Unpopular opinion: Brand consistency is hurting your growth more than helping

I spent 3 years forcing every post, email, and ad to match our brand guidelines to the letter. Same colors, same voice, same templates every time. Last quarter our engagement tanked by 40% and I couldn't figure out why. Then I saw a competitor run a goofy meme campaign that completely ignored their usual polished look and it got 10x the shares. That's when it hit me - I was so focused on being consistent that I forgot being interesting mattered more. Has anyone else seen brand guidelines become a straightjacket instead of a foundation for your team?

2 comments

2 Comments

hollym8228d ago

Watched my own brand guidelines turn into a straitjacket last year when I spent a whole afternoon arguing with a junior designer over a font size difference of 2 pixels. Meanwhile our competitor was running a campaign where their mascot got photoshopped into historical paintings and that thing went viral for weeks. It's like we all read the same book on branding and decided the only way to win was to make everything look like it came out of the same boring factory. Maybe the real problem is we treat brand guidelines like religious texts instead of helpful suggestions. I swear if I see one more company post a perfectly lit photo of their product on a white background with three lowercase hashtags I'm gonna lose it.

fiona_clark29d ago

I read a study from HubSpot last year that said 63% of people follow brands on social media because they make them laugh or feel something. Not because their colors matched. I think we overcorrected as an industry on consistency after that big 2015 rebranding wave, where everyone wanted to be the next Mailchimp or whatever. Your meme competitor proves the point - being on message is worthless if nobody wants to hear what you're saying.