience by applying hospitality principles to aviation. They emphasize that while digital tools should remove transactional friction, human-centric connection remains the key driver of long-term traveler loyalty.

• Is This the End of Tech-Spec Marketing? ft. Hisense CMO Sarah Larsen
  Sarah Larsen, CMO at Hisense USA, details her strategy for shifting consumer electronics marketing away from dry technical specifications. Instead, she refocuses the brand’s positioning on real-life consumer behavior, product sell-out metrics, and emotional relevance.

• The emotional labour of content creation

  A reflection on what happens when content creation depends on your energy, but your energy runs out. Nathalia shares how isolation, emotional fatigue, and an overloaded business model forced her to rethink what sustainable personal branding really requires: more input, better structure, and protecting the creative capacity behind the work.

• How I turn daily moments into viral LinkedIn posts
  The exact 6-step system behind the author’s 25k impressions per post

• Everyone Is Talking About Taylor Swift’s Wedding. Here’s the Branding Lesson Most People Missed
  Robin Landa explains that true brand trust is earned when ongoing consumer experience matches expectation. Using Taylor Swift’s career arc as a strategic model, she illustrates how a brand promise is a lived truth rather than a static tagline.

• Why Are Brands Extending Into Hospitality?
  Major brands are moving beyond their core products into hospitality and lifestyle spaces. Fashion houses, automakers, retailers, and banks are opening cafés, restaurants, hotels, diners, and coworking spaces to make their brand feel more tangible. The trend shows how companies are using physical experiences to build stronger emotional connections with customers.

• KFC’s Christophe Poirier: “The Best Engine for Growth Is Creativity”
  KFC’s Global Chief Concept Officer argues that the traditional, isolated CMO role is dead. To build brand equity that drives commercial growth, modern marketers must sit at the intersection of marketing, operations, digital technology, and retail store design.

• Sporting CP reveals new brand identity by JKR
  Global agency JKR updated the identity of Sporting Clube de Portugal for its 120th anniversary. Centered on a refined 1945 crest, the system unifies historic iconography into a cohesive design framework meant to expand the members-owned brand globally.

• Studio Blackburn gives Meat Ellis Butchers a playful identity split across two Blackheath shops
  Studio Blackburn managed a unique retail rebranding challenge for Meat Ellis Butchers’ two different locations. The agency successfully preserved family brand cohesion through animated meat characters while tailoring local store colorways and typography to each neighborhood’s distinct demographic profile.

• Six Cinquième Scribbles a New Future for the Arts Nonprofit 1001 Colors
  Montreal agency Six Cinquième rebranded arts non-profit Artworks to 1001 Colors. Sourced from a historic hand-painted sign uncovered during building renovations, the new name and playful, scribble-based visual system resolved regional obscurity and redefined their national identity.

• Otherway brings Cowshed back to its Somerset roots with wild botanical illustrations
  Faced with growing competition from premium skincare brands, Cowshed worked with otherway to refresh its visual system. The rebrand returns the brand to its Babington House roots through rustic, wild botanical packaging designed to showcase natural ingredients.

• rbl rebrands Better Cotton Initiative following new EU anti-greenwashing laws

  Branding agency rbl has overhauled the consumer-facing identity of the Better Cotton Initiative, renaming it BCI Cotton after new European Union legislation banned unverified comparative product claims.

• Monoprix rediscovers its pop DNA in a rebrand by W Conran Design (Article in French)
  W Conran Design refreshed French retailer Monoprix's visual system by stripping away decades of graphic clutter. The rebranding leverages the brand's historic pop heritage, utilizing simplified icons, bold typography, and vibrant palettes to unbreak its multi-department customer experience.

• How M&S has reinvented its own-brand packaging
  Creative Review speaks to John-Paul Hunter, head of packaging design at Marks & Spencer’s, about how the team has built a more expressive own-label design system – and why moving beyond supermarket templates allows every product to tell its own story.

• The Singleton unveils sustainable packaging redesign
  Single malt whisky brand The Singleton updated its core packaging to elevate its slow-batch craft story and simplify flavor discovery. Alongside visual refinements, the redesign incorporates structural production updates to reduce its overall environmental footprint.

• How Fishwife Is Rebuilding Its Entire Creative Identity Around Abundance
  As tinned-fish brand Fishwife scales toward $160 million in revenue, its creative team faces the challenge of protecting its distinct “anti-austerity” visual identity. By formalizing a creative brief system, the brand scales its output while preserving its handmade appeal.

• “Expedition Impossible”: Why Columbia Sportswear went looking for an agency willing to go too far
  Columbia Sportswear won 10 Cannes Lions for its “Expedition Impossible” campaign, which dared flat-earthers to find the edge of the world. By taking a massive creative risk, the outdoor brand built an organic social conversation that captured global attention.

• Kiwibank introduces Kiwis to ‘Buck’ – the green-wooled sheep who refuses to follow the flock
  To challenge the banking status quo in New Zealand, Kiwibank developed its “Bank Kiwi” campaign around an animated green sheep who refuses to follow the flock. This character serves as an appealing, highly distinct brand asset to champion the consumer interest.

• Deepika Padukone Returns for the Next Chapter of Hilton’s Campaign
  Hilton has expanded its “It Matters Where You Stay” campaign with brand ambassador Deepika Padukone. Directed by Nadia Marquard Otzen and filmed in Bengaluru, the creative work reinforces the brand’s core focus on the physical stay as a memorable customer experience.

• We Went to Cannes Lions: Where the Industry Is Trending
  Jim Joseph reflects on the core creative lessons from Cannes, noting that AI has been successfully repositioned as a supportive creative utility rather than a lead strategy. The winning work shows a shift from passive digital consumption to genuine client participation.

• Bright Side: The Supergoop! Playbook for Turning Sun Care Into a Cultural Movement
  Supergoop! CMO Lauren Weinberg discusses building brand culture in CPG. Highlighting AI discoverability, she notes that as Large Language Models crawl the web, maintaining a highly organic, distinct point of view on social networks is key to emerging in algorithmic searches.

• Dan Ramirez: Your tone-of-voice guide isn’t fit for the AI era
  Dan Ramirez says traditional, document-based verbal guides cannot control how Generative AI expresses a brand. He argues that companies must build “Brand Language Architecture”—interactive verbal engines containing defined knowledge and logic to govern brand consistency across automated creation tools.

• Cannes Lions 2026: Connecting Art and Algorithm
  Bain’s analysis of the Cannes Lions festival highlights that leading brands are shifting from experimentation to full organizational AI rewires. However, as execution speed increases, human judgment and empathy have become even more critical to keep automated storytelling distinctive.

• How AI Has Redefined the Rules of Brand Discoverability, and What CMOs Must Do Now
  With most B2B buyers now initiating research inside AI chatbots rather than traditional search engines, discoverability has shifted from climbing SEO ranks to owning AI summaries. Strategists must secure a solid volume of third-party reviews, as models prioritize verified peer data when formulating answers.

• New B Corp and EU standards are changing how businesses talk about sustainability
  New regulations like the EU’s ECGT directive are cracking down on loose environmental terms, banning claims such as “eco-friendly” unless backed by granular data. Brands must transition their messaging away from vague marketing generalities and toward clear, specific sustainability metrics.

• What Designers Need to Know from the Sustainable Brands Conference 2026

  Sunny San Diego served as the perfect backdrop for this year’s Sustainable Brands conference, bringing together some of the world’s most influential companies to discuss the future of sustainability.

• ‘Should we do it at all?’ The question David Johnston wants every creative to ask
  Accept & Proceed founder David Johnston introduces Signalism, a strategic design framework suggesting that brand signals shape societal behavior and belief. He urges brand strategists to challenge the cultural and ecological cost of a brief before executing it.

• New Kantar study reveals the brands consumers trust most on sustainability
  Kantar’s Consumer-Led Sustainability Brand Ranking reveals that sustainable growth requires real-world credibility. Ecover took the top spot for baking green initiatives into its corporate DNA, while second-place “The Ordinary” was praised for using radical ingredient transparency to earn trust.

• Cash and brands: The two missing ingredients for regenerative agriculture to scale?
  Wildfarmed’s high-profile partnerships with Lloyds Banking Group and Nestlé illustrate a path for scaling regenerative farming. By offering growers specialized financial support and a direct route into mass-market grocery brands, the initiative transforms green agriculture from a niche concern into a commercial norm.

• UK Bans Adidas, Uniqlo, Calvin Klein Ads for Misleading ‘Recycled’ Claims
  The UK’s Ad Standards Authority (ASA) recently banned ads from major players like Adidas, Uniqlo, and Calvin Klein for making unsubstantiated “recycled” clothing claims. The analytical lesson is clear: regulators are actively penalizing brands that treat sustainability as a hollow marketing trend.

• How Ferrero Has Achieved 98% Cocoa Supply Chain Traceability
  Confectionery maker Ferrero has hit 98% traceability in its cocoa supply chain. Using its “knowing what is in the bag” philosophy, the brand demonstrates how integrating strict agricultural tracking directly with brand communication protects operations and builds long-term consumer trust.

• IBM names Stagwell as lead creative partner for global brand campaigns
  IBM has appointed Stagwell as its global creative partner, deploying Code and Theory and Anomaly as one unified team. This integrated administrative framework is designed to help the technological enterprise execute campaigns with creative impact and high operational speed.

• Brand Potential Launches Branding For Buyout
  Strategic consultancy Brand Potential has partnered with US marketing firm The Grist to launch a sell-side brand advisory service in the UK. The service focuses on defining exit narratives and professionalizing marketing structures to maximize client enterprise value.

Thanks for reading until the end! We’d love to read your thoughts and feedback in the comments of this Substack newsletter.

Your Team at The Branding Journal
www.thebrandingjournal.com

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