The Middle Is Where Brands Go to Be Forgotten

There’s a widening gap in consumer markets right now. The brands that know exactly what they are keep growing. The ones still figuring it out are running out of room.

Everyone in Ireland has stood in a Debenhams. Wedding outfits, school shoes, the perfume counter at Christmas, meeting your mother at the escalator. When Covid closed the shops in spring 2020, the eleven Irish stores simply never reopened: liquidation, 1,400 jobs, former staff picketing shuttered doors for over a year. The pandemic took the blame, but the business had been loss-making for years before anyone had heard of lockdowns. It sat in the middle of every high street, and the middle had been emptying for a long time.

The same thing is happening across nearly every consumer market. The brands with a clear position at the top are holding. The brands with an honest value proposition at the bottom are surviving. The brands in between are where trust, and margin, go to dissolve. And it matters to every product brand trying to figure out where it belongs.

What Happens When a Brand Extracts Instead of Building

The fastest way to understand the middle is to look at what happens when a strong brand starts taking more than it gives.

Cadbury is probably the most visible example in these islands. Before Kraft (now Mondelez) acquired it in 2010, it was one of the most trusted consumer brands in Britain and Ireland. After the acquisition, the pattern was textbook. The Creme Egg recipe changed to a cheaper chocolate in 2015. Sales dropped by £6 million that year. Easter eggs shrank by 24% between 2021 and 2026 while prices held or increased. Factories closed. Production moved overseas. After 170 years of association with the British monarchy, Cadbury lost its Royal Warrant in 2024.

None of this happened because people stopped wanting chocolate. It happened because the brand started taking from the trust it had built instead of continuing to earn it. Each cut was small enough to justify internally. Cumulatively, they hollowed the brand out.

The luxury fashion market shows the same pattern at a higher price point. Between 2019 and 2024, major houses raised prices on core leather goods by an estimated 50 to 70 percent. Chanel’s classic flap bag increased by 91%. Nearly 80% of growth in luxury over that period came from price increases, not from selling more product or creating more value. Meanwhile, CNN reported that luxury goods were increasingly falling apart as quickly as fast fashion. The price went up. The quality went in the other direction. The middle customer, the aspirational buyer who stretched to afford the product, walked away. Not because they stopped wanting it. Because they stopped believing the price reflected what they were getting.

Then there’s BrewDog. A brand built entirely on anti-corporate authenticity, which collapsed when the reality didn’t match the story. The “punk” positioning, the bold marketing, the Equity for Punks crowdfunding campaigns. All of it was image. When former employees published an open letter describing a culture of fear, when the “solid gold” beer cans turned out to be gold-plated, when the company ran an anti-Qatar World Cup campaign while simultaneously showing matches in their bars and selling beer in Qatar, the story fell apart. BrewDog entered administration with over £550 million in debt and was sold for £33 million. Over 200,000 small investors got nothing.

The thread connecting all three is the same. Image without substance is a short-term gain and a sharp fall.

The Brands That Built Instead of Extracted

The escape route runs on commitment, and the cleanest proof is the least likely brand imaginable. In 2008 Crocs lost $185 million and its stock fell from the high sixties to about a dollar. Every sensible adviser said the same thing: make the shoes prettier, chase the middle of the market. The turnaround did the opposite. New leadership treated the ugly clog as the company’s single greatest asset and leaned into the joke, and revenue went from $1.4 billion in 2020 to $2.3 billion in 2021. Nobody escapes the middle by becoming more agreeable.

The counter-examples closer to home are quieter, and just as instructive.

Barry’s Tea has been a family-owned business in Cork since 1901. Fourth generation. They hold 38% of the Irish tea market. They’ve never been acquired. They’ve never compromised on blending quality to cut costs. In a category where most brands are owned by multinationals optimising for margin, Barry’s has stayed independent and stayed consistent. No dramatic marketing campaigns. Just 120 years of the same product being exactly as good as you expect it to be every time you open the box.

Hiut Denim started in Cardigan, Wales, a town of 4,000 people that lost its jeans factory in 2002 along with 400 jobs. David and Clare Hieatt founded Hiut in 2011 to bring the craft back, hiring the same skilled workers. They only make jeans. No line extensions. No other products. Every pair is hand-finished by a named maker. Free repairs for life. “Do One Thing Well” isn’t a slogan. It’s a constraint they’ve built the entire business around. The brand punches far above its weight because the story is true, and the product proves it.

Patagonia ran a full-page ad in The New York Times on Black Friday 2011 with the headline “Don’t Buy This Jacket.” They provided a transparent breakdown of the environmental cost of making the very jacket pictured and asked customers to consider whether they needed to buy it at all. Sales increased 30% in the months that followed. Revenue grew from $400 million to over $1 billion by 2017. In 2022, founder Yvon Chouinard transferred ownership of the entire company to a climate trust, stating “Earth is now our only shareholder.” They also offer free repairs and actively encourage customers to buy used Patagonia gear.

These brands aren’t succeeding because they have the best marketing. They’re succeeding because the substance is real, and the presentation of that substance is consistent and honest. Trust, built deliberately, turns out to be the most resilient thing a brand can own.

Why People Buy Into Brands, Not Just Products

There’s a layer to this that goes beyond quality. The strongest brands don’t just earn trust. They give people something to identify with.

When someone buys from Patagonia, they’re not just buying a jacket. They’re aligning themselves with a set of values. Environmental responsibility. Durability over disposability. A rejection of mindless consumption. The purchase becomes a statement about who they are. The same is true of Hiut Denim. Buying those jeans means supporting a small Welsh town, skilled makers, slow production. It means choosing craft over convenience. That identity becomes part of the customer’s own story.

This is what the best brands understand. People don’t just want a product that works. They want to feel that the brand they’re buying from shares their values, and that by choosing it, they’re saying something about themselves. That’s what turns a customer into an advocate. Not loyalty programmes or discount codes. A genuine sense of belonging.

The brands in the middle can’t offer this. If your value proposition isn’t clear, there’s nothing for a customer to identify with. If your values aren’t visible, there’s nothing to connect to. The purchase stays transactional, and transactional relationships are the first to break when a cheaper or shinier option appears.

The brands that escape the middle are the ones that decide what they stand for, communicate it clearly, and then value and nurture the relationships that form around those shared values. Their customers don’t just buy from them. They belong to them.

What This Means for Your Brand

If you’re a product brand growing beyond its first stage, this is the question that matters: do your visuals tell the full story of what makes your brand worth belonging to?

Because the squeeze in the middle isn’t just about cost. It’s about whether a customer can look at your brand and immediately understand who you are, what you stand for, and why your product has value. Polished product photos on a white background aren’t enough on their own. That’s surface. The brands pulling out of the middle are the ones whose imagery communicates something deeper, something a customer can connect with.

Does someone landing on your website see the people behind the product? The hands making it? The workspace where it comes together? Can they see from your imagery that this is a real operation with real craft behind it, not a logo on a dropshipped box? Do your videos show the face of the person who started the business, or does the brand feel like a nameless entity? Do the visuals show the processes, the sourcing decisions, the effort made to reduce waste or support local production? Is there a clear identity proposition that someone would want to be part of?

You don’t need to be Patagonia. You need your brand’s visual identity to make your story, your values, and your substance visible without anyone having to dig for it. When a customer can see who you are, why you have value, and why they’d want to be associated with your brand before they’ve read a word of copy, the price becomes justified and the relationship has room to grow. When they can’t, you’re asking them to take your word for it. And in a market where the middle is disappearing, that’s not enough.

If the gap between your product and your brand’s visual presentation is something you recognise, a Brand Visual Strategy service is where we start. Or see how our photography brings product quality into focus.