Are You Too Consistent to Be Interesting?

Predictability numbs your audience, chaos creates brand connection.

Source: Clinique

Consistency is no longer the virtue it once was. For years, it was heralded as branding’s sacred tenet; the principle drilled into every guideline document, every marketing playbook, every founder deck. Keep your logo the same. Keep your palette the same. Keep your tone consistent across channels, continents and formats.

And for a time, this made sense. Where media was rationed and attention wasn’t yet a battlefield, repetition passed for strategy. Consistency signalled credibility. You built trust by saying the same thing over and over, in the same tone, with the same design. Uniformity became a proxy for reliability.

But we no longer live in that world.

We’ve moved from a landscape of limited impressions to one of ambient overload. Culture updates faster than most brands can schedule content. Attention, once something you could buy in blocks, now arrives in fragments. Messaging is consumed passively, subconsciously, in the blur of a scroll.

Our environment is not one of scarcity but superabundance. Cultural cues shift in real time, consumer attention is fragmentary and relevance is increasingly temporal. Brand exposure is absorbed passively through scrolls, swipes and feeds. In such a context, consistency does not reassure. It numbs. The more uniform a brand becomes, the more it dissolves into the undifferentiated stream of content that already dominates the digital ecosystem. Consistency has become code for creative stagnation. What once offered structure now functions as constraint. What once built brand equity now often bleeds it dry.

Where Consistency Becomes Thy Enemy

Source: Susan Saroff

This isn’t an argument for incoherence; the brands that endure aren’t erratic. But there is a critical, and often misunderstood, difference between consistency and continuity. Consistency demands replication: the same look, the same line, the same executions across every point of contact. Continuity, by contrast, allows for movement. It maintains internal logic even as expression evolves. It accommodates instinct. It permits surprise. And that’s exactly what cult modern brands understand.

Skims could have been another celebrity shapewear line: beige basics and body-conformity, rinse and repeat. Instead, Skims keeps the brand culturally alive with a steady stream of unexpected collaborations: the NBA, ice hockey uniforms, a nipple bra that dominated timelines. It’s not the products that make Skims sticky, it’s the curveballs.

Miu Miu stages fashion as fantasy. The brand could have rested comfortably under the weight of its Prada lineage; pristine, intellectual, predictable. Instead, it made rebellion its muse. From ballet flats and micro-minis to casting elders alongside ingénues, Miu Miu thrives on contradiction. Each collection feels like a cultural pulse check — part prep, part punk, part fever dream. It’s a brand that never stands still, shifting shape each season, yet somehow remains unmistakably itself. The unpredictability of the Miu Miu world is what keeps it so alluring.

Duolingo, a language learning app, let go of polish entirely. It handed over its entire personality to an unhinged green owl who threatens users, posts thirst-traps and acts more like a chaotic friend than an education brand. It’s hard to resist its charms.

Even Ryanair, a budget airline with nothing traditionally “brand-worthy” to sell, turned irreverence into relevance. On social media, it is raw, unfiltered and brilliantly self-aware. Memes, clap-backs, unpolished chaos. People follow a low-cost airline account for entertainment, who’d have thought.

Notice the pattern? It’s not about consistency of execution. It’s about consistency of spirit. These brands have a steady core, their ethos is intact. But the way they animate it is unpredictable enough to keep culture leaning in.

Founders, This Is On You

The overcorrection toward consistency is, unsurprisingly, rooted in fear. Fear of dilution. Fear of confusion. Fear of losing control. But it’s precisely that fear that is stifling cultural impact. Founders and CMOs cling to identity decks like insurance policies, hoping uniform execution will stand in for original thought. It won’t. If anything, it signals the absence of it…

👉 We’ve talked about fear. Next comes integrity — and the real reason “control” is killing creativity. Get the full story when you subscribe.