Edited on Jun 22, 2026
Crunchy brands win. Granola brands die slow.
Granola is the bland middle. Wholesome. Inoffensive. Forgettable. Every category has a few — the brand on the shelf the shopper can’t quite name even when she’s holding the box.
Crunchy is the brand that picks a fight. Sharp angle. Clear enemy. A reason to exist you can say in one sentence.
Most consumer brands aim for granola because granola feels safe. Don’t alienate. Don’t test poorly. Don’t scare the family-friendly buyer in the focus group. Round the edges. Soften the language. Add the words “wholesome” and “quality” and “premium.”
It tests fine. Then it dies.
The brands that move product, hold shelf, and build loyalty are the crunchy ones. They take a real position. They say what they’re not. They have a founder who says one thing in every interview. They sound like a person, not a committee.
Liquid Death is crunchy. Yeti is crunchy. Patagonia, in its early years, was crunchy. RXBAR, before Kellogg’s bought them, was crunchy. The label said: protein, dates, egg whites. No B.S. Three ingredients you could read on the front of the wrapper. Every competitor was a granola brand selling “wholesome nutrition.” RXBAR sold a position.
Crunchy travels. Granola sits.
Here’s the test. Hand your packaging to a stranger. Ask them to summarize the brand in one sentence. If they need to read the back of the box, you’re granola. If the front of the package does it for them, you’re crunchy.
Same test works for the rest of the brand work. The press release. The founder bio. The pitch deck. The website. If any of them require three paragraphs to land the position, the position isn’t clear enough.
Most public relations failures aren’t failures of execution. They’re failures of position. The brand doesn’t know what it is. So the messaging doesn’t know what it is. So the coverage doesn’t know what it is. So the buyer doesn’t either.
Fix the position first. Then the PR work has something to carry. Until the position is crunchy, the work is granola, no matter how good the agency is.
Pick the position that scares your consultant. That’s the one the market remembers.
Crunchy over granola. Every time.
Ten years later this matters more, not less. The AI engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity — compress every brand into a one-sentence answer when a buyer asks. The brands with a crunchy position get cited cleanly. The granola brands get summarized into the middle, or skipped entirely. Same shelf. Different fate.
Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.