26 October 2026 | Issue #138
In this issue:
- Creativity is less important than consistency
- Amazing real-world video effects
- Design quote of the week
Why Consistency Beats Creativity in B2B Branding
Your audience isn’t nearly as familiar with your brand as you are. And that’s a problem when you’re constantly changing it.
Years ago, I worked with a CMO who had a habit of explaining our solution story to the marketing team. Over and over again.
He’d stand at a whiteboard or one of the glass walls in our office and draw it out. We’d heard the story countless times. We knew where he was going well before he got there. And we hadn’t even started promoting it externally.
That experience changed how I think about brand consistency. As marketers, we spend so much time with our messaging and creative that we naturally get bored with it. We want something new. A fresh campaign. A different approach.
But our audience isn’t living with our brand every day.
By the time you’re tired of telling your story, your audience is probably just starting to understand it.
And if you keep changing that story, you’re making it harder for them to remember.
Your audience isn’t paying as much attention as you think
Think about how much time you spend with your company’s brand.
You see the website every day. You review the campaigns, social posts, presentations, and sales materials. You sit through meetings where the same messaging gets discussed for the hundredth time.
Eventually, even good creative starts to feel stale.
Your customers have a completely different experience.
They might see one of your LinkedIn posts, visit your website a few weeks later, and encounter your brand again at a trade show six months after that. In between, they’re seeing hundreds of messages from other companies.
And most of them aren’t even shopping for what you sell.
Research from the LinkedIn B2B Institute and Ehrenberg-Bass Institute introduced the 95-5 rule, which suggests that roughly 95% of potential B2B buyers are out of market at any given time. The actual percentage varies by industry and buying cycle, but the implication is important.
Most people encountering your marketing aren’t ready to buy.
They’re forming memories. They're making connections between your brand and the problem you solve.
That matters because when they eventually need a solution like yours, you want your company to come to mind.
Research from Bain & Company and Google found that 86% of B2B buyers begin the purchasing process with a list of vendors already in mind. And about 92% of the time, the vendor they ultimately choose comes from that initial list.
In other words, much of the work of winning a customer happens before that customer starts actively shopping.
If your brand looks different every time someone encounters it, you’re making that job unnecessarily difficult.
Recognition is more valuable than novelty
Creative people like creating new things. I’m certainly guilty of that.
There’s something satisfying about developing a new campaign concept or exploring a different visual direction. It’s part of why we got into this business.
But there’s a difference between creating something new and creating something effective.
A campaign can be beautiful, clever, and completely original. But if nobody recognizes which company created it, how much is it really doing for the brand?
Think about companies like Salesforce or Accenture.
They produce new creative work constantly. But they don’t reinvent their identities with every campaign.
They’ve established recognizable visual languages and continue to build on them.
In B2B, our audiences are smaller, buying cycles are longer, and many of our products and services are difficult to differentiate.
Yet B2B marketing is full of companies that look and sound almost identical.
The same stock photography. The same abstract technology graphics. The same language about innovation, transformation, and empowering customers. (I won't go into all of the AI visuals we're seeing that look the same.)
If your brand already looks like everyone else’s, consistency alone won’t save you.
You need something distinctive to begin with.
But once you’ve established it, you need to give it time to work.
The research points the same way
In 2024, System1 and the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising published a study called The Magic of Compound Creativity.
The researchers followed 80 UK brands across 54 categories over five years, matching their TV ads to campaign results in the IPA Effectiveness Databank. The goal was to see how consistency affected creative quality and business performance.
One finding stood out to me.
The most consistent third of brands improved their average ad emotion ratings from 3.1 to 4.0 over five years. The least consistent third actually declined from 2.6 to 2.3.
And the benefits weren’t limited to creative performance.
The research also found that 38.5% of campaigns from brands with a high culture of consistency reported very large profit growth, compared with just 6.7% of campaigns from brands with low consistency.
Now, this wasn’t B2B research, it covered UK brands, and the campaigns came from IPA effectiveness award entries, which skew toward success stories. Correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation, either. But the findings reinforce something I’ve observed throughout my career.
Consistency gives your creative work a chance to build on what came before it.
Instead of introducing your brand all over again, each new campaign reinforces the recognition you’ve already established.
And that cumulative effect is something we tend to underestimate.
I repeated this point an annoying number of times in my book
When I wrote The Visual Marketer, I repeated one particular argument so many times that I suspect some readers got tired of seeing it: consistency is more important than creativity.
That was intentional.
I wanted readers to remember it. And I figured the best way to make that happen was to follow my own advice.
Of course, I wasn’t arguing that creativity doesn’t matter (I've always been a creative at heart). I wrote an entire book about creating better visuals.
But even the most creative work loses some of its value when it looks and feels disconnected from everything else a brand produces.
A recognizable brand isn’t built one brilliant design at a time. It’s built by making hundreds of creative brand decisions that reinforce one another.
Color. Typography. Photography. Illustration. Layout. Tone of voice.
Each decision might seem insignificant on its own. Together, they create something people can recognize and eventually, trust.
And recognition is what gives those decisions lasting value.
Consistency doesn’t mean everything has to look the same
This is where some marketers misunderstand brand guidelines.
I worked with one Art Director who saw brand guidelines as too restrictive. He felt the box we had to work within was too small and he couldn't be creative.
He was wrong. And he didn't have that job for long because he was thinking like an artist, not a designer. He saw restrictions as handcuffs, not guidelines upon which brands are built.
He wanted to develop different visual treatments for each individual campaign because he wanted the work to feel fresh.
*sigh*
A good brand system should provide enough structure to create recognition and enough flexibility to keep the work interesting.
Establish a common visual language that different teams can work within.
Consistency isn’t about repeating the same design. It’s about making different designs feel like they belong to the same company.
You can experiment with composition, storytelling, illustration, animation, and messaging without abandoning the visual elements that make your brand recognizable.
In fact, a well-developed brand system makes creativity easier.
Instead of spending time debating fonts, colors, and visual treatments every time you start a project, you can focus on the more interesting problems.
What are we trying to communicate? Who are we trying to reach? How can we make the message more compelling?
The brand system handles the foundation.
The creative team builds on it.
Inconsistency is expensive
There’s another reason to take brand consistency seriously, and it has nothing to do with aesthetics.
Constantly reinventing your brand wastes time and money.
When every campaign needs a new creative direction, designers spend time solving problems they’ve already solved. Agencies develop concepts that don’t connect to existing work. Internal teams debate visual decisions that should have been settled months or years earlier.
I’ve led brand/creative teams at companies ranging from startups to global enterprises, and one of the most valuable things you can give a team is a clear system for making decisions.
The less energy you spend reinventing the foundation, the more you can invest in the ideas that actually matter.
But brands still need to evolve
None of this means a company should maintain the same identity forever.
I’ve led major rebranding initiatives. Sometimes a complete reset is necessary.
Companies acquire other businesses. Products change. Markets evolve. The brand that worked five years ago may no longer reflect what the organization has become.
But there’s a difference between evolving a brand and changing it because you’re bored.
Before making a significant creative change, marketing leaders should ask themselves a few questions:
- Are we solving a real problem, or are we just tired of looking at what we have?
- Will this make our brand more recognizable, or simply make the next campaign more interesting?
- Are we building on the recognition we’ve already established, or throwing it away?
- And most important, have we given our current approach enough time to work?
That last question is particularly difficult for marketers because we’re under constant pressure to show progress.
New campaigns feel like progress. Redesigned websites feel like progress. A refreshed visual identity gives everyone something tangible to point to.
But sometimes the most effective decision is to keep doing what you’re doing.
Not because it’s easier.
Because it’s working.
Give your brand a chance to become familiar
I still think about that CMO standing at the glass wall, drawing the same solution story we’d already heard a dozen times.
At the time, I didn’t fully appreciate what he was doing.
He wasn’t trying to entertain us with something new. He was making sure we understood the story well enough to tell it consistently.
And if we needed to hear it that many times, imagine how much repetition our customers would need. Even if they hear our story six times, it's not the only story they're hearing. The consistency builds repetition and solidifies memory. Hopefully your competition is flailing about with new concepts on each interaction.
We’re surrounded by our own work. We know our messaging, recognize our visuals, and understand what makes our company different.
Our audience doesn’t.
They need time and repeated exposure to make those connections.
So the next time someone suggests changing your creative direction because the current approach feels tired, consider who it’s actually tired for.
Your marketing team?
Or your customers?
By the time you’re tired of telling your story, your audience is only starting to remember it.
REAL-WORLD VIDEO EFFECTS
Have you seen the latest process video that Apple released behind the announcement of the new Apple Music visual brand?
It's amazing what can be done with master storytellers (and an unlimited budget).
