In part one of our series, we learn that the most dangerous brand changes aren’t the ones that alter what a company does but are the ones that break what customers believe about who it is. Southwest, Tropicana, and Netflix each learned that the hard way, at a cost measured in revenue, subscribers, and trust. What separates a change customers accept from one they punish is whether you understood the difference before you made the move.
Three Brand Changes That Went Wrong
Some brand changes are strategic evolutions. Others feel betrayed. The difference almost always comes down to how well you understood your audience before you touched what made you, you.
Southwest Airlines spent more than five decades building a brand on two promises: you’re free to fly, and we'll make it affordable. Free checked bags. Open seating. A personality that felt more like a neighbor than a corporation. Then, in early 2025, the airline announced it would charge for checked bags and move to assigned seating, dismantling the very cornerstones that had differentiated it from every other carrier in America.
The response was immediate and sharp. Loyalists who had organized their travel lives around Southwest's model felt the rug pulled out from under them. Financial analysts debated whether the changes would work. Travel writers questioned what Southwest even was anymore.
What Southwest encountered isn't unique. It's one of the most complex and consequential challenges any brand can face: changing something that sits at the core of what you stand for.
Whether driven by competitive pressure, financial necessity, a new leadership direction, or a genuine strategic evolution, core brand changes carry outsized risk and outsized opportunity.
In this two-part series, you will find a framework for brands navigating this terrain. In Part 1, we will examine what "core" really means and draw the hard lessons from brands that got it wrong. In Part 2, How to Change the Hard Stuff Without Burning It Down, we will lay out how to do it right for you and your brand.
What Makes a Brand Change 'Core'? Start With What's Load-Bearing
Before a brand can manage a core change, it has to honestly assess what core means. Not everything that feels important is load-bearing. And not everything load-bearing is visible.
Brand equity researchers have long distinguished between brand attributes – the things a brand does or offers – and brand values – the beliefs and feelings a brand embodies. Kevin Lane Keller, whose Brand Equity Model is foundational to modern brand strategy, describes the most powerful brands as those that create "resonance" with customers: a deep, psychological connection that goes beyond features and price.
The danger in brand change isn't necessarily changing what you do. It's rupturing customers' beliefs about who you are.
Southwest's bags weren't just a perk. They were proof of a value: “we're on your side.” The seating policy wasn't just operational, it was democratic, playful and egalitarian. When those changed, the brand didn't just lose features. It lost evidence.
The key question before any core brand change: Are we changing an attribute, or are we changing the evidence for a belief customers hold about us?
Three Brands That Learned (Or Are Learning) Core Brand Changes the Hard Way
Southwest (2025): Bag Fees, Assigned Seating, and Caving to the Activists
When activist investor Elliott Investment Management took a significant stake in Southwest and pushed for operational and leadership changes, the airline found itself in the difficult position of making strategic decisions under external pressure rather than internal conviction. CEO Bob Jordan announced the shift to assigned seating and bag fees as part of a broader revenue strategy.
Low fares, bags fly free, open seating, and other brand tenets that had been part of the Southwest ethos for years were gone in one fell swoop. The challenge Southwest now faces is what brand strategists call a "covenant break" – a unilateral change to a promise customers accepted as foundational when they chose loyalty. The long-term outcome depends on whether the airline can articulate a new, compelling brand promise that replaces what was lost.
As of this writing, that new promise has yet to fully emerge, but my six-month experience with Southwest has begun to show that they’ve taken some of the challenges seriously and have added new features to their offering, including technology changes, employee support programs, and special features for loyal customers that have made these transitions more palatable. What they have been known for for years, freedom and no frills, has definitely changed. This one still has to play out, but they seem to be moving in the right direction already. While the jury is still out, customers do seem to be coming back, profits are up, and the experience is still good, but not as unique as it had been.
The Insight
Financial pressure is real. But brands that change core attributes without simultaneously building a new, compelling reason to believe risk winning the short-term P&L battle (they are seeing a significant increase in profitability) while risking losing their identity altogether and the long-term brand war.
Tropicana (2009): A $30 Million Redesign Nobody Asked For
When PepsiCo redesigned Tropicana's iconic orange-with-straw packaging in 2009, internal teams likely saw it as a modernization. Consumers saw the disappearance of something they trusted.
Within two months of the redesign launch, Tropicana's sales dropped approximately 20 percent – roughly $30 million in lost revenue. The company reversed course and reinstated the original packaging design.
The episode is now a staple case study in business schools, including programs at Harvard and Wharton, precisely because it illustrates how brand equity resides in visual and emotional assets that customers rarely consciously consider until those assets disappear.
The Insight
The things customers never consciously praise are often the things they will loudly mourn. Brand audits need to account for emotional equity, not just rational preference.
Netflix (2011): The Qwikster Faceplant
In 2011, Netflix announced it would split its DVD-by-mail and streaming services into two separate brands – Netflix for streaming and "Qwikster" for DVDs – while simultaneously raising prices significantly. The company lost approximately 800,000 subscribers in a single quarter, and its stock declined dramatically in the months that followed.
The reversal came quickly. But the damage extended beyond subscriber numbers. Netflix had fractured customer trust at the exact moment it needed subscribers to follow it into a new era of streaming. Interestingly, Netflix recovered – but it did so by doubling down on its new streaming identity with consistent, heavy investment in content and experience. The comeback is instructive: recovery from a botched brand change requires not just reversal, but a compelling new forward narrative.
The Insight
When you must change, don't equivocate while you change. Half-measures in messaging amplify confusion and erode trust faster than the change itself.
What All Three Got Wrong
Southwest, Tropicana, and Netflix made very different changes for very different reasons. What links them isn't the decision itself but the misjudgment around it: each treated a brand-significant change as primarily operational or financial, and each underestimated how much their customers had invested in what the brand stood for, not just what it delivered.
That's the trap. The decision can be sound on a spreadsheet and still rupture the thing that made customers loyal in the first place. Knowing the danger, though, is the easy part. Navigating it is harder.
What's Next: Making Core Brand Change Work for You and Your Business
In Part 2, Don't Torch Your Brand (Part 2): How to Communicate Brand Changes, we will lay out the framework: which audiences to reach and in what order, how to time a core change, how to communicate it without hedging, and the questions every leadership team should answer before they touch what makes them, them.
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Sources and Further Reading
- Keller, Kevin Lane. Strategic Brand Management: Building, Measuring, and Managing Brand Equity. Pearson. The foundational academic text on brand equity, resonance, and customer-brand relationships.
- Harvard Business Review. "The Brand Report Card (opens in new window)." Kevin Lane Keller, January–February 2000. Keller's framework for assessing brand strength across ten dimensions relevant to brand change management.
- The Wall Street Journal. Coverage of Southwest Airlines' 2025 strategic changes, including bag fee reinstatement and seating model overhaul, February–May 2025.
- Ritson, Mark. "The Tropicana Redesign Disaster. (opens in new window)" Advertising Week. A widely cited post-mortem on the 2009 Tropicana packaging failure and its implications for brand equity management.
- Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Brand strategy and consumer behavior research. Wharton's marketing faculty, including Americus Reed II's work on identity-based loyalty (opens in new window), offers useful frameworks for evaluating the depth of customer attachment to brand attributes.
This article is Part 1 of a two-part series written for brand leaders and marketing professionals navigating decisions about core brand change. The examples and frameworks here are meant to be starting points, not prescriptions – every brand's situation is different, and the decisions that matter most always require judgment grounded in specific knowledge of your customers, your culture, and your competitive reality.
