When disappointing some people is the brand strategy
March 12, 2026
I grew up with Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. The moody Yorkshire moors, gothic romance, windswept hair and heavy wool cloaks – it always felt like a story that belonged to a specific audience, best experienced with a cup of tea and rain lashing against the window. So when Emerald Fennell’s film adaptation arrived in February, my first reaction wasn’t exactly radiant. I felt (like many readers) a certain loyalty to the world it created. But I’ll leave any undignified ranting to Letterboxd and focus on the more interesting question the film raises: that reinvention often works not by pleasing everyone, but by making peace with alienating some.
It’s clear that Fennell had a very different vision for the story. With Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi leading the cast, a Charli XCX soundtrack pulsing underneath, and a visual language built for a Gen Z lens, the book and the film feel starkly different. But the adaptation reportedly took $77 million at the global box office on Valentine’s Day weekend, which shows that something worked. Not necessarily for fans of the novel , but for the audience it was designed to reach. And perhaps that’s entirely the point.
Who was this actually for?
It makes me wonder whether the film was ever trying to speak to readers – and I’m increasingly convinced it wasn’t. Those quotation marks weren’t accidental.
Fennell has crafted something provocatively aimed at a younger audience: the casting chosen for social buzz; the music for a cultural edge; and the entire project designed to travel on social media in a way that gothic romantic literature simply doesn’t. On those terms, it is a success. In fact, book sales of Wuthering Heights reportedly increased 469% in the UK after the film’s release. Even when an adaptation annoys the purists, it can still send a whole new audience back to the original.
That tension, between loyalty to the original and the appeal of something new, is exactly the challenge brands face when they try to reinvent themselves.
Brand reinvention requires a choice
For brands, this offers an interesting reframing. Most conversations around brand change are built on a comforting idea: that you can modernise and retain simultaneously. Update the expression, keep the core audience, grow into new ones. It sounds like you can have everything, but in practice, you rarely can.
Fennell has chosen a new generation of viewers and accepted the cost. The Charli XCX soundtrack wasn’t simply a nod to current culture, it was a signal that this version of the story is for someone else now. The point isn’t to appeal to everyone. It’s to make a clear decision and commit to it, accepting that some people will love what you’ve created while others won’t connect with it.
This was signalled early on, with Fennell placing the title in quotation marks before anyone else had the chance to frame it as a betrayal. By naming the bold choice before your audience does, it turns a potential accusation into a deliberate statement. It’s the difference between a brand that looks to have drifted and one that looks decisive.
Jaguar, Cracker Barrel and Burberry have all recently struggled with reinvention not simply because they changed, but because the change never looked deliberate to their loyal customers. From the inside, drift can feel like reinvention. From the outside, it can look like confusion.
Why not everyone has to like a brand reinvention
Returning to “Wuthering Heights”, I’m technically the prime audience – a 23-year-old Gen Z viewer curious to see a more provocative, visually expressive adaptation. And yet I didn’t like it, probably because my loyalty to the book ran deeper than I realised. My personal disappointment isn’t necessarily proof that Fennell’s approach didn’t work. It might just mean that the film was aimed at a different kind of viewer, one experiencing the story for the first time.
I still prefer the book – ideally plus a cup of tea, rain on the window, and the Yorkshire moors exactly as Brontë imagined them. My disappointment doesn’t mean the strategy failed. It might be proof it worked. I was never the target audience, and knowing who isn’t your audience can be just as important as knowing who is.
By Emily Christie