Most brands have never been better at maintaining visual consistency. Brand systems are stronger, guidelines are more comprehensive and teams have access to an increasing number of tools that help protect identity across every touchpoint. Yet many brands still feel less distinctive than they once did.
As content production scales across channels, teams and formats, the behavioural characteristics that make a brand recognisable can begin to drift. Personality, pace, confidence and overall character are far harder to govern than logos, colours and typography.
From a motion perspective, these behavioural qualities are often where brand expression is at its most visible. The question is no longer whether the guidelines are being followed, but whether the brand still feels like itself.
Many established brands have never looked more consistent. The logo, colours and typography are correct. Teams are following templates and working from increasingly sophisticated brand systems.
Yet despite all of that, I've noticed that some brands feel less distinctive than they used to.
This isn’t a criticism of brand systems, but the opposite. Most organisations are better than ever at protecting visual consistency. The problem is that consistency of assets isn't the same as consistency of behaviour.
As brands create more content, across more channels and with more people involved, it's becoming easier for those behaviours to drift. The visual identity might stay intact, but the things that make a brand feel recognisable start to become less consistent. Over time, that can make even well-managed brands feel a little less like themselves.
For me, this is where the conversation becomes interesting.
A brand isn't only defined by what it looks like. It's also defined by how it behaves. That behaviour shows up in the way stories are told, the pace of communication, the confidence of a message, what gets emphasised and what gets left unsaid. It influences how things move, sound, respond and ultimately how they make people feel.
What can be felt is how considered and well executed these details are.
The strongest brands have behaviours and a level of execution that feel unmistakably their own. Not because they're following a formula, but because they're expressing a clear and consistent point of view.
The tricky part is that behaviour is much harder to document than visual identity.
You can specify colours, typography and layouts. You can create templates, usage rules and approval processes. It's much harder to codify things like energy, rhythm, confidence, restraint or personality. Those qualities often sit between the lines of a brand system rather than inside it.
As a result, many brands become very good at protecting the things that are easiest to govern, while paying less attention to the characteristics that make them distinctive in the first place.
You can usually spot it when you start looking for it.
A campaign launches that feels slightly disconnected from the rest of the brand. Social content develops a different personality to the website. Product experiences communicate differently from marketing. Motion feels generic despite strong visual design.
Nothing feels completely wrong in isolation, but collectively the brand starts to feel less coherent. Less recognisable. Less like itself.
It's something I've found myself noticing more often over the last few years, and I suspect that's partly because the conditions for creating content have changed so dramatically.
Teams are expected to produce more content than ever before, often across an increasing number of platforms and touchpoints. At the same time, the tools available to create that content have become faster, more accessible and more democratised.
Creating assets at scale is becoming easier. Maintaining a recognisable sense of character across those assets is not.
The more brands I see wrestling with scale, the more I think this may be one of the defining challenges for brand building over the next few years. Not because visual identity has become less important, but because visual identity alone isn't enough to create recognition.
Many brands can replicate a visual style. Far less can replicate a distinctive way of behaving. In fact, it might be one of the few things that's genuinely hard to copy.
That's often what people remember. Not a specific asset, campaign or touchpoint, but the cumulative feeling of interacting with a brand that consistently feels like itself wherever it appears. This is one of the reasons motion plays such an important role when it comes to brand expression.
Motion tends to expose behaviour more clearly than static design. It reveals pacing, personality, confidence and intent. When those qualities are aligned, motion can strengthen recognition. When they're not, the inconsistencies become much easier to spot.
But this isn't really an argument about motion. It's an argument about recognition.
The brands that stand out aren't necessarily the ones with the most polished assets. They're the ones that behave consistently across every interaction.
Brand guidelines still matter. They always will. But as brands scale, I'm not sure that's where the biggest challenge lies anymore. I think we'll spend less time worrying about whether guidelines are being followed and more time thinking about whether the brand still behaves like itself.
Because ultimately, that's what people remember.
Tom Allen is a judge for the Brand Impact Awards 2026. If you have a standout branding project from the last year that you think deserves recognition, you need to enter the BIAs. You have until July 9 to enter and you can do so on the Brand Impact Awards website.
