A few weeks ago, at the D&AD Festival, Landor’s Chris Moody brought up an interesting point about brand identity/presence and the ‘role’ of consistency. He claims:
“I’m not sure [consistency] is so relevant anymore – it’s not the answer to creating meaningful and relevant brands for audiences.”
Now, as someone who DOES talk about consistency in branding, a fair bit, this gave me pause for thought.
I have always been in the camp that consistency drives recognition and familiarity, builds regard, and builds trust. We do that by creating identities that can show up with a level of consistency to ensure that the trajectory to building trust can happen smoothly and steadily. I feel that generally audiences are savvy and pick up on incoherencies and discrepancies that can damage not just their experience but also their perceptions of a brand.
He goes on to say, “I don’t know how Pantone is still a thing.” So, why have designers been agonising over the exact replication of colour across the board for decades… Has this time of teeny tiny colour chips gone?
But is the idea of consistency more nuanced? I talk about creating ‘brand stretch’ (much to the dismay of my copywriter, I hasten to add) in identity systems (giving them enough tools in the tool box to play with) that allow the brand to show up in the most relevant way for specific audiences they may have, whilst still having a strong central theme in its presence. But even within that, there’s a level of consistency.
In our recent work, we have been leaning more and more on varied palettes, more typography selections and adaptive visual mechanisms that allow the client to have more to play with in their marketing and communications. Perhaps this reflects a growing need to be more flexible? Perhaps it reflects a more diverse audience base? Perhaps it is that clients also want to be armed with choice. Perhaps they are responding to what Moody was getting at – that audiences are everywhere, across platforms, mediums, have different requirements, want something different from a brand in different contexts.
So, how does consistency sit within that?
I wonder if all along what I was actually banging on about is coherence, resonance and alignment over consistency. And this fascinates me – this gets into something far less tangible: not hex codes or margins, or key messaging or the usual metrics, but feeling, emotion, fluidity and adaptability. If this is the case, then the strategy is even more important in setting the who, what, and why – it’s in the how that there’s more room to play.
Maybe I’m a convert to this thinking – I’m excited to find out.