"Brand consistency" is one of the most misunderstood phrases in brand work.
For many companies, it means:
The logo stays the same.
The colours stay the same.
The typeface stays the same.
The photography looks the same.
The tone of voice stays the same.
Eventually everything looks like it came from the same PowerPoint.
Very consistent.
Also potentially very boring.
I don't think consistency means looking the same.
I think it means:
When different situations come up, people make broadly the same kind of judgement.
Those are very different things.
A mature brand can be restrained on its website.
Have more personality on Instagram.
Speak more directly in China.
And let the founder sound much more like a human being on LinkedIn.
These things don't have to look or sound identical.
As long as the judgement underneath them is consistent.
Who are you?
What do you care about?
What won't you do?
What might be popular, but simply isn't right for you?
Those things matter more than a colour code.
I see this particularly often in cross-border work.
HQ sends the China team a brand guideline.
Dozens of pages.
And says:
"Please make sure everything is consistent."
Then the local team starts asking:
Can we change this?
Can we change that?
Is this sentence too soft?
Does this look too European?
Eventually everyone is discussing the guideline.
Nobody is discussing:
What does this market actually need?
I actually think a mature brand should allow different markets to be a little different.
Markets are different.
People are different.
Media are different.
Competitive environments are different.
If a brand can only stay consistent when everything around it is identical, it probably hasn't understood its own brand deeply enough.
Real consistency isn't making everything the same.
It's making sure that different people, in different places, still know:
What is something this brand would do?
And, perhaps more importantly:
What is something it wouldn't?
