Why brand strategy, visual identity and campaigns need room to move.

I once said in an interview that companies wear their brands like suits of armour. The longer I work in this field, the more often I come back to that thought.

Armour protects. It gives you a distinct shape, signals where you belong and can withstand a great deal. But it is also heavy. And at some point, you realise you can barely move inside it.

Particularly in larger companies, I often experience brand management as a highly sophisticated exercise in playing it safe. Every application has a specification. Every departure needs approval. The brand guidelines describe exactly how everything should look. Follow them diligently, and at least you can prove you did everything right.

Whether the communication actually says anything relevant at that moment is another question entirely.

I understand the desire for control. Many people work on a brand, across departments, countries and agencies. Recognition also comes from repetition. And nobody wants every application after launch to look as though it belongs to a different company.

The problem begins when the rulebook takes over the thinking. When more time is spent debating a margin than asking whether a message even fits the situation. When a campaign meets every design requirement and still fails to connect with the people it was meant for.

This rigidity often starts with how we imagine a brand is built: first, a strategy is signed off. Then a visual identity is developed. Then everything is rolled out. A campaign comes along at some point and is expected to follow the rules, thank you very much. What is learned along the way rarely makes it back into the system.

I am interested in how these layers can work together. The direction strategy provides. The possibilities design opens up. And how a campaign uses and develops those possibilities at a particular moment.

A strategy needs to help people make everyday decisions. What role does the brand play? Who is it relevant to? Which expectations within those people's social and cultural worlds does it meet, and which does it challenge? What does that mean for language, design and behaviour?

Words like “bold”, “approachable” or “innovative” only become useful once we know what they demand. How does an approachable brand talk about a mistake? What risk does a bold brand actually take? Which collaboration would it turn down, even if the reach looked tempting?

Answering these questions creates a shared understanding. Teams and partners can use it to develop their own thinking. Even when a situation never featured in the original strategy deck.

That requires clarity about the core of the brand and which assumptions are open to review. A brand does not need to change its positioning every time something happens. But its strategy should allow insights from the market, campaigns and conversations with people to feed back into it.

A visual identity reveals how much freedom a brand actually has to move. Flexibility is often measured by the number of templates available. I am more interested in whether the system can accommodate content that has no template yet.

How do typography, imagery, language and composition relate to one another? What holds the identity together when a campaign needs a different visual world? Which elements make the brand recognisable when a format offers very little space, or a message calls for an unusual degree of restraint?

For me, these decisions belong in the development of the system. A visual identity should allow different levels of intensity: communicating facts, telling a story, commanding attention. The same design logic can take very different forms.

My principle is simple: concept unambiguous. Execution open.

I want to know precisely what strategic purpose the design serves. With that foundation in place, images, forms and the way an idea is staged can surprise us. The quality of a system also shows in what other creatives can develop with it.

Campaigns make this particularly clear. They are often a brand's most visible touchpoints: the film, poster, activation or collaboration people talk about. This is where strategic intent becomes a tangible public statement.

A campaign therefore needs its own idea, a narrative arc and a reason to happen now. Its design decisions need to be able to grow out of that task. A carefully applied visual identity alone does not provide that reason.

If a brand wants to bring people together, for example, a campaign could create an actual occasion for them to meet. That immediately changes the work: we start thinking about participation, place and how the experience unfolds. Design gives that experience a recognisable form. What happens makes the message credible.

This also gives us a more useful way to discuss creative freedom. Which departure strengthens the idea? What connection to the brand remains perceptible? And what does the campaign teach us about the wider system?

For me, this feedback is part of building a brand. A strong campaign can reveal possibilities within an identity that had not yet been fully articulated at launch.

A video by brand strategist Eugene Healey recently brought me back to this thought. He describes how creators and communities help shape the stories of brands. They bring their own language, references and audiences. Working with them means being able to make room for that perspective.

At the same time, the context in which communication is received keeps changing. A cultural event, a public debate, a crisis or even an unexpectedly funny moment can give a new message a reason to exist. Or suddenly make a planned one feel inappropriate.

The world will not wait for another round of approvals.

That certainly does not mean every brand should comment on every event. Restraint is a decision, too. But a contemporary brand strategy needs to help people make that decision deliberately and in time. Do we have a credible connection to the subject? Do we understand the context? Can we contribute something beyond our own visibility?

The answers need to find expression in campaigns and individual touchpoints. That takes a design system with room to move, and people who are trusted to make decisions.

These are precisely the points where collaboration becomes interesting to me. Between strategy and visual identity. Between a lasting identity and the next campaign idea. Between the team that developed a brand and an agency with something new in mind for it.

I want a strategic idea to carry through those handovers. I want the next team to understand what matters and have enough freedom to bring its own expertise. To do that, we need to be able to judge together which developments take the brand forward and where it starts to lose its distinctiveness.

A good playbook supports that judgement. It makes the reasoning behind decisions accessible and clarifies who has room to do what. Then other branding practitioners, art directors, copywriters and campaign teams can take responsibility without putting every new idea through the same approval loop.

I believe this is a central task of brand management today: making a shared vision clear enough for others to create something of their own with it.

If we safeguard a brand until every possible movement has been ruled out, what we have built is a very carefully constructed suit of armour.

I am interested in what happens when the company inside it can move again.

WRITTEN BY: Florian Kowatz

IMPULSE: Eugene Healey, „The Control Crisis“, TikTok.

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