Brand Memory and the Long Shadow of Narrative: Trust, Reputation, and Reinvention in the Age of Continuous Visibility

Aging brands are a double-edged sword. They are both a trust amplifier and an endless record of past milestones or mistakes.

Many of us can recall scandals or PR crises involving companies that are 20, 30, or 50+ years old. Could be medical trials for Coke Zero or VW’s Dieselgate, or self-driving Tesla failures from a decade ago.

An engineer here reminded me of the 5-hour Cloudflare outage in Nov 2025. But that’s the first real downtime I can remember for 5 years straight.

But how accurate are these past stories today?

Rebuilding brands is like overriding memory. It’s repetition, showing up, and imprinting the new story over and over again.

I still get associated with “the WordPress guy” from my 2015-2017 era of teaching WordPress retainers around the world. Or “the freelance guy” from leading freelance seminars and courses in 2010 or 2011. Or even “the teacher” from a similar era (2009-2012).

I even got called out on Facebook last night for hiring interns nearly 15 years ago and not paying market salaries. For college students working part-time between lectures, with the velocity of, well, students.

Some brands get it right – Apple hasn’t innovated in a decade but has fanbase. Volvo isn’t the safest car brand in the world.

Everyone else needs to work hard and keep flashing as frequently as possible.