Why are blue brands so tired of being blue?

We’ll use ‘blue’ for this one, because blue has dominated tech branding for decades. If you’re reading this and thinking about your own company’s brand, please insert your dominant brand color as a replacement for blue throughout. #interactivearticle

Our spark for this post comes from a series of experiences in the last few years with long-term clients in the tech space, who, like clockwork, tend to grow tired of their own carefully-crafted look and feel after a year or so. It’s the design system they approved (whether Rover created it or inherited it), and it was crafted with strategic insight and expert care—but they’re just a bit bored now, seeing the same thing, over and over. We call it “consistency fatigue”, and we totally get it, but we also totally push back.

In these cases, the brand is objectively and creatively “right” for their company, at this stage of their growth, up against their current competitors. But a year or so in, they’ve grown tired of seeing the same look and feel, the same design elements, the same aesthetics. They ask us if it’s time to shake things up again with the design system—a logo refresh, a new type system, a v2 color palette, new stylistic themes. These are all things that people pay us a lot of money to develop, but we need to be very careful and very deliberate about when to recommend pursuing these updates. 

Your marketing department, your brand, your audience

You may be growing tired of your brand, but the marketing team is not your target audience. Your fatigue is not your customers’ fatigue. Oftentimes the CBO or the founder/CEO will be looking for some excitement, and their opinion is very important (often it’s presented as a mandate). But sometimes it’s our job to push back, and ask them to set aside their personal preferences in the best interest of the work their brand is in the process of doing: building consistency, building trust, building identity and familiarity, and building a link in the minds of customers between the way your brand looks, and the promise of your products or services. This work takes time, and it takes a long-term commitment to consistency.

Ironically, the more tired you are of your own design system, the more equity you’ve built, and the more valuable it is as a differentiator and identifier in an excessively crowded space. This is a consistency game. It’s so boring from the inside, but so powerful in the marketplace. And your boredom with your brand is not shared by your prospective customers. 

There’s tension between designers and marketers wanting fresh/new, and the encapsulated experience of your prospects, who are deep-diving your site, your content, and your feeds… to see who you are, how you show up, and to judge the quality of your offerings based on what they can see. Based on what you show them. If your communications and brand work are consistent, disciplined, and committed, then on a universal just-barely-subconscious level, they will assign those traits to your product or service offerings. 

If your communications work is all over the map on the other hand, (Exciting! Expressive! Never expected!), then those traits will be assigned to your product or service offerings as well. Gorgeous and unexpected work, that doesn’t hold true to your core brand identity, is fun to commission—and fun to create—but now your brand is an art project. And if you’re selling to CTOs, or CISOs, or to old-school execs from industries in need of your new solutions, they are 100% not buying. 

Can’t we just?

Remember that in marketing operations, you see your brand more than anyone else. You likely say/think things like: “Our graphics are always blue. Can’t we just lead with some of the other colors from our palette?” Yes, of course you can. You can task your design team with some new looks, some zigging and zagging—and it’ll work out wonderfully if you’re a fan of confusion and inconsistency. Order-taker designers will just do the work, and they’ll remove themselves from the responsibility of your brand’s success. “The CMO told us to shake it up, so we did - it’s their call!”. Yes, it is, but your design teams should bring expertise and leadership to these decisions. Saying “No”, when it really matters, can be the best thing an agency does for a client’s brand. 

When to shake things up

Sometimes a refresh is in order. A tired brand, when the competitive landscape or industry have evolved or shifted, can become an anchor that keeps you locked in the past. Your design team should be tuned in to the nuances of the competitive landscape. They should know when the time is right, or when the right time is coming. But changes to the brand design system should (must!) only happen when they’re solving a structural business or brand challenge. If you’re not sure what situation you’re in, try to remove personal preferences and “consistency fatigue” from your strategic decision-making. The smartest path forward will become clear pretty quickly.

Remember Big Blue

IBM isn’t great because their branding is great. They use great branding to build confidence and bolster a reputation of quality and ingenuity that they’ve been cultivating for over a century. They’ve never gotten tired of being blue. They are always themselves, even if the young guns on the marketing team would love to just get into some greens every once in a while. Being bored by your brand’s consistency is a sign of a job well done. Adherence to your brand across agencies, in house teams, the tenures of multiple CMOs—this is the hallmark of a company that is committed to building long-term brand equity by putting crafted predictability in action. 

The best marketers, and the best creatives that they involve in the brand work, know that there is endless flexibility for creativity and excitement within the design system’s parameters. Stay focused on the core of who you are, and find opportunities (campaigns are fun and have bendy rules) to flex without gutting the equity you’ve built. The long-term results take a long time to take shape, and nothing will get you there faster than consistency. We love mapping these theories to real-life tech brands, and we’re always up for a conversation. How have you harnessed brand consistency to fuel marketing success for your company? Or, like so many others, are you all over the place?