Dean Trevelino

expert panel

Companies refresh their brands for plenty of legitimate reasons: The business may have evolved, its audience may have changed or its identity may no longer reflect its products, positioning or ambitions. Changes in markets, business models, acquisitions or target audiences can create a gap between what a company has become and what its brand still communicates.Still, even a well-founded refresh can go wrong. The most visible risk is backlash when customers feel a company has discarded or even disrespected something they valued about the old brand. But there’s another, quieter risk, too: In the push to look current, a company can strip away the visual cues, language, personality and positioning that made its brand recognizable, leaving behind something polished but generic and harder to distinguish from competitors. For example, the streamlined, sleeker logo briefly introduced by Cracker Barrel in 2025 got pushback from customers and commentators who described it as “soulless,” “bland,” and “generic.”So how can CMOs modernize a brand without alienating the people who already value it or stripping away the qualities that set it apart? Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank share what separates a strong brand refresh from a forgettable one—and what marketing leaders should protect most carefully as a brand evolves.

expert panel

For years, search strategy largely revolved around earning a prominent place in a list of links. AI-generated answers are changing the front door to search: A 2026 Pew Research Center survey found that 60% of U.S. adults say they read the AI summaries at the top of search results, and about four in 10 say they use AI chatbots to search for information. For CMOs, that shift raises a bigger question than where a brand ranks: What will people learn about the company when an AI system assembles the answer for them?That question sits at the center of answer engine optimization, or AEO, the practice of making a brand’s information easy for AI systems to find, trust and cite. These systems rarely rely on a single page. Google explains that AI Overviews and AI Mode can run multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources, identifying supporting web pages as they build a response. As a result, an answer about a company may draw not only on its website but also on news coverage, analyst commentary, reviews and other third-party sources. A polished corporate website establishes what a company says about itself, but in an AI-driven search environment, that story has to be corroborated elsewhere.That puts owned media (the channels a company controls) and earned media (the coverage and endorsements it has to win) on the same team. The challenge for CMOs is to keep core facts, claims and positioning consistent across both so AI systems encounter a coherent picture without forcing every channel to sound exactly the same. Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank, a curated group of leaders with expertise in brand storytelling, digital advertising and the rise of AI in marketing, explore how to bring owned and earned media together to strengthen the authority, consistency and trust brands need in an answer-driven search environment.