From TCP to Benecol — why the brands we recognise are harder to change than we think

Benecol has just unveiled a significant new look after 30 years. The packaging is brighter, the tone more energetic and its new LIVE MORE positioning deliberately moves the conversation away from ageing and managing cholesterol towards something more positive.

It got me thinking about another household name I wrote about earlier this year.

One of my most read LinkedIn pieces this year was “TCP: Totally Can’t Purchase — A shortage with long trade mark shadows” after I discovered that the familiar yellow bottle is almost impossible to find.

Benecol and TCP are not obvious bedfellows, unless your breakfast routine is considerably more alarming than mine. One is associated with cholesterol lowering foods. The other has a smell capable of transporting half the British population immediately back to a grazed knee in 1987.

Yet they have something important in common. They both demonstrate how much value can accumulate in the things consumers simply recognise.

With TCP, the reaction to its disappearance showed that the brand meant much more to people than the words printed on the bottle. The colour. The smell. The packaging. The memories. The sense that this slightly terrifying liquid had somehow always been in the bathroom cupboard.

Benecol faces the opposite challenge because it isn't disappearing. It is deliberately changing. This creates an interesting question for any long-established business. How much can you modernise before you start giving away some of the recognition you spent decades creating?

Every familiar feature potentially carries brand equity. The name, logo, colours, typeface, packaging layout and even the general feel of the product can all help consumers identify it. Marketing teams naturally want brands to evolve because a 30 year old brand shouldn't necessarily look 30 years old. This is also where my job as a UK Trade Mark Attorney becomes particularly interesting.

Trade mark advice isn't simply about filing an application when somebody creates a new name. Part of the value we bring is helping businesses identify what it is about their brand that is actually worth protecting, whether the existing registrations still match what is being used and what needs to happen when the identity evolves. A significant rebrand is therefore a very sensible moment for an IP health check. This can include asking questions such as:

• Does the registered logo still resemble the one consumers now see?
• Are genuinely distinctive new elements protected?
• Should older registrations be retained during the transition?
• Is a new campaign line merely advertising copy or something the business intends to build into a longer-term brand asset?
• Most importantly, which existing elements carry recognition that should not lightly be discarded?

There is a tendency to think about trade marks at the beginning of a brand's life. In practice, some of the more interesting questions arise much later, once there is actually something valuable to lose. My TCP piece was ultimately about what happens when a familiar brand unexpectedly disappears from view, and Benecol presents an alternative question of what happens when the brand stays, but the way we recognise it changes.

The moral of the story being that the best rebrands are (usually) not exercises in starting again.

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Emma King, brand marketing manager, says: “2026 sees Benecol showing up in a more colourful and impactful way, reflecting the attitude of our 49+ life maximisers. With our new look and Live More campaign, we want to move the conversation around ageing away from caution and limitation and towards desire, energy and possibility.

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