Most brand guidelines protect the wrong thing, and they’ve been doing it for so long nobody questions which layer actually matters.
A lot of founders and marketers hear “brand consistency” and translate it into “never change anything.” Same logo placement, same three colors, same tone of voice in every sentence, forever, because any deviation feels like a risk to recognition. It’s a reasonable fear. It’s also the wrong instinct, and it usually protects the wrong layer of the brand.
The brands you’d recognize anywhere keep changing on the surface
Spotify’s year-end Wrapped campaign looks meaningfully different almost every year. The color palette shifts, the illustration style shifts, the way your listening data gets visualized shifts. If you lined up five years of Wrapped side by side, a stranger might not guess they came from the same design team. And yet nobody has ever been confused about whose campaign it is, because the thing that actually identifies Wrapped was never the color palette. It’s the ritual: once a year, entirely personal, built around the idea that your taste in music says something true about you. Change the wrapping every year. Never touch that idea.
Apple’s advertising has gone through several completely different visual eras: the silhouette-and-headphones iPod ads, the stark white product-on-white-background era, the “Shot on iPhone” user-generated look. Different colors, different subjects, different photography styles entirely. What never moved was the belief underneath all of it: the product is the hero, the ad gets out of its way, and simplicity is presented as a kind of confidence rather than a lack of effort.
Nike changes creative constantly, different athletes, different sports, different formats, sometimes barely any product in the frame at all. “Just Do It” survives all of it, along with an emotional register built around effort and deservingness, because that’s the part doing the actual identifying. The ads around it are allowed to look like nothing you’ve seen from Nike before.
Most teams protect the wrong layer
Here’s the mistake that shows up constantly, usually with good intentions behind it: teams lock down the surface, the exact logo lockup, the exact hex codes, the exact font, treating those as sacred, while letting the actual point of view drift depending on who’s writing that week’s copy. It should run the other way. The surface can flex. The underlying belief is the thing that has to hold.
A useful test: pick something about your brand and ask, “if we changed this tomorrow, would people still recognize us?” If the honest answer is yes, you’re looking at decoration. It can move. If the answer is no, that’s the thing you actually protect, and it’s rarely the color palette. It’s usually a belief, a promise, or a specific way of treating the customer that would feel like a betrayal if it disappeared.
It only gets harder from here
Content keeps splitting into more formats: short video, voice, an AI-generated summary of what your brand does, channels nobody designed a brand guideline around. The instinct is to try to control the surface everywhere, same font, same crop, same three words in the same order, on every single one. That instinct won’t survive the number of formats still coming.
What actually holds a brand together is whether its point of view still sounds like itself once it gets translated into a format nobody built it for. That’s harder to pull off than a style guide. It’s also the only version of consistency that was ever going to last.
If you’re figuring out what’s actually load-bearing in your brand versus what’s just decoration, I’d like to hear about it. Get in touch, or see the Work page for more of the thinking behind this.