In 2026, transformation is in every brand brief. Every brand has a story about it. Every pitch deck references it. Every industry publication has a case study: before and after, beautifully art directed, with a client quote about being braver than they thought they could be.
And yet if you look around, a strange thing has happened. Everything looks the same.
Open almost any transformation brief circulating in the industry today and you will find the same language. Bold and purposeful and human and relevant, future-forward but rooted in heritage, disruptive but not too disruptive. I have started to wonder if there is a template somewhere that everyone is working from. There might be. I have certainly started to recognise the cadence.
I have had an unusual vantage point on this. I started at Landor in client servicing, sitting inside transformation projects day to day, living through every uncomfortable and occasionally chaotic moment of the process. Now I am in growth, helping brands decide whether to begin one. Two very different seats at the same table. One produces a lot of adrenaline. The other requires a lot of patience. Both have taught me the same thing.
Everyone wants to transform. Not everyone is ready for what that actually means.
There is a difference I have come to think is fundamental. A brand that wants to transform, and a brand that genuinely needs to.
Want sounds exciting. Want shows up in every brief. Want is also where things get complicated – where teams start questioning each other, where leadership discovers mid-process that it is not quite as aligned as it thought, where someone in the third workshop says something that makes you wonder if everyone was really on the same page to begin with.
Need is different. Need is when a brand understands, honestly, that the way it has been showing up is no longer creating the differentiation or the relevance it once did. Need is when the brief is not just aspirational but urgent. And need is when a brand is willing to sit with uncomfortable answers in order to arrive at the right ones.
That shift, from wanting to needing, is where real transformation begins. And the brands that make it through are the ones who come in knowing the difference.
I have seen what it looks like when a brand arrives before it is truly ready.
We were working with a well-established brand early in what should have been an exciting project. In the very first conversation, the discussion turned to what was being heard about them in the market. Not our opinion – just an honest read of the landscape, the kind of diagnosis any good transformation starts with. The response was immediate discomfort. It took considerably longer than anyone had planned for the organisation to find its way back to the table.
But here is what I took from it. When they came back, they came back differently. More open. More honest about what they actually needed to address. That time was not wasted. It was, in many ways, the beginning of the real work. Because transformation cannot be built on a foundation you are not willing to examine.
More recently, on the growth side, I spent a considerable amount of time in conversation with a brand before we formally began working together. Several proposals. Several conversations.
Not because the brief was unclear – but because after our very first meeting, they paused. They realised they needed to do some internal work first. Figure out how they ran, how decisions were made, what they actually stood for before they could think about how to speak to the world.
That time felt long in the moment. Looking back, it was the most important part of the whole process. They asked the hard questions before anyone picked up a pen. And when we did begin, we began right.
And then there are the projects where everything clicks. Where every person involved, from the most senior leader to the newest voice in the room, understands not just what is changing but why. Where the goal is not simply to look different but to become genuinely more relevant to the people they are trying to reach and more distinct in a market that keeps getting noisier. Where the team is willing to ask the harder questions: what do we keep, what do we let go of, and what are we actually building towards.
Those projects are something else entirely. They also, genuinely, make up for every difficult workshop you have ever sat through.
The difference between all of these was never about budget or ambition. It was about whether the organisation was truly ready – aligned, honest, and patient enough to see it through even when it got uncomfortable. That readiness does not show up in a brief. It shows up in the room.
AI will replace some of this work. The surface work. The transformations that are really just new logos. The briefs that say bold but mean familiar. What it will not replace is the slow, human, occasionally frustrating work of helping an organisation figure out who it truly wants to be – and holding that conversation together long enough for it to mean something. That part is not going anywhere.
Be careful what you wish for is advice usually given too late. In transformation, it is the only question worth asking first. Not – do you want to transform? But – do you know what you are signing up for?
The organisations that answer that honestly, before the brief is written, before the process begins, before anyone has picked a direction those are the ones that come out the other side not just looking different.
Actually being different.
Aanchal, Growth Manager, Landor.
She thinks a lot about what happens between the brief and the case study and slightly too much about everything else.
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