Why traditional branding systems are dead

The rapid rise of influencer media, the fragmented media landscape, and our always-on culture have given way to a new content beast that brands now must tackle. Today, most brands race to produce free, entertainment-first content for platform algorithms that prioritise and reward engagement above all else, often at the expense of brand consistency.

As a result, brands often adopt a “shotgun” approach: producing lots of posts, formats, and trend-chasing content that may momentarily spike engagement but rarely compounds into durable brand meaning. This is exacerbated by audience fragmentation across countless niche platforms and communities. Traditional brand identity systems, optimised for static expression and centralised control, struggle to keep pace with these demands.

The brands that are successfully breaking this cycle are shifting their thinking from “what we look like” to “how we behave and enable others to create.” This means evolving briefs, toolkits, and governance models to support deliberate, scalable content production that serves both human audiences and platform discovery algorithms. Flexible identity systems and strategic content franchises are essential, and brands that fail to adapt risk irrelevance or incoherence.

Corporate identity to channel identity

We’re in a new era of corporate identity building. What was once driven by an iconic logo, graphic simplicity, and an architecture signaling brand ownership, must now be adaptable across channels, for an audience that includes a constantly evolving AI persona. A new hybrid challenge has emerged: how to deliver on the engagement opportunity while maintaining coherence.

We see some of the more effective working models of this in traditional media brands such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The BBC. They retain the fundamentals of an iconic masthead and build everyday relevance by developing a variety of content franchises (NYT Cooking, Wirecutter, The Athletic, etc.), some evergreen, and some of which change from day to day and season to season.

Similarly, today’s brands need to evolve from thinking in terms of type, colour, and photography that lives within a single brand to how those same devices stretch across content franchises and media channels. Brand management must balance formal visual consistency with a dynamic editorial content platform that can flex, experiment, and occasionally challenge visual norms.

This combination of a visual constant, paired with variable systems and storytelling, allows the brand to stay recognisable while flexing to engage as the news and entertainment cycle evolves.

Platform and content thinking

Many brands have a difficult time freeing themselves up from their “corporate identity.” However, reframing your marketing mindset for today’s channels and audiences can pay enormous dividends.

Red Bull is a clear exemplar: through Red Bull Media House, the company has built a full-fledged media ecosystem – Red Bull TV, The Red Bulletin, and creative hubs like Red Bull Studios – that produces everything from live events and music programming to cinematic sports films. By owning distribution, investing in long‑form storytelling, and operating physical and digital studios for creators, Red Bull has transformed product marketing into a portfolio of content franchises that build community, loyalty, and distinctive cultural positioning.

Every brand should be looking at its portfolio of people, ideas, events, sponsorships, and philanthropy through a similar lens: what could become a repeatable content franchise that audiences recognise and return to? And how can we think dynamically about how we use and engage with content from each of these sources?

Moving from a shotgun approach for social to a more programmatic, franchise-based model allows you to work with social channels to create brand meaning and follower-ship, rather than relying on the hit-and-miss of one-off posts and the algorithm.

Creating dynamic systems

From a visual perspective, the franchises you create should not be cookie-cutter replicas of each other. Your identity systems need a strong and purposeful foundation of typography and colour that can flex to support a broad content platform, from the serious and analytical to the playful and humorous.

Take The Guardian, for example, which has a distinct typographic family and colour palette, yet allows for a vast array of photographic and illustrative imagery, including political cartoons. It also flexes how these are used across channels, including Instagram and YouTube. Contrast the formal structure of the print and digital edition of the paper with the street voice of Instagram. This is exactly what modern brands need: a consistent core identity that can shift tone and format by channel and moment.

In comparison, Liquid Death’s identity is rooted in character versus the more traditional graphic guidelines. While a newer, more niche brand, it understands that “principles,” not rules, give it the flexibility and creativity to build its tribe.

In each case, a strong core identity supports diverse content series, rather than constraining them.

Now what?

It can be challenging for traditional brands to pivot how they think and act with their identity; they often have large management structures that resist newer, more reactive media models and antiquated design systems. The skills and aptitudes required to manage a brand are quite different from those needed to create it.

To start, marketers should ask themselves clear questions from a content and design perspective:

Content

• Where and with whom is the brand driving engagement?
• What can we learn from others inside and outside of the category?
• What if we did the opposite of our competitors?
• Can we dig deeper into a topic to broaden the range?
• How might we atomise components for quick consumption?

We’d also recommend carving out specific time to continually play and experiment with new topics and elements to gauge interest.

Design

• Are we leading or following? For example, if everyone in the category is, say, blue, do we break through by using a different colour?
• Does our logo and system, or how we are using these elements, allow us to be alive in culture? What elements and rules need to change?
• Where can we introduce new tools and automation to free up thinking time, and speed execution?

The shift may require a rebalancing of power, from linear campaign planning and management to zig-zagging dynamic content creation, and from a primary focus on “what we look like” to “how we behave and enable others to create.” But from this shift, we can usher in a new era of iconic design built for cross-platform success.

To see the brands doing it right, see the winners of The Brand Impact Awards 2025.