You’re sick of your brand.Your customers barely met it.

You saw the campaign before it had a headline. Then the first three concepts, the revised concepts, the version with the smaller logo and the final version with the logo put back. By launch day you’ve got strong opinions about the background music.

Your customer went to the footy that weekend. Odds are they haven’t seen it once.

That gap is one of the most expensive blind spots in marketing. The owner walks past the sign every morning. The marketing team lives inside the brand for months. Both can be completely right about how tired it feels inside the building and completely wrong about what customers recognise outside it.

Boredom is an internal metric. Customers don’t come to your WIP meetings, which is a kindness to everyone.

Recognition is slow to build and quick to throw away

Customers aren’t studying your brand. They’re glancing at it, between other things, for a second or two, every now and then. Each time a cue repeats, a colour, a character, a voice, a line, it gets a little easier to link to you. Change it and that slow build starts again from zero.

That’s why the evidence favours sticking. System1’s Compound Creativity study, using data from the IPA Effectiveness Databank, looked at more than 4,000 ads from 56 brands across 44 categories over five years. The most creatively consistent fifth of brands achieved 28% more very large business effects. Those effects come from awards entries, which lean towards campaigns that worked, so read it as a strong association, not proof. But the direction is hard to ignore.

The same study found brands that kept the same creative agency over five years produced higher-quality ads. Consistency isn’t a failure of imagination. It’s what lets imagination compound.

Annoying is an asset

National Tiles gave Australia the best lesson in this all year. For more than four decades, Frank Walker’s “Hellooooo” has been blasting out of Australian radios. Plenty of marketing teams would have retired him long ago.

The research came first. Many Australians described the advertising as “annoying”. The insight was that the annoyance was also one of the brand’s greatest strengths: everyone knew exactly who Frank Walker was. So instead of burying it, the brand and its agency, Sunday Gravy, built a platform on it: Annoyingly Good. In the TV spots, Walker crashes through cliché ads for beer and super, hijacking them to remind viewers they’re actually watching a National Tiles commercial.

Read that as a brief. The thing the brand was most tempted to throw away became the whole idea. The joke only works because the audience already knows him, and that’s an advantage a brand-new campaign can’t buy.

My view: most rebrands are internal boredom dressed up as strategy. If you can’t name what customers would lose, you’re not ready to change it.

Consistent isn’t the same as recognised

There’s a trap on the other side. Using something consistently proves you use it. It doesn’t prove anyone links it to you.

Take a family bakery, an illustrative one, that’s put a hand-drawn mascot on its cake boxes for years. A new owner is moving upmarket and finds the mascot embarrassing next to the new website. Fair enough. Packaging costs money, and so does sending the wrong signal.

But there are two questions here. Does the bakery use the mascot consistently? The team can answer that in an afternoon. Do locals see it and think of this bakery, not just any bakery? Staring at more boxes won’t tell you. Only customers can.

Brief what stays and what changes, separately

When you do brief new work, write it in two paragraphs. The first names what customers already recognise and why it carries forward. The second names the new job: who you need to reach, what’s changed for them and what the work has to say.

Creative teams do their best work with something solid to push against. “Make it feel fresh” is an expensive way to find out nobody agreed what needed to change.

What to do on Monday

1. Collect ten things a customer has seen recently, including the unglamorous ones: the invoice, the order confirmation, the van, the shopfront.

2. Make four columns: the cue, where you use it, what customers actually recognise, and what you’ll do with it. Leave the third column blank wherever you’ve got no evidence.

3. Show a handful of customers, one at a time, with the name hidden. Ask which business comes to mind. Write down the wrong answers as carefully as the right ones.

4. Before any national change across many sites, pay for a proper recognition study first, not after.

5. If you’ve got a new marketing leader, judge them on the first great campaign that makes proper use of what the last team built, not on new stationery.

Sometimes the loudest move is turning up the volume on something you already own.

Sources & notes

• IPA, “How creative consistency strengthens brands and business effects”, 9 October 2024 (System1 Compound Creativity: 4,000+ ads, 56 brands, 44 categories, five years; the most consistent 20% of brands achieved 28% more very large business effects). Business effects come from IPA Effectiveness Databank awards entries, so this shows association, not proof of cause.

• Campaign Brief, “National Tiles embraces its most famous brand asset with ‘Annoyingly Good’ via Sunday Gravy”, 1 September 2026

• The bakery is illustrative.

Continue with The best thing about your business never leaves the building. If you want a next step, see Hum’s fractional CMO page.