When Your Brand Isn’t the Only One Speaking

Why brand consistency is collapsing and what replaces it

That feeling a lot of founders get.

A lot of business owners, and you might be one of them, currently feel as though their brand is slowly slipping away from them.

Nothing catastrophic has happened and sales may even be continuing to grow. The business however appears in more places than it's ever been before. More customers are seeing it, more platforms are carrying it, and yet internally something feels less certain than it used to. Conversations internally start focusing on, “Our messaging feels messy”, or “I’m worried customers don’t really understand us anymore”, or sometimes they can’t articulate it at all and simply say, “it just feels off”.

A lot of times the assumption I hear is it’s a marketing execution problem and that they just need a better social media plan, a stronger campaign, or more consistent visuals and fonts. But as always what they are actually encountering is something much deeper.

They’re starting to discover or realise they no longer fully control their own brand. 

What this actually looks like inside a business

Just so we are all clear this hardly ever arrives as some dramatic moment. It usually appears operationally and over time, which is partly why it becomes so confusing to diagnose. Your marketing agency starts encouraging you to follow trends on TikTok, while internally there’s someone responsible for the brand who becomes uncomfortable because it feels like it cheapens how the business has always been perceived. Maybe a customer service response to a complaint is written in a tone that feels entirely different from the way the brand speaks on social media, and nobody can quite explain which one is correct. Maybe some content creators video performs really well and it brings heaps of attention, yet the customers who arrive do not feel like the customers you originally built the business for. It could be your wholesale partners present your product one way and your website presents it another, and while both are technically acceptable, somehow neither feels entirely right. The best example is when internal meetings about messaging begin to go in circles and, strangely, become emotional even though the discussion is about wording rather than strategy. I see this a lot. People start defending positions they can't fully articulate, and decisions now take way longer than they used to.

You increase marketing activity, but confidence in decisions actually drops.

None of this initially feels like a branding issue, it normally just feels like a coordination issue, as though the teams simply just need better communication.

But it is not coordination. It is reference.

What it means is the business no longer shares that common internal understanding or anchor of what it is, so every decisions start to becomes a negotiation rather than an expression.

The world branding was built for

For many years branding has worked in a pretty predictable environment. You decided how your company looked, how it sounded, and how it presented itself. You designed your store, your packaging, your photography, your website and your advertising, and if all of those aligned you were considered a consistent brand.

Consistency meant repetition.

Basically meaning that when a customer encountered you in different places they received the same signals each time, and recognition created trust. That model worked because brands often owned the environments they appeared in. Your advertising was yours. Your store was yours. Your photography and copy were all yours. The brand spoke and the customer listened and with that we hardly ever acknowledged it, but branding back then relied heavily on control.

The moment that changed

Today your business exists in many places you don’t own and certainly can’t fully manage.

Your product appears inside a creator’s video. It appears inside customer reviews. It appears inside marketplace structures you did not design or it appears inside comments, comparisons and screenshots.

Very soon may I add, it’s going to increasingly appear inside AI summaries describing your company to someone who has never even visited your website.

So what this means is as we move forward your brand is no longer simply communicated.

It is interpreted.

And this is where the tension and potential stress begins.

Many brands try to build on reassurance, expertise, care or considered quality, yet all these modern channels require behaviour that is fast, human and sometimes imperfect. To function in these attention-driven environments, content must feel alive and maybe even disruptive. So in turn  leaders find themselves facing a question they often struggle to phrase clearly,

“How do we show up in any channel without losing what made the business trusted in the first place?”

What businesses are doing right now

Without a clear framework, companies tend to respond in almost predictable ways. Some will tighten control. They script creators, approve every line and force talking points. They are trying to protect the brand, but the result is often producing content that feels more like advertising than participation. This then results in weakened engagement and creators (UGC) just disengage. Others go the other way and release control completely. They send products wide and then celebrate reach, and as we know the numbers always look promising initially, yet over time the brand always fragments. Customers encounter different personalities of the same company depending on where they meet it. Let me say clearly, both reactions come from the same misunderstanding. They assume consistency is still a visual problem. It’s not.

The shift that has actually happened

Ok so consistency used to come from controlling media but now media is no longer controlled.

It means your brand lives inside behaviour now rather than just presentation, it lives in how a customer service email is written, how a problem is handled publicly, how a creator naturally interprets the product or brand, and how the company responds when something goes wrong. Because of this, recognisability no longer comes from making everything look identical.

It comes from predictability.

People will trust a brand or anything really, people, experience, service etc etc when they can easily anticipate how it will act. They trust it when they understand what it values, what it protects, what it refuses and what it prioritises. In other words, they trust a brand that behaves like a coherent person.

Emotional default

Every organisation has what I describe as an emotional default, even whether it has consciously been defined or not. Some businesses default to reassurance and care while others default to authority and expertise. Some to energy and playfulness and some to status and aspiration. When this is super clear internally, the external variation becomes safe. Creators can interpret the brand without having to rewrite it, because the behavioural boundaries are clearly understood. In turn when it is unclear, every new platform will slightly alter the company’s identity and over time the business stops feeling recognisable, simply because its decisions no longer feel connected, not because the logo changed.

It's at that point we hear many leaders say the customer does not understand the brand anymore. However, more accurately, the brand stopped understanding itself.

Clarity in the chaos

The solution is not creating tighter guidelines or stricter templates. It’s clarity. Clarity about what the organisation actually stands for, what trade-offs it will accept and what it will sacrifice reach to protect. Because once a brand or business forgets who it is emotionally, every channel is going to define it instead.

Trust me when I say no marketing activity can restore consistency without identity. You might be able to manage outputs, but you cannot manage perception if decision-making itself is uncertain.

As I said before, consistency used to come from control of media and now it comes from shared understanding.

What good looks like

You can see this clearly in brands that operate heavily through creators yet remain unmistakable. It may not be a great example but just consider a brand like Liquid Death. The company exists in a pretty ordinary category but appears across creators, events, retail and collaborations and all without losing recognisability. The content varies so widely, but notice that the behaviour never does. Creators are not copying a visual guide, they are just expressing a worldview the company has made unmistakably clear.

The lesson here is not to imitate their tone. The lesson is that the organisation knows who it is.

The real discipline

Ok so modern branding is no longer primarily a communications exercise but a leadership discipline and when internal clarity is strong, external variation is safe. When internal clarity is weak, every additional channel increases confusion. Simple right.

If a company or brand forgets who it is, eventually it forgets what matters, both to the customer and to its own decisions and more activity will not repair that, because the problem was never activity. It was just clarity.

In a world now where your brand is constantly being interpreted, clarity is not some creative luxury. It is and very much should be an operational infrastructure.

Those businesses navigating today’s environment confidently aren't winning anymore because they have the most tactics or the most content. It's because they understand themselves so well they can participate in chaos without becoming chaotic.

And that, more than anything else, is the challenge modern brands are actually facing right now and if you get that sorted it provides the discipline internally and the competitive advantage externally regardless of where you are seen or met.

Nick Gray | IGU GLOBAL