The brands that look exactly the same everywhere are usually the ones that don’t know who they are.
I know that sounds backwards. We’ve been conditioned to think consistency equals strength and that the most successful brands are the ones with the tightest control. But that kind of thinking belongs to a different era of marketing – one where brands could control nearly every touchpoint.
That world doesn’t exist anymore.
Ten years ago, brand guidelines were about creating the perfect Instagram grid. Every color had to be exact. Every font had to be approved. Every photo had to match a specific mood board. The goal was visual uniformity across every single channel, as if consumers were keeping detailed scorecards of whether your Facebook post matched your email newsletter.
This approach made sense when there were fewer channels and more predictable formats. Brands could craft practically every message in conference rooms and push it out through controlled channels. Consistency was achievable because the brand lived in a manageable number of places. (Brands were also under the influence of millennials, who desired aspirational lifestyle content, but that’s another topic.)
Then the world got messy. Social media exploded. Customer service moved to Twitter. Influencers and employees became brand ambassadors. User-generated content became more trusted than polished campaigns. Suddenly, brands needed to show up in a thousand different contexts, often in real-time, often without the luxury of a creative review process.
The brands that tried to maintain that old level of visual control started to feel robotic and stiff. They felt disconnected in a world that was undergoing strain from the continuous onslaught of chaos and upheaval. Like they were speaking from a script while everyone else was having actual conversations.
The brands that feel most cohesive are the ones with the clearest sense of self.
When you know who you are – your personality, your values, your point of view – you can adapt to any context while still being you. It’s the same for brands. You don’t need a 40-page brand guide to tell you how to respond to a customer complaint or what tone to take in a crisis.
Weak brands need rigid rules because they’re terrified of losing control. They don’t trust their teams to make brand-aligned decisions, so they try to prescribe every possible scenario. The result is brands that feel stilted and artificial, especially when they encounter situations their guidelines never anticipated.
In brand we talk a lot about perception. And often it’s related to how customers perceive us. What levers can we pull from behind the curtain so that the brand is seen how we want it to be seen? But there’s another layer of perception that may be holding you back, and that’s how you and your employees and your teammates all perceive the brand and the many, many, many different ways to embody brand characteristics.
A brand cannot be held captive by a single person’s sense of what the brand is and isn’t. If you’ve ever found yourself going down a rabbit hole and refreshing your memory on Einstein’s theory of relativity (and specifically the relativity of simultaneity), then you know that there is no such thing as two or more people having the exact same perception of the exact same event.
Why do I bring this up? Because if you’re in charge of a brand and a team of people who need to work with that brand, then you need to understand that an audience of 10,000 people will view a single brand characteristic in 10,000 different ways. Overwhelming, yes, and potentially frustrating for those of us that like tight control. But it’s also freeing, and not only opens up endless creative possibilities but also has the potential of strengthening your brand expression in ways you never thought possible.
Strong brands give their teams principles, not prescriptions. They focus on the why behind the brand, not just the what.
The most effective brand guidelines I see today spend less time on color codes and more time on character. They may answer questions like:
These guidelines create consistency of character, not just consistency of appearance or word choice. They help teams make brand-aligned decisions in situations no one anticipated, from crisis communications to casual social media interactions.
The frustrating (but, again, freeing) thing about brand guidelines is that there is no single right way to set them up. Some companies love using an archetype, some insist on using a framework from the Fascinate model, some insist that having a Brand Essence is a must-have, some would roll their eyes at the questions above (sometimes I do, too), and on and on.
The brands that are thriving today don’t necessarily look exactly the same everywhere – and frankly they may not even feel the same everywhere. Instead, they resonate and capture attention regardless of the context. There’s a difference.
This doesn’t mean visual identity doesn’t matter! Of course it does. But visual identity should be intertwined with the brand’s personality, not constrain it. The best brand systems today are flexible enough to work across different contexts while remaining recognizable.
Think about how you present yourself in different situations. You might dress differently for a job interview than for a coffee with friends, but you’re still recognizably you. Your core personality comes through regardless of the context. That’s what modern brands need to do.
What stays consistent and what’s open for surprise? There’s no formula, it’s a decision each brand needs to make for itself. Maybe your brand’s voice is sacred but your visual expression can be wildly experimental. Maybe your core message never changes but your delivery method is always evolving. Maybe your personality is non-negotiable but your values can shift with the context.
The key is being thoughtful about where you’re predictable and where you’re not. The brands that break through have figured out their own unique balance between consistency and curiosity.
The question isn’t whether someone could encounter your brand in any context and immediately understand who you are. The question is whether they’d stop what they’re doing and actually give you a second of their attention.
In a world where people see thousands of brand messages a day, being recognizable isn’t enough. You need to be interesting. You need to create that head tilt moment – that split second where someone thinks “wait, what?” and actually pauses instead of scrolling past.
This requires brands to move beyond playing it safe. It means having the confidence to be surprising, to do things that don’t look like what everyone else in your category is doing. But here’s the catch: you can only afford to be surprising when your foundation is rock solid. (And, you guessed it, you get to decide what that foundation is.)
Brand guidelines that only optimize for recognition are missing the point. The brands that succeed today are the ones that can maintain their core identity while having the confidence to surprise people by trying new formats, taking unexpected positions, and showing up in ways that make people pause.
This requires guidelines that are more about principles and less about individual pixels. More about empowering teams to make good decisions and less about controlling every possible outcome.
The most rigid brand guidelines often belong to brands that are afraid of being noticed. When you truly know who you are, you can afford to take risks with how you show up. You can experiment, surprise, and evolve because your foundation won’t budge.
The goal isn’t to look the same everywhere. The goal is to be interesting enough that people actually care whether they see you again or, better yet, interesting enough that they go out of their way to seek you out.
Ready to build brand guidelines that actually work in the real world? Let’s talk about what your brand stands for.
Meg sees patterns others miss and pulls the threads that matter. With 10+ years of experience and multiple awards, she's a master at uncovering the hidden truth and charting a course to better. Methodical in her approach but never predictable in her solutions, everything she touches packs a punch.