Most brand marketing strategy advice plays it safe. This doesn’t. Marketing advice becomes accepted so fast that nobody stops to ask whether it still works, and that costs brands more than any rebrand would. We’re pulling five brand opinions most agencies won’t say out loud, on guidelines, consistency, rebrands, logos, and what actually makes a brand memorable.
Unpopular Opinions, Brand Edition
There’s a lot of branding advice floating around out there, and most of it treats branding, logos, strategy, and business goals like separate conversations instead of the same one. Real branding and strategy for growing businesses doesn’t work that way. Most of that other advice sounds like this:
- Be consistent.
- Follow your brand guidelines.
- Refresh your logo.
- Build awareness.
- Rebrand when things feel stale.
- Spend more money.
And sure, some of that advice is useful. But sometimes marketing advice becomes so accepted that nobody bothers asking whether it actually works anymore. So we’re going there.
Not because being contrarian is fun.
Okay, it’s a little fun.
But mostly because good brand marketing strategy isn’t about following a checklist. It’s about knowing what your brand is trying to accomplish, why it matters, and what actually gets results. Here are five brand takes we think deserve a little more attention.
Take 1: Brand Guidelines Without Culture Are Just Expensive PDFs
A beautifully designed brand guide is not a brand. It’s a document. And documents don’t build brands. People do.
You can spend thousands of dollars developing the perfect visual identity, writing a 74-page brand book, choosing the precise shade of blue and documenting exactly when your logo can appear at a 17-degree angle, and then watch someone on your team slap the old logo onto a PowerPoint six months later. Because they didn’t know why any of it mattered.
That’s the problem.
Let’s be clear about something: you need a brand guide. Every growing business does. Brand guidelines are useful. They’re important. They give your team a framework for making decisions and keep your visual identity from turning into a free-for-all. But they can’t do the work of creating brand alignment inside the organization. If your team only understands the brand when someone sends them the PDF, you’ve got documentation. You don’t necessarily have culture.
A strong brand culture means your employees, contractors, agencies and other regular partners understand the brand well enough to make good decisions without needing to consult the sacred scroll every five minutes. They know:
- What the brand stands for
- Who it’s trying to reach
- How it should sound
- What it should never sound like
- What makes it different
- Why certain choices matter
That’s a very different thing from memorizing your approved hex codes.
So what actually fixes it? Don’t create more documentation. Create more alignment.
Build brand onboarding into the employee experience. Do the same with agencies and key vendors. Talk about the brand regularly. Use your core values in actual conversations instead of leaving them framed in the lobby like corporate wall art. And revisit the brand when the business evolves.
The goal isn’t to make everyone a walking brand manual. The goal is to make good brand decisions feel obvious. Because if your team genuinely understands the brand, consistency becomes a whole lot easier.
Brand marketing strategy is not simply the collection of things your company puts into the world. It’s the shared understanding that determines how those things get created in the first place.
Take 2: Consistency Is Overrated if Your Brand Isn’t Worth Repeating
The marketing world loves consistency. And we’re not here to hate on it. Consistency matters.
But here’s the problem: consistency is a multiplier, not a foundation.
If the underlying brand is confusing, forgettable or painfully generic, consistency doesn’t magically fix it. It just helps you deliver the same problem over and over again.
Imagine a restaurant that prides itself on serving the exact same mediocre burger every single day. Technically, that’s consistency. Nobody is handing out awards.
The same thing happens in marketing. You can use the same fonts, colors, photography style, messaging structure and social templates across every channel. But if your positioning doesn’t differentiate you, your messaging doesn’t mean anything and your creative looks like everyone else’s, you’re not building a stronger brand. You’re just becoming more efficient at being forgettable.
This is where branding and strategy have to work together.
Before asking, “Are we being consistent?” ask: “Is what we’re being consistent with actually working?” That’s the better question.
Harvard Business Review has written about the importance of both differentiation and the broader competitive context in brand positioning. Being different for the sake of being different isn’t the goal either. Your brand needs a meaningful position that makes sense to the people you’re trying to reach.
So when should consistency become the priority? When you have clarity worth multiplying. If people understand what you stand for, recognize you, remember you and know why you’re different, then yes, consistency can become incredibly powerful.
But if you’ve got:
- Low brand recall
- Generic messaging
- Creative that blends into your category
- No clear differentiation
- An identity your own team struggles to explain
…maybe don’t start by policing whether everyone used the approved shade of navy. You might have a strategy problem wearing a consistency costume.
Take 3: Most Rebrands Happen for the Wrong Reasons
Somewhere in a conference room right now, someone is looking at their company’s logo and thinking: “I’ve just…seen it a lot.”
And that, apparently, is enough to start a rebrand. Let’s pump the brakes.
A rebrand is not a seasonal home makeover. It’s not something you do because the CEO has been staring at the same logo for five years. It’s not something you do because your competitor launched a shiny new website. And it definitely shouldn’t happen because someone on the leadership team says, “It just feels dated.”
A rebrand should solve a business problem.
Maybe the company has fundamentally changed. Maybe the audience has changed. Maybe the positioning no longer reflects what the business actually does. Maybe the existing brand is actively getting in the way of growth.
Those are reasons to investigate a rebrand. “I’m bored of looking at it” is not.
The HBO Max Cautionary Tale
Let’s talk about one of the most fascinating recent examples.
In 2023, HBO Max became Max. The reasoning wasn’t completely irrational. Warner Bros. Discovery wanted the streaming service to represent a broader collection of entertainment beyond HBO’s premium programming. The idea was to create a larger umbrella for HBO content alongside Discovery programming, Warner Bros. films, reality, lifestyle and more.
In theory? Makes sense. In practice? Well…
By 2025, HBO Max was back. Warner Bros. Discovery announced that it would restore the HBO name, emphasizing HBO’s association with high-quality programming and the clearer, more distinctive promise the name gives consumers.
Regardless of the business rationale at each stage, the rapid shifts created a clear brand-continuity problem: HBO Max became Max, its familiar purple identity gave way to blue, and the HBO name returned two years later.
Meanwhile, WBD reported a net loss of 1.8 million direct-to-consumer subscribers in the second quarter of 2023, a period that included the May launch of Max. That figure covered HBO/Max and Discovery+ collectively, not Max alone, and WBD said some churn was expected as subscribers with overlapping services consolidated accounts. So no, we’re not going to blame every lost subscriber on a logo.
The Bigger Lesson Is Still Valuable: Changing a Familiar Brand Carries Real Costs.
When a new identity does not make the brand’s promise clearer – or gives up recognition people already value – the organization may end up paying both to introduce the change and to rebuild familiarity later.
Every rebrand creates work. New signage. New websites. New sales materials. New social templates. New presentations. New advertising. New internal training. New customer education. New everything.
And then there’s the thing you can’t put neatly into a project estimate: lost familiarity.
A brand that people already know has equity. Recognition has value. Familiarity has value. Association has value.
That’s why a smart brand marketing strategy doesn’t automatically treat “new” as “better.”
Sometimes the right move isn’t a rebrand. It’s a refinement. Keep the equity. Fix what’s not working. Strengthen the positioning. Modernize what needs modernizing. You don’t have to burn the house down because the kitchen cabinets are ugly.
Take 4: Your Logo Is Doing Less Work Than You Think.
Your brand messaging is doing more.
We love a good logo. We’re a creative agency. Of course we do. But let’s be honest about what a logo can and can’t do.
A logo is an identifier. Your messaging tells people why they should care. And too many businesses invest heavily in the first while treating the second like something they can slap together on a Tuesday afternoon.
That’s backwards.
A great logo with weak messaging creates a beautifully branded mystery. Nobody knows what you do. Nobody knows why you’re different. Nobody knows why they should choose you. But hey, the logo looks nice.
Meanwhile, a brand with a simple visual identity and incredibly clear messaging can become instantly recognizable because people understand what it stands for.
Think about the brands you know well. You probably don’t remember every detail of their visual identity. You remember what they mean. You remember what they make you feel. You remember what they’re known for. You remember the promise.
That’s why messaging deserves a bigger seat at the branding table.
If you’re considering a brand refresh, don’t automatically start with the logo. Start with the questions underneath it:
- What do we want to be known for?
- Who are we trying to matter to?
- What makes us meaningfully different?
- What do we believe?
- What should people understand about us in five seconds?
- What should they remember five days later?
Then build the visual identity around those answers. That’s where branding and strategy stop being two separate conversations and start becoming one.
Your logo should support the strategy. It shouldn’t have to carry the whole dang thing.
Take 5: The Brands Winning Right Now Have the Clearest Point of View, Not the Biggest Budgets
Now we’re getting to the good stuff. Because here’s something that makes big-budget marketers uncomfortable: money can buy attention. It cannot buy a point of view.
A bigger budget can buy more impressions. More placements. More ads. More eyeballs. But if your brand doesn’t have anything interesting to say, you’ve just paid more people to ignore you.
The brands that break through tend to know exactly what they believe. And they aren’t constantly checking the room to see whether everyone agrees.
Take Liquid Death. It’s water. In a can. With a brand identity that looks like it wandered out of a heavy metal album cover and decided to pick a fight with the bottled water aisle.
Their point of view is pretty simple: water doesn’t have to be boring. And they commit to it. Hard.
The result is a brand that people talk about, share, wear and remember. That’s the magic of a strong brand awareness strategy. It’s not simply about getting more people to see you. It’s about giving them something worth remembering.
Liquid Death has historically leaned heavily into relatively scrappy, unconventional marketing and earned media rather than trying to outspend giant beverage companies dollar-for-dollar. The brand has even talked openly about keeping production costs low so it can make more creative work and put more ideas into the world.
And here’s where the comparison gets a little ridiculous.
Coca-Cola operates on a completely different scale. Industry estimates have put Coca-Cola’s annual advertising spend in the billions, while estimates for Liquid Death have been in the tens of millions. Coca-Cola itself confirms that it reports advertising spending globally rather than breaking it down by individual country, brand or media type, so the exact comparison depends on the source and methodology.
The point isn’t that Liquid Death somehow spends less than Coke and therefore wins marketing. Coke is Coke. The point is that you don’t need Coke’s budget to have a recognizable point of view.
Liquid Death couldn’t win by playing Coca-Cola’s game. So it played its own.
And that is the strategic lesson. You don’t need to be louder than everyone. You need to be clearer.
Harvard Business Review’s work on brand positioning makes a similar point from a more traditional strategic angle: strong brands need meaningful differentiation while still making sense within the category and competitive landscape.
That’s the sweet spot. Know the category. Know your audience. Know what makes you different. Then have the guts to actually say it. Because a point of view does something a generic brand can’t: it attracts some people, and repels others. That’s not a flaw. That’s the filter working.
What All 5 Takes Add Up To
Your brand is doing a lot more than making your business look nice.
It’s helping people decide what you mean before they’ve had a conversation with you. It’s shaping expectations. It’s creating familiarity. It’s influencing whether you’re remembered.
And, when done well, it’s giving your marketing something much more valuable than another campaign idea: a reason to exist.
That’s why brand marketing strategy matters. That’s why consistency matters, but only after clarity. That’s why brand guidelines matter, but only when people understand them. That’s why rebrands should solve real problems. That’s why messaging deserves serious investment. And that’s why a clear point of view can outperform a giant pile of marketing dollars.
The goal isn’t to create a brand that everyone likes. The goal is to create a brand that the right people recognize, understand and remember.
Much more useful. Much less beige.
5 Brand Opinions Worth Stealing
Let’s bring it home.
- Brand guidelines without culture are just expensive PDFs. Your people create consistency. Give them understanding, not just instructions.
- Consistency is a multiplier, not a foundation. Get the brand right first. Then make it recognizable everywhere.
- Most rebrands happen for the wrong reasons. Don’t rebuild a brand because you’re bored with it. Fix it because the business actually needs something different.
- Your logo isn’t carrying the whole brand. Messaging, positioning and a clear promise are doing far more heavy lifting than most companies realize.
- The clearest point of view wins. You don’t need the biggest budget if you know exactly who you are, who you’re for and what you believe.
And if your team can’t answer those questions? Well. We’ve got some brand marketing strategy work to do.
If you’re ready to build branding and strategy for growing businesses into the same conversation instead of treating them like two departments that occasionally email each other, that’s exactly where we like to play. Book a discovery call and let’s figure out what your brand is actually trying to say.
Because your brand shouldn’t just look consistent. It should mean something. And preferably, something people remember.
Want the Full Conversation?
We went a whole lot deeper on this one. Watch Episode 06 of Marketing Made Creative: Unpopular Opinions, Brand Edition above for the full conversation, the arguments behind each take and probably a few opinions we should have kept to ourselves.
(We regret nothing.)
Go make your brand impossible to ignore.
Listen to Episode 06 Anywhere You Get Your Podcasts
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