The Brand Remains the Same…
Consistency. It’s the unsung hero of branding. Without it, brands wouldn’t exist.
For marketers, there’s always been the temptation to keep moving and try something new. Now, AI is speeding up marketing even more.
Yet today, a coherent brand is more important than ever.
The benefits of brand consistency
Consistency is fundamental for branding because we learn through repetition. Think about it. We’re not born knowing a cat is a cat. But over time we keep coming across cats in different contexts and gradually construct an understanding of what a cat is. The same holds for Coca-Cola.
Consistency delivers 3 key benefits for branding:
Identification
We learn to identify the brand. This is why distinctive brand assets (formerly known as brand codes) are so important. They act as anchor points to attach memories of any encounters we have with the brand.
Understanding
From our observations across all the different ways we encounter the brand, we come to understand what the brand has to offer and for what usage occasions.
Trust
If we observe a reliably consistent pattern over time, we come to trust that the brand will always deliver on its promises.
Together, these enable a strong and positive memory structure to develop so that the brand can come to mind for relevant usage occasions.
Brands need to be coherent rather than uniform
However, marketers often struggle with consistency. It’s boring. They want to change stuff, make their mark, try new things. It can feel like a straitjacket.
Certainly, brands need to evolve in order to stay relevant. But this frustration comes from too rigid an understanding of consistency. Growing up in retail marketing, I learned the brand was defined primarily by the customer’s experience of the shopping trip. A shopping trip was a living, breathing, multi-dimensional entity that touched all the senses. You couldn't make it rigidly consistent, even if you tried. Yet you could still make it unmistakably yours.
Consider Trader Joe’s. It’s not identical from location to location. Signs are even hand-written in each store. But you always know you’re in a Trader Joe’s store.
This works for advertising too. System 1 has been on a mission to convince marketers of the multiplier benefits of consistent advertising. But it’s not about simply repeating the same advert. Take Specsavers in the UK. For as long as I can remember (24 years actually), it’s run the Should’ve Gone to Specsavers campaign. By producing fresh takes and twists on the idea to keep it interesting and relevant, the slogan itself has become part of everyday culture.
Both of these speak to a broader truth. Being consistent means speaking, behaving, and showing up in a way that always feels like the brand rather than simply identical. It creates a coherent rather than uniform pattern, expressing an unmistakable core. After all, we don’t expect people we know to always dress, talk, and act exactly the same, yet we still know them.
AI has raised the stakes for brand coherence still further.
AI has impacted brand consistency in 2 ways.
On the one hand, it has made it more difficult for a brand to maintain consistency across its own communication. Enabled by AI to produce almost infinite content and move at much greater speed, the traditional ways of maintaining consistency (brand books and manual reviews) have struggled to keep up, with brand drift becoming a recognizable problem as a result.
On the other hand, AI recommendations have broadened the scope of brand coherence. When assessing credibility in relation to a prompt, it doesn’t just draw on what the brand says about itself and how it behaves, but also critically on what people say about the brand, in reviews, recommendations, and community discussion. A clear and coherent pattern needs to emerge across all these sources. If there are gaps or conflicting evidence, credibility suffers, and recommendation becomes less likely.
Coherent brands need to be lived, not enforced
Faced with the imperative of ensuring brand consistency, the usual reflex for a marketer is to enforce it, by producing a detailed set of rules and then establishing governance to ensure they’re followed. The idea of deploying AI Brand Agents follows this logic, they can ensure everything produced meets the agreed brand standards (though whether this results in a too perfect Disneyesque Main Street version of brand communication remains to be seen).
Yet I learnt long ago at Tesco, you can’t police something as complex as a shopping trip using such methods. Yes, you can ensure the environment is in line with the brand. But the experience is heavily dependent on employees, and employees are people, you can’t simply program them to behave in a particular way.
This is true today for all brands. Agentic AI may produce consistent brand communication, but it can’t control what people say about the brand, whether employees, creators, or customers. To achieve a coherent pattern, they need to be inspired to live the brand.
To make this happen, I found three major elements need to be aligned:
Stand for something meaningful
Center the brand on improving people’s lives in some way, to make it meaningful for customers and employees. This needs to be directly connected to what the brand does, rather than some generic statement about doing good, so that it makes sense.
Add a clear set of values to live by. These should reflect a brand that is fair and does the right thing, to create a sense of trust.
Flow this through everything the brand produces or owns.
The products and services, policies and processes, physical and online properties, as well as communications should all feel part of the same narrative. It’s what the business does, not just what it says.
Create a sense of belonging
Commit to a positive and supportive workplace for employees, and provide opportunities for customers and creators to feel part of the brand.
Of course, this is not in the gift of the CMO alone. The entire leadership team needs to commit to creating a brand worth living.
But brands still rely on people. And to be coherent in a complicated world, they need to be lived.
