Preventing Brand Inconsistency with Narrative Architecture

47% growth doesn't come from a brief. It comes from people who are curious enough to talk to real shoppers. Honest enough to challenge what isn't working. Skilled enough to turn insight into something that actually moves off the shelf. This is exactly why hiring and building the right team matters. Not just filling seats — but finding people whose thinking creates real business impact for clients. Proud to be part of a team that doesn't just deliver design. We deliver growth.

THIS is what we love doing! Relaunching brands is about so much more than just redesign. When AI can do design, it means design as a service has been commoditized. There is no value in what you can get for free. Agencies that just deliver design better pivot. The key to real success is figuring out how design can be leveraged to drive demand, increase sales, drive actual growth. Helping the brand team figure out how a solution should be fine tuned and deployed. 47% growth is a real number. Thats the value an agency brings. Being the growth partner to the client. No one cares about design. How? Talk to users. Understand their world. What value brands can bring to their life. Understand what trends shape culture. Help figure out how a brand can be connected directly with it. Understanding the shopper journey. Understanding channel behavior and how to play into it. The refresh transformed bland into irresistable. We'll publish a case study soon. In the meantime great to see that we've helped this existing brand grow a whopping 47%! A massive result. Congrats to Corrado Giaquinto and the team at Rojukiss International PLC. [KISS] and thanks for your trust!

Reality is losing its competitive advantage. For decades, brands spent millions trying to capture reality perfectly. Now? Some of the highest-performing campaigns never existed physically at all. No studio. No location. No product shoot. Just synthetic environments designed faster, cheaper, and sometimes… better. And consumers are adapting surprisingly fast. Because modern attention isn’t driven by authenticity alone anymore. It’s driven by: → Emotion → Novelty → Visual impact The next generation of retail brands won’t just market products. They’ll design realities. The future of branding may not be real. Only memorable. EveriAI.AI helps retail brands create high-impact visual systems built for the next attention economy.

Most brands are not behind because they lack ideas. They’re behind because they have no system for deciding which ideas deserve a future. That matters because new tools, faster production cycles, and AI-assisted execution have made volume easy and discernment rare. If you’re building a brand right now, the real advantage is not “innovation” as a personality trait. It’s innovation as a decision framework. This helps you stop chasing every new thing and build a brand that can evaluate trends without being led by them. A stronger brand system asks: Does this idea support the brand promise? Does it improve how people understand us? Does it create a better experience, or just a newer one? Can we sustain it beyond the launch moment? The brands gaining ground right now are not the loudest. They’re the clearest. They know what fits, what doesn’t, and why. That’s where strategy starts to do real work. If your brand feels reactive, there’s usually a systems issue underneath it. What part of your brand is being driven by momentum instead of intention right now? #BrandStrategy #CreativeDirection #BrandIdentity #InnovationStrategy #BusinessGrowth

Dear colleagues, We are thrilled to finally share this article with you. It is the latest output of the 'CrossFit project' that Craig and I launched during my PhD years and have been working on for literally a decade. In it, we conceptualize brand performativity as an explanatory factor that underlies existing theorizations of how brands generate identity value for consumers, and thereby complements the cultural branding, brands-as-relationship-partners, and brand community literatures. We hope that you will find it insightful. University of Wisconsin-Madison Wisconsin School of Business emlyon business school emlyon Lifestyle Research Center #marketing #strategy #brands #branding #performativity #CrossFit

Very happy to see this one in print at the Journal of Marketing. I will just add that the performativity is a powerful concept for bringing a network perspective into the understanding of why and how consumers form identity connections with brands.

𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗖𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗖𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗜𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲 Craig Thompson and Anil Isisag argue that existing views (brand communities, brand as relationship partners, cultural branding) miss a key mechanism: brand performativity. 𝗞𝗲𝘆 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 • Brand performativity:  -is an arrangement of discourses, practices, material resources, normative standards, metrics, and goals -functions as a script consumers use to cultivate identity value -enables consumers to develop identity through brand-mediated experiences • Identity value is not preexisting—it is constructed through consumers’ trust in the brand’s implicit performative promise (elicited through authenticating assurances) and engagement with brand’s performative arrangement • Consumers experientially validate the brand’s identity value by cultivating identity-enhancing capabilities through their brand engagement 𝗜𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 • Create and leverage synergies among the discursive and material elements of the brand’s performative arrangement • Deploy multiple forms of authenticating assurances in support of the brand’s performative promise • Create virtual and material spaces for consumers to interact and witness identity value • Adapt the brand’s performative arrangement in response to cultural and competitive changes • Use more extensive performative arrangements to cultivate identity-enhancing capabilities rather than rely on identity expression alone #branding #brands #marketing #strategy

R/GA recently published a sharp piece on the rise of what they call 'Intelligent Brand Systems'. The core thesis is clear: we are moving away from making things, and moving toward making things that make things. Why it matters: Most marketing technology stacks were designed for traditional publishing and distribution rather than dynamic interaction. As AI assistants increasingly summarise, prioritise, and filter information on behalf of users, simply churning out a higher volume of content variations becomes a commercial dead end. If an intelligent system handles the discovery process, high output alone does not ensure your brand appears in the decision moment at all. The shift in behaviour: AI has quickly moved beyond basic productivity shortcuts to become a functional life interface. Consumers now use these conversational systems to compare products, navigate everyday decisions, and answer health queries. To remain visible, brand identity can no longer live solely in static PDF documentation: it must live inside the system logic itself. The operational fix: Succeeding in this environment requires unifying structured brand knowledge, adaptive real-time interfaces, and generative storytelling into a single operating model. Brand teams must move away from manually policing creative outputs after the fact, focusing instead on designing the underlying intelligence that produces them. The bottom line: Strategy is only as good as the revenue it generates. Business leaders must modernise the marketing engine while it is running by prioritising system design over asset factories. You either build your brand as an intelligent system, or you become the brand that intelligent systems filter out. The link to the full report is here: https://lnkd.in/eKZ-gBRM #MarketingStrategy #BrandSystems #CMO

Why modern brands are not suffering from a lack of attention, but a lack of belief Attention has never been easier to acquire. Algorithms can amplify visibility. Paid media can manufacture reach. Trends can create temporary relevance almost overnight. And yet, despite unprecedented exposure, trust is declining. Consumers are not struggling to find brands. They are struggling to believe them. This is the defining challenge of modern branding: not awareness, but credibility. Overexposure has created a trust recession. Audiences have become highly fluent in marketing language, polished messaging, and performative authenticity. They recognise the mechanics. They understand when something is engineered to persuade. As a result, traditional signals of confidence now often trigger skepticism. The polished campaign. The purpose statement. The carefully constructed tone. None of these are inherently flawed. But when expression outpaces evidence, audiences notice. Trust is no longer built through presentation alone. It is built through consistency between what a brand says and what it repeatedly does. This changes the role of branding significantly. Brand is no longer simply a communication layer. It is a behavioural contract. Every touchpoint now functions as proof or contradiction. A sustainability claim unsupported by operations becomes distrust. A premium promise unsupported by service becomes distrust. A human tone unsupported by customer experience becomes distrust. In this environment, trust compounds more slowly than awareness, but lasts significantly longer. Brands that win are not necessarily the loudest. They are the ones whose identity can withstand scrutiny. Because in a trust recession, belief becomes a competitive advantage. . . . #Branding #MorrisFrank #Design #WebDesign

House of Brand Transformation: Kill Your Agency?! 👉 https://lnkd.in/eFtpxD7u AI has arrived with a simple, uncomfortable question: what exactly are you paying your agency for? 10 Days London founders George White and Jolyon White are set to tackle the issue head-on in Cannes, exploring how the technology can enhance creativity, trust and real impact for companies. Brands that are winning now are not simply moving faster. They are building smarter operating systems around creativity, culture and commercial impact, with agencies that bring judgement, imagination and expertise the machines just can’t manufacture. By the end of this session, you'll walk away with a clear, actionable framework to be such a brand - a practical checklist for deciding what to automate, what to bring in-house, what to outsource and what kind of creative partner is still worth paying premium money for. The inaugural House of Brand Transformation, taking place in Cannes from 22–26 June, is just a ten-minute walk from the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès. Make sure to join Transform for senior-level conversations shaping the future of brand transformation 👉 https://lnkd.in/eADSBWp5 #branding #brand #rebrand #design #strategy #transformmagazine