What if brand consistency is actually holding your brand back?
In this episode of The Unified Brand Podcast, Chris Outlaw sits down with Paul Blackburn, founder and CEO of Studio Blackburn, to explore why the strongest brands need more than rigid rules — they need permission to play.
Drawing on more than 25 years in design and branding, Paul shares how creativity, strategy and experimentation can work together to build brands with greater clarity and character.
They explore why measurement can sometimes suffocate great creative ideas, whether consistency is really the virtue brands assume it is, and why traditional brand guidelines may no longer suit the way modern brands need to behave.
Paul also explains the idea of “brand stretch”: treating a brand less like a fixed identity and more like a set of ingredients that can be combined in different ways without losing what makes the brand recognizable.
You’ll discover:
- Why brands need permission to play • The tension between consistency and creativity • Why traditional brand guidelines may be becoming outdated • How to escape your industry’s “sector vernacular” • Why brands can’t communicate everything — and shouldn’t try • How to identify the 1% of your brand that people actually need to hear • Why great brand strategy is as much about what you leave out as what you include • How creative teams can produce better ideas without fear of getting things wrong • Why pitching great creative work is about more than the work itself • What LEGO, Airbnb and the Olympic brand can teach us about brand stretch
If your brand has become too controlled, too predictable or too similar to everyone else in your category, this conversation will challenge the way you think about consistency.
- Paul Blackburn – LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/blackburnpaul
- Studio Blackburn – Website: studioblackburn.com
- Studio Blackburn – Instagram: instagram.com/studioblackburn
- Studio Blackburn – LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/studioblackburn
Why Do Brands in the Same Industry All Look the Same?
Brands in the same industry often look and sound alike because they gradually adopt the same category conventions: similar colours, imagery, language, claims, website structures and customer experiences. These conventions help customers recognise what kind of business they’re dealing with, but when brands rely on them too heavily, familiarity turns into sameness.
The result is a strange contradiction. Businesses invest significant amounts of money in their brands, yet often emerge looking more like their competitors than themselves.
I’ve seen this happen repeatedly.
Nobody walks into a meeting and says, “Let’s make ourselves indistinguishable.”
It happens gradually.
Competitors become reference points. Accepted industry practice becomes the benchmark. Safe decisions accumulate. And before long, the organisation has built a perfectly competent representation of its sector, rather than a distinctive expression of the business itself.
Designer Paul Blackburn describes this as the “sector vernacular”.
When I spoke with Paul, founder and CEO of Studio Blackburn, on the Unified Brand Podcast, he put it simply:
“If you’re a bank, you tend to look like a bank.”
That sounds obvious. But there’s something strategically important underneath it.
Your customers need enough familiarity to understand what you are.
They also need enough difference to understand why they should choose you.
Finding the balance between those two things is where brand strategy becomes valuable.
What are category conventions in branding?
Category conventions are the familiar visual, verbal and behavioural signals businesses use to communicate that they belong to a particular market or sector.
They can include:
- colours
- typography
- imagery
- terminology
- messaging
- website structures
- product naming
- customer experience conventions
- tone of voice
- advertising styles
- symbols and iconography.
Look at enough businesses within almost any sector and patterns begin to emerge.
Financial brands might lean towards signals of security, confidence and stability.
Technology businesses often favour minimalist interfaces, abstract graphics and language about innovation.
Professional services businesses tend to communicate authority and expertise.
Luxury brands have their own visual and verbal codes.
None of that is inherently wrong.
These signals exist because people use familiarity to make sense of the world.
Paul made this point when discussing how Studio Blackburn approaches a new category:
“There are certain cues in this sector that you need to hit and that people will need. There are some familiar tropes, if you like, that you need to retain.”
The problem isn’t the existence of category conventions.
The problem is what happens when everybody follows them in exactly the same way.
Why do brands start looking like their competitors?
Brands rarely become generic because of one disastrous decision.
They drift there.
A competitor launches a new website and suddenly becomes the internal reference point.
A board member asks why the organisation doesn’t look more like the market leader.
A creative idea gets rejected because “nobody else in our sector does that”.
An agency presentation contains a mood board populated primarily with competitors.
Another campaign adopts the same language everyone else is using because it feels familiar and safe.
Individually, these decisions can seem perfectly rational.
Collectively, they create sameness.
I think of this as category drift.
What is category drift?
Category drift is the gradual process through which a brand becomes more representative of the conventions of its market and less representative of its own distinctive identity.
It rarely feels dramatic while it’s happening.
That’s what makes it dangerous.
A business can still look professional. Its marketing can still be polished. Its website might be beautifully designed.
Nothing is obviously “wrong”.
But remove the logo and ask whether somebody could confidently identify the company.
That’s often where the problem reveals itself.
Category drift is particularly likely as organisations grow because more people become involved in expressing the brand.
Decisions get distributed.
New agencies arrive.
Teams change.
Channels multiply.
Short-term commercial priorities compete for attention.
The brand slowly moves away from its strategic centre.
In the Elements Brand Lifecycle™, we describe the wider pattern as:
Alignment → Drift → Fragmentation → Brand Identity Crisis → Unification
Category drift can be one expression of that wider organisational drift.
And by the time you can see the problem in the design, it may have been developing underneath for years.
If you’re beginning to question whether the assumptions that built your existing brand are still serving the business you’re becoming, our Strategic Shifts guide explores some of the strategic changes growing organisations need to consider before jumping straight to a rebrand.
Why category conventions aren’t necessarily bad
This is where differentiation is often misunderstood.
Standing out doesn’t mean rejecting everything associated with your industry.
Imagine a financial institution whose entire identity communicates frivolity, instability and risk.
It would certainly be different.
That doesn’t make it strategically useful.
Customers use category cues to understand what they’re looking at. Some conventions carry important meaning, reassurance or context.
Paul’s point wasn’t that businesses should abandon their sector’s visual language entirely.
It was that they should understand it well enough to make conscious choices.
As he explained:
“We understand your sector. There are certain cues in this sector that you need to hit… but within this sector you need to really stand out.”
That last part matters.
You aren’t trying to disguise the category.
You’re trying to become distinctive within it.
The strategic question therefore isn’t:
How can we make ourselves completely different from our competitors?
It’s:
Which conventions help our customers understand us, and which conventions are preventing them from remembering us?
Those are very different questions.
When familiarity becomes brand sameness
Imagine ten competitors displayed side by side. Now start removing the names and logos.
What happens? Can you still distinguish them?
If the answer is no, look at what remains. Perhaps everyone uses the same colour palette, the photography is interchangeable, and everyone claims to be innovative, customer-focused, and trusted. Perhaps every website follows an almost identical hierarchy, while everyone has adopted the same tone.
This is where familiarity has tipped into sameness.
And visual identity is only one part of it.
One of the biggest differentiation problems I see is language. Businesses frequently make almost identical claims using slightly different combinations of words:
- “We put customers first.”
- “We’re passionate about quality.”
- “We’re innovative.”
- “We’re your trusted partner.”
- “We deliver tailored solutions.”
These statements aren’t necessarily false. They’re simply strategically weak if every credible competitor can say exactly the same thing.
Being true isn’t enough to make something differentiating.
A strong brand needs to identify what is both relevant and meaningfully distinctive.
Your brand doesn’t have a design problem. It may have a clarity problem.
When a brand looks too much like its competitors, the instinct is often to change the identity: new colours, a new typeface, different photography, a new website, and perhaps a new logo.
Sometimes that’s necessary. But design can’t manufacture strategic difference where none has been identified.
This is one of our core beliefs at Elements:
Strategy must precede expression.
If the business hasn’t established who it is, who it serves, what it stands for, and why it matters, the creative team has very little distinctive material to work with. So it reaches for what is available: the category.
That’s why a generic-looking brand can actually be a symptom of a deeper strategic issue.
The organisation isn’t necessarily suffering from a lack of creativity. It may be suffering from a lack of clarity.
The 1% problem: what should people remember about you?
One of my favourite moments in my conversation with Paul was his distinction between everything a business could communicate and what it should communicate.
Most established organisations have an enormous amount they could say: products, services, capabilities, values, features, history, processes, people, accreditations, methodologies, case studies, sustainability initiatives, technology, culture, and experience. All of it may be true.
But your audience doesn’t have unlimited attention.
Paul described the challenge this way:
“There’s 99% of what you do that we just haven’t got the bandwidth to communicate. What’s the 1% that we can communicate with that will engage people and bring them towards your brand?”
He calls that 1% a kind of Trojan horse for the entire brand.
I think that’s a powerful way to think about differentiation because businesses often respond to competitive pressure by saying more: more claims, more propositions, more benefits, more website pages, and more proof points.
But more information doesn’t necessarily produce more clarity.
Sometimes differentiation requires reduction. You have to identify the idea that earns somebody’s attention first, then let the rest of the business unfold behind it.
As Paul put it:
“There’s lots we could say about you, but what we’re here to do is to find out what we should say about you.”
That’s brand strategy.
Not inventing something clever to say. Deciding what deserves to be remembered.
How to identify the conventions in your category
Before trying to differentiate your brand, map the world around it.
Choose five to ten competitors or credible alternatives your customers might consider and compare them across the following areas:
| Area | Questions to ask |
| Positioning | What space does each competitor appear to be trying to own? |
| Proposition | What is the main reason each gives customers to choose them? |
| Messaging | Which words, phrases and claims repeatedly appear? |
| Visual identity | Which colours, type styles and graphic approaches dominate? |
| Imagery | Are competitors using similar photography or illustration styles? |
| Personality | How does the category tend to sound and behave? |
| Website experience | Are similar structures and patterns being repeated? |
| Customer experience | Which behaviours have become expected category norms? |
| Proof | How does each competitor substantiate its claims? |
| Distinctive assets | What, if anything, could you recognise without seeing the name? |
Don’t immediately judge these patterns.
First, identify them.
You’re trying to understand the vernacular of the sector.
Only then can you determine which parts need to remain familiar and where there is room to move.
Which category conventions should your brand keep?
Not every convention is your enemy.
Some are useful shorthand.
A good test is to put each major convention through three questions.
1. Does the customer need this cue?
Would removing it make the business harder to understand or trust?
If so, think carefully before discarding it.
2. Is it genuinely distinctive to us?
If every major competitor does exactly the same thing, it probably isn’t creating much competitive distinction.
3. Are we using it intentionally?
This may be the most important question.
There’s a difference between choosing a convention because it serves the strategy and inheriting one because “that’s how our industry does it”.
Intentionality changes everything.
Don’t differentiate for the sake of being different
There’s another trap here.
Once businesses recognise that their category is full of sameness, they sometimes race in the opposite direction. Suddenly, everything must be disruptive, unexpected, bold, and different.
But difference without strategic relevance is simply novelty.
If your competitors are all blue, making yourself fluorescent orange isn’t automatically a positioning strategy. You may become more noticeable, but that doesn’t necessarily make you more meaningful.
Effective brand differentiation creates a reason to remember you that reinforces a reason to choose you.
That distinction matters.
Brand is not decoration applied to a business after the strategy has been decided. We see brand as the operating system of the business. It should connect what the organisation believes, how it behaves, how it competes, and how it expresses itself.
That’s why genuine differentiation has to go deeper than aesthetics.
Use the Unified Brand Framework™ to escape category sameness
At Elements, we approach this through the Unified Brand Framework™: Clarify → Unify → Amplify.
The sequence matters.
Clarify: understand what is genuinely different
Before trying to look different, establish what makes the business meaningfully distinctive.
Ask:
- Who are we really for?
- What problem are we uniquely equipped to solve?
- What do we believe that shapes how we operate?
- Where are competitors converging?
- What do customers genuinely value about us?
- What can we credibly own?
- What is the 1% people should remember?
Clarity creates the strategic centre.
Without it, differentiation becomes cosmetic.
Unify: build the difference into the organisation
Differentiation becomes powerful when it isn’t confined to a positioning statement.
Leadership should understand it.
Employees should understand it.
Products and services should reinforce it.
The customer experience should demonstrate it.
Sales should articulate it.
Marketing should amplify it.
Design should express it.
This is what we mean by a Unified Brand: every part of the organisation moving in the same direction.
When differentiation only exists in the marketing department, competitors can copy the appearance of it relatively easily.
When it exists throughout the business, it becomes much harder to imitate.
Amplify: make the difference recognisable
Only then should you turn up the volume.
Creative expression has an important job here.
And this is where another idea from Paul becomes particularly useful: permission to play.
“Clients aren’t paying us to trot out something that they could get a computer to do… The thing that we bring that no one else can bring is that creative element.”
Once the strategic foundations are strong, the creative system needs enough freedom to express them.
Otherwise you’ve created clarity only to bury it beneath the same execution as everybody else.
Consistency doesn’t mean repetition
This leads to an interesting tension.
Brands need consistency, but consistency is often interpreted as making everything look the same. Paul questions that assumption:
“Why is consistency a virtue?”
He compares brands with people. We’re not emotionally identical in every situation. Sometimes we’re serious, sometimes excited, sometimes playful, and sometimes reflective. Yet the people who know us still recognise us.
Brands can have a similar range.
The objective isn’t rigid repetition. It’s coherence.
This fits with one of the guiding principles behind the Unified Brand Framework™: Consistency Compounds. Repeated, aligned actions build meaning over time, but aligned doesn’t have to mean identical.
The strategic core remains stable while expression responds to the audience, channel, culture, and context.
Think of your brand as ingredients, not one recipe
Paul shared an analogy from brand strategist Rachel Fairley that captures this nicely.
A brand can be understood as a collection of ingredients.
Paul explained:
“A brand [is] a mixture of ingredients that you can put together and create different recipes with.”
I like this because it gives us a more useful way to think about brand consistency.
Imagine your ingredients include:
- positioning
- personality
- colour
- typography
- imagery
- language
- graphic devices
- behaviours
- beliefs
- distinctive assets.
Not every execution needs every ingredient in equal quantities.
One campaign might be typographically led.
Another might lean heavily into photography.
One communication might bring out the more serious side of the brand.
Another might be playful.
Different recipes.
Same kitchen.
That’s a much more dynamic model than forcing every piece of communication through the same template.
Can your brand stretch without losing itself?
This is where strategic clarity pays dividends.
The stronger the centre, the further the brand can often stretch.
Paul described working with brands where the challenge isn’t to control every possible execution but to create enough confidence for the identity to live:
“Why can’t they behave in different ways and explore different things at different times to different people?”
It’s a good question.
Many organisations fear variation because they’re not entirely sure which parts of their brand are fundamental.
When everything feels important, everything becomes protected.
When you know what actually creates recognition and meaning, you can distinguish between brand principles and brand habits.
That gives creative teams much more room.
If you’re unsure whether your current brand has that level of clarity and alignment, the Brand Power Assessment can help you identify where the system is strong and where fragmentation or drift may be limiting its impact.
Do traditional brand guidelines make sameness worse?
They can.
Traditional brand guidelines are useful for protecting important assets and maintaining basic standards.
But guidelines become counterproductive when their primary purpose is preventing variation.
Paul told me:
“We don’t really do guidelines, brand guidelines anymore.”
Instead, Studio Blackburn increasingly encourages something more like a living toolkit:
“A living, breathing toolkit that almost becomes a gallery for what the brand has done, because that gives you clues as to what the brand could do and where it could go and play.”
There’s an important shift in thinking here.
A traditional rulebook asks:
How do we stop people getting the brand wrong?
A living brand system asks:
How do we help people create more things that are unmistakably right?
Those are not the same objective.
Governance still matters.
But the best governance doesn’t just police a brand.
It enables people to use it confidently.
How do you know whether your brand has fallen into category sameness?
Try this simple diagnostic.
The category sameness test
Take your own brand and five competitors and ask:
- If the logos disappeared, how easy would it be to identify each business?
- Do you use substantially the same language to describe yourselves?
- Are you all making variations of the same core claim?
- Does your visual identity rely primarily on category conventions?
- Could a competitor credibly copy your main proposition tomorrow?
- Can your leadership team clearly articulate what makes you meaningfully different?
- Does that difference appear throughout the customer experience, or only in marketing?
- Is there one idea you want customers to associate with you?
- Are your creative teams empowered to express the brand, or primarily instructed not to break it?
- Does the brand represent the business you’ve become, or simply the sector you’re in?
If those questions are uncomfortable, that’s useful.
Don’t immediately redesign anything.
Go back to clarity.
Your competitors shouldn’t be the starting point for your identity
You obviously need to understand your competitive landscape.
But competitors are context, not creative direction.
If your brand is built primarily by looking sideways, you’ll inevitably move towards the centre of the category. The more interesting questions look both inward and outward at the same time.
Ask yourself:
- What is changing in the market?
- What does your audience need?
- What do you believe?
- What are you exceptionally good at?
- What could you become?
- Where is the business going?
- What can you credibly say that matters?
- What should people remember?
These questions uncover material your competitors don’t necessarily have access to.
Because the most defensible differentiation usually isn’t invented. It’s discovered within the organisation and then deliberately strengthened.
Build a brand that represents you, not just your industry
Every category has a language.
Learn it.
Understand why it exists.
Respect the parts customers genuinely need.
But don’t mistake fitting into the category for building a strong brand.
The aim isn’t to become the strangest business in your sector.
Nor is it to become the most beautifully executed version of exactly the same thing.
It’s to create enough familiarity for people to understand you and enough meaningful distinction for them to remember and choose you.
Paul’s idea of sector vernacular gives us a useful way of seeing the problem.
But the solution begins deeper.
Clarify what makes the business matter.
Unify the organisation around that understanding.
Amplify it through distinctive, confident expression.
Clarify. Unify. Amplify.
Because when a business truly understands who it is, it doesn’t need to borrow its identity from the category around it.
It can build a brand that is unmistakably its own.
If your brand has gradually drifted towards the conventions of your category and you’re struggling to articulate what should make you meaningfully different, book a Discovery Call with Elements Brand Management. We’ll explore where the lack of distinction is coming from, what needs to be clarified and whether a more unified brand could unlock the next stage of growth.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do brands in the same industry look the same?
Brands in the same industry often look alike because they use common category conventions — familiar colours, imagery, language, layouts and behaviours that help customers recognise the type of business. Problems arise when those conventions dominate the identity so completely that individual brands become difficult to distinguish.
What are category conventions in branding?
Category conventions are the visual, verbal and behavioural cues commonly used within a particular market. They help customers understand what kind of organisation they’re dealing with, but brands need to decide consciously which conventions to retain and which to challenge.
How can I make my brand stand out from competitors?
Start with strategic differentiation rather than visual difference. Clarify who you serve, what makes the organisation meaningfully different, what customers value and what you want to be remembered for. Then unify that difference across the organisation before amplifying it through messaging, identity, marketing and customer experience.
Should a brand look completely different from its competitors?
Not necessarily. Some category cues help customers understand and trust a business. The goal is to retain useful familiarity while creating enough meaningful distinction to make the brand recognisable, relevant and memorable.
What is the difference between brand consistency and brand sameness?
Brand consistency means repeatedly reinforcing the same underlying identity, positioning and principles. Brand sameness occurs when executions become unnecessarily repetitive or indistinguishable from others. A strong brand can express itself differently across contexts while remaining strategically coherent.
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