Perfectly on-brand. Completely out of place.

A team walks in with an idea. It clearly understands the audience. It fits the moment. And it looks like nothing the brand has done before.

The easy move is to bring it into line: swap in the house typeface, soften the tone, make it look a bit more like us. It will be easier to approve. It will probably be less effective.

For a CMO, this isn't really a question about creative freedom. It's a commercial judgement. Will this difference create value, or will it introduce risk the brand doesn't need to take?

That judgement is harder than it should be because of two assumptions most marketing teams carry. The first is that on-brand means safe. It doesn't: work can be perfectly consistent and still be invisible, irrelevant or wrong for the moment. The second is that unfamiliar means risky. That isn't true either. Work can look completely new and still reinforce exactly what the brand stands for.

“Making complexity simple is at the heart of building a strong brand. It's not about making everything consistent, but knowing what makes a brand unmistakably itself - what needs to stay the same, and what can change without losing its identity.”

Brands aren't built by consistency alone, or by creative freedom without boundaries. They're built by knowing what to keep consistent and where to make room for change.

Know what has to stay the same

“On-brand” usually bundles three things together, and they deserve different treatment.

The first is strategic meaning: the positioning and associations the business is trying to build. That is rarely up for negotiation. The second is distinctive assets: the cues that connect an experience to the brand. These should be repeated deliberately, because recognition compounds. The third is creative expression: how the brand shows up in a particular place, for a particular audience. That's usually where difference creates its value.

Separating them turns a vague instinct (“it doesn't feel like us”) into a sharper question: which of these does this idea change, and is that actually a problem?

It also exposes an imbalance in how risk gets counted. The risk of doing something different is visible in the approval meeting. The cost of sameness rarely is. Work that feels familiar to the internal team but unremarkable to the audience still uses media budget, production budget and attention. It just returns very little.

Paid social makes this particularly visible. When brand guidelines dictate every execution, campaigns can become a collection of matching luggage: the same layouts, colours, typography and logo placement, regardless of the audience or message. Everything looks beautifully consistent. But if nothing stands out, nothing gets noticed.

And increasingly, the problem goes beyond audience attention. Advertising algorithms need genuine creative variety to find what works for different people. Meta, for example, encourages advertisers to diversify their creative rather than simply produce variations of the same execution. Changing the text on an otherwise identical video doesn't necessarily create a meaningfully different ad. If everything looks and feels the same, you're effectively giving the platform one creative approach to work with. If that approach isn't resonating, there's little else for the system to test or optimise towards.

Worse, when the data tells you an ad isn't working, the instinct can be to produce another version of essentially the same thing. The brand book has become a constraint on effectiveness rather than a foundation for it.

Internal familiarity is not a measure of external effectiveness.

The constraint is often in the brief

Many creative limits aren't imposed in the approval meeting. They're written into the brief, long before anyone has started thinking, because the brief describes what we're making rather than what we're trying to achieve.

“We need a branded tote for the event” has already decided the answer. “We want attendees to still be thinking about us a month later” leaves room for an object, a collaboration, or something that isn't merchandise at all. The same is true of social. “Three posts a week” is an output. Deciding what role the brand should play in someone's feed is an objective.

An objective-led brief also eases the CMO's commercial tension. It defines the outcome and how success will be judged, so unfamiliar work is assessed against results rather than resemblance. It states upfront what is fixed (meaning, values, key assets) and what is open, so a different idea doesn't have to renegotiate its permission at every stage. And it gives the team licence to challenge the brief itself.

That changes the approval conversation. The question stops being “does this look like our other work?” and becomes “does this do the job we agreed?”

The most expensive creative constraint is the one written into the brief before the work begins.

Use the judgement you hired

Brands hire social specialists, cultural strategists and creatives because they're closer to the audience than the leadership team is. That's the point of them.

Then the work is reviewed by the people furthest from that audience, against criteria that tend to reward familiarity. Expertise becomes advisory. Convention carries the authority. The business pays for specialist judgement and gets back a consensus.

You can't hire people for their expertise and then refuse to use their judgement.

In practice, using it looks like this:

Decision rights that match expertise, so the people closest to the audience can make calls within agreed boundaries.

Senior review that focuses on strategy, values and genuine risk, not personal taste.

Backing considered experiments through uneven early results, rather than pulling them at the first wobble.

Expecting challenge in both directions, including from specialists to work that already has senior support.

That last point matters as much as the others. Trusting people's judgement means trusting them to say no, as well as yes.

And increasingly, it means trusting them to act quickly.

Social is a live feedback loop. A creative approach that works on Monday might be losing its impact by Thursday. An opening hook might be failing to hold attention. One message might be outperforming another. A format might connect with an audience nobody anticipated.

Not every fluctuation is a meaningful signal, of course. But when the evidence is there, teams should be able to respond to it. Sometimes that means changing the next piece of creative overnight, not waiting for the next campaign review.

The brand shouldn't change with every result. But the work should be able to.

What good decisions make possible

Glossier offers a simple reminder that unfamiliar expression and a recognisable brand aren't opposites. Its 2019 London pop-up on Floral Street was a riot of floral print. Its SoHo flagship took its cues from the New York subway. Two very different spaces, each unmistakably Glossier.

Duolingo is the more instructive example, because its social presence is so widely imitated and so rarely matched. The tone is the visible part, and the least transferable. What sits behind it is a set of decisions about authority.

Zaria Parvez, one of the people behind Duolingo's social presence, has described a team that works on a two-day cycle and signs off its own content: “we approve the content within the team ourselves, so we're not waiting for senior leadership to say yes or no.” She has also described a tolerance for risk, moving ahead with ideas that are good for the brand even without full internal agreement (Technical.ly).

Ryanair offers another illustration of what creative responsiveness can look like. Its social content moves with trends, conversations and audience reactions, often at the pace of the platforms themselves. The formats and jokes change constantly. But the irreverent personality, value positioning and willingness to poke fun at itself remain recognisable.

Neither brand needs every execution to look identical. Their identities give them the confidence to experiment with how they show up.

That's an objective-led brief and real decision rights working together: a team given a job and the authority to do it. Brands that copy the voice without handing over that authority get the tone without the results.

The output is the visible part. The decisions behind it are what make it repeatable.

Approval isn't judgement

In August 2026, Good Good Golf released an ad for a co-branded Callaway driver. In it, Good Good co-founder Garrett Clark pushed former Division I golfer Alexis Miestowski to the ground as she reached for his club. After criticism that it trivialised violence against women, Callaway ended the partnership with immediate effect (Campaign).

The detail that matters here is what happened before it went out. Callaway CEO Chip Brewer acknowledged that “while the video was produced by Good Good, it was approved by Callaway prior to posting”, adding: “That approval should never have happened” (Golf.com). Clark's own apology was blunt: “This is not at all what we stand for” (Campaign).

There was a process. The work passed through it. And it was still wrong for the audience and for what both brands say they stand for.

Set against Duolingo, it's the mirror image. Duolingo shows unfamiliar work that was right. Callaway shows approved work that was wrong. Neither the familiarity of the work nor the existence of a sign-off told anyone what they needed to know.

We don't know what happened inside either business, and it would be wrong to guess. But the questions are worth asking of any brand team:

Is anyone in a position to challenge an idea backed by a high-profile partner?

Do reviewers consider how the audience will read the work, not just the intended joke?

Is it clear who is accountable when two brands share a piece of work?

A sign-off confirms that work has been seen. Only judgement tells you whether it's right.

Guidelines should teach how a brand thinks

Most brand guidelines tell people what a brand looks like. The best ones teach people how it thinks.

A rulebook records decisions that have already been made: the logo, the palette, the tone of voice. That's useful, but it only answers questions someone has already asked. The decisions that matter most are the ones the guidelines never anticipated. A new platform. A partner with a very different sense of humour. A brief for something the brand has never made.

Guidelines that teach thinking explain the reasoning behind the rules, so people can apply it where the rules run out. They show worked examples of why an adaptation succeeded or failed, not just a gallery of approved executions. And they are explicit about the values that hold in every context, whoever made the work.

There's a balance here. Brand building depends on consistency, repetition and recognition. Every time a brand abandons something distinctive simply because a new idea comes along, it risks losing some of what it's worked to build.

But protecting the brand shouldn't mean protecting every creative decision ever made in its name.

Particularly in social, where the feedback is immediate and the opportunities to improve are constant, the ability to adapt is part of what makes good marketing effective. You might change the creative, the hook, the format or the message from one day to the next. What shouldn't change is the underlying identity that makes the work yours.

The strongest brand systems make that distinction clear. They tell people what must stay the same, and give them the freedom to change what isn't working.

That's the difference between a team that spots a values problem early and one that relies on sign-off to catch it. It's also the difference between a team that waits for permission and one that can move with confidence.

A rulebook produces compliance. Teaching people how the brand thinks produces judgement.

Back to the idea on the desk

So, the unfamiliar idea is still waiting. The question isn't “is this on-brand?” It's “is this the right decision for the brand, the audience and the business?”

Answering that well depends on everything that comes before it: a brief that defines the outcome rather than the output, people whose judgement is genuinely used, and guidelines that teach them how the brand thinks. It also takes a willingness to question work that has already gathered internal support, including your own.

And the confidence to listen to what happens after the work goes live. Not every execution will work. Not every assumption will prove right. The advantage belongs to brands that can learn from those results and adapt quickly, without losing the identity they've spent years building.

Brands aren't built by the work that looks most like them. They're built by the quality of the decisions about when to be consistent, when to be different, and when to change course. And by leaders who trust the judgement they hired.

Sources

Glossier's floral pop-up store in London, Dezeen

Glossier's NYC store gets a subway-inspired glow-up, D5 Mag

Duolingo viral marketing strategy lessons, Technical.ly

Callaway Golf ends relationship with Good Good Golf following ad backlash, Campaign

Callaway CEO apologizes for controversial Good Good ad, Golf.com