The Top Five Celebrity Brand Resets >

Brands are just like people. Some are clear, confident and likeable. Others find it hard to connect and engage. Some lose their way, suddenly, or gradually over time. And just like FMCG or retail brands, some people reset their brands, in all sorts of different ways.

Nowhere is this truer than with celebrities. Famous people are perhaps the purest form of brand. A name, a face, a reputation, a personality. All driving personal value.

It's what makes great celebrity brand resets so instructive.

So, here are five of the best:

Dwayne Johnson - The strategic pivot

Professional Wrestling is all about brands, and 'The Rock' was one of WWF's strongest and most loved. Although the brand needed some early tweaking, as at first, his character 'Rocky Maivia' was actually seriously disliked. But with a new catchphrase, "Do you smell what The Rock is cooking?" The Rock put bums on seats and made millions for the franchise.

But then came the bigger pivot - a deliberate move away from his brand persona of WWF wrestler, repositioning as movie star and then serious business entrepreneur, as Dwayne Johnson. In Hollywood, his movies have clocked up nearly $15bn at the box office, and in business, Johnson has assembled a serious portfolio, with his tequila brand, Teremana, becoming the fastest-growing spirit in America, shifting over a million cases a year. It's a well-planned brand reset that required serious work and delivered huge reward.

Miley Cyrus - The complete brand transformation

Hannah Montana was one of the most valuable brands Disney has ever built. A global franchise, a sell-out arena tour, and a squeaky-clean teenage character played by a real teenage girl. The problem with a brand that strong is that it belonged to everybody except the person wearing it. By her late teens, Cyrus was trapped inside a positioning designed for an audience she had already outgrown.

So, she didn't evolve it. She blew it up. And completely reset her brand. Bangerz, the VMAs, wrecking ball - a total transformation from Disney character to real deal 'sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll' rock star, executed with enough conviction to tell an entire childhood audience in a single summer that the old brand no longer existed. Perhaps painful in the short term, with the odd uncomfortable moment, but a decade on, and Miley Cyrus is a Grammy-winning A-list artist, with complete ownership of her own name and image. It's a brand transformation that only worked because it was total, done with absolute conviction.

David Beckham - red card to royalty

In 1998, David Beckham was the most hated man in England. One flick of the boot at Diego Simeone in Saint-Étienne, a red card, and a World Cup exit. The Mirror ran a '10 Heroic Lions, One Stupid Boy' headline and an effigy of him was hanging outside a south London pub. At 23, his brand was as damaged as a brand can get.

What followed is perhaps the most useful lesson on this brand list, because he never tried to just communicate his way out of it. He rebuilt through behaviour instead. Fifty-eight games as England captain, that free kick against Greece, twenty years as a UNICEF ambassador, malaria campaigns, and Olympic bids. No apology tour, no rebrand, just consistent evidence, year after year, until the country changed its mind. By the time he knelt in front of the King at Windsor last November and stood up as Sir David, he had long since become a national treasure. It's a reset built on consistent action rather than messaging, and it took the best part of three decades.

Pamela Anderson - bombshell to bare-faced

For most of the nineties, Pamela Anderson was the most recognisable woman on the planet, and one of the most one-dimensional brands in entertainment. Baywatch drew a billion viewers a week, with distributors writing a 'Pamela clause' into their contracts, agreeing to buy only the episodes she appeared in. with fourteen Playboy covers, more than anyone in the magazine's history, she was the pin-up, the blonde bombshell, the sex symbol of her generation.

Rather than adding something new, she took things away. A Broadway run in 2022. A memoir in 2023 that she wrote herself, poetry included. A documentary made with her son. And a completely bare face at Paris Fashion Week. No stylist, no artifice, no character to maintain. "Vanity is a prison," she said. What emerged was a funny, well read, slightly eccentric woman who gardens, cooks and writes, and who had been there all along — and, two years later, a Golden Globe nomination for The Last Showgirl. It's a reset from pure image to something true, and proof that in an age of artifice, the strongest positioning available is often just being real.

Oasis - greatness rediscovered

Our outlier, because the Oasis brand is more than Liam and Noel Gallagher, but strategically it's so relevant for brands in every category, we had to include it. In the nineties, Oasis were a huge part of British culture, and the country’s biggest band. Knebworth, August 1996, was the peak: two nights, and a quarter of a million people. But things faded, later albums got patchier, gigs more unpredictable and founder members walked. And eventually, the Oasis brand had stopped being about the music and become about two brothers fighting in public.

The solo years proved the point. Beady Eye and High Flying Birds both did perfectly well. But neither came close to the impact of Oasis. People hadn’t fallen in love with one brother or the other. It was Oasis that really connected. So, when they finally returned, they didn't reinvent, apologise or modernise. No new album, no reflective documentary about healing old wounds. It was the same songs, same parka, same swagger, with Bonehead back in the band. Forty-one sold-out shows, 2.23 million tickets and $443m, and crowds who spent two hours feeling like it was 1996 all over again. It's a reset built on rediscovering magic rather than reinventing anything, and it is a mighty successful one.

Five very different routes. One thing in common.

None of them involved becoming someone else. The Rock didn't invent a character, he stopped playing the wrong one. Miley didn't find a new identity, she took her own name back. Beckham didn't rebrand, he outlasted. Pamela took things off. Oasis added nothing at all.

A Brand Reset isn't a costume change. It's a decision about who you actually are, made out loud, in public, with the nerve to see it through.

For most brands, that's the hard bit.