The useful bit to borrow
Big-brand medicine is not copying a famous company’s colours or nicking the swagger from its adverts. It is borrowing the discipline behind the work.
Strong brands build a small set of recognisable cues and use them repeatedly: colour, type, shapes, phrases, sounds, characters, layouts and ways of behaving. The clever part is not having fifty assets. It is helping people connect a few useful ones to you.
Consistency is not creative prison
Independent businesses often redesign because they are bored. Unfortunately, the owner sees the brand every day while a potential customer may notice it for eight seconds in a busy week. Your boredom is not evidence that the market is tired of you.
Keep the recognisable bones and vary the story. A newspaper does not invent a new masthead for every edition. A good brand system should give you room to move without making you look like a different business each time.
Build a tiny brand-code kit
Then use the kit for long enough to become familiar. Recognition is a slow cooker. Stop lifting the lid every four minutes.
- One dominant colour combination people can learn to associate with you.
- One type hierarchy that behaves the same way wherever it appears.
- One recurring visual device: a frame, crop, pattern, character or mark.
- One verbal habit that sounds like your business and not the entire internet.
- One rule for what never changes, even when the campaign does.
The prescription
Do this next.
- Lay out your last ten communications and circle what repeats consistently.
- Choose three useful cues to protect for the next twelve months.
- Before redesigning anything, ask whether the problem is the asset or your failure to use it.
Under the microscope
Useful source material.
The thinking behind this article has been checked against these sources. No borrowed lab coat required.