Like TV, Radio and Facebook. The death of consistency has been heralded by the chorus for some time now. There are too many channels. Even our channels have channels. Channels Challenger Deep until you hit the datacentre.
Consistency is dead. It's time to relinquish control of our brands.
No it fucking isn't.
Consistency is using distinctive assets in the same way, regardless of channel. The lockup at the end of a TVC worked as a bargain for the content being free. Legacy brands worked to a considerable advantage, when the cost to enter on competing channels was high, before fragmentation. What heady luxury, when attention was held by so few places.
Logo, colour palette and slogan are all proven shortcuts to a memory structure in the mind of a human. Check out sound and smell while you are there. That is a measurable economic concept: these structures accumulate over time and result in you being chosen more often when someone buys. Benefits are greatest for those who are readily available.
Yes, there are places where your corporate trousers jar against the fabric of society or culture. Ditching any ambition of leaving a lasting impression beyond the yawning painfulness of now seems a hysterical overreaction.
At Fortescue, we used the bright green beacon on its own to go places the corporate brand felt out of place. Projected onto Battersea Power Station. Oversized on the Green Pioneer for visibility at sea. The Rick and Morty short that introduced five million Americans to green hydrogen used a different shortcut entirely: Rick Sanchez and the show's cool, black president wore suits powered by the fuel.
Consistency still works.
What I am increasingly interested in is the idea of cohesion.
As the number of surfaces a brand can exist on has increased, there has been a pretty clear bifurcation into two groups. First, the surfaces a brand controls. A website, a roadshow, a press release, a branded gilet. Second, the ones it does not. A creator on TikTok, a nail salon, a review, a media article.
No one person can experience every surface on which a brand exists.
Given a small town's supply of electrons and water, the machine can. Before you pour the coffee.
The gaps are easy to find once something is looking for them. A manufacturer whose website promises local, hand-finished, while every TikTok unboxing shows the same offshore stamping. A bank running a care campaign while Trustpilot carries hold-time horror stories. A consultancy publishing on culture change while Glassdoor shows twenty months of turnover. The buyer used to see one of these. The machine reads all of them and makes the comparison first.
Cohesion is the discipline of balancing what a brand wants people to believe with the evidence it has that they do. Across the surfaces it controls, and the ones it does not. The machine identifies the gap across every surface, prompts you to define strategy, and can take action to close the obvious ones.
The closer the controlled and uncontrolled surfaces match, the more likely the machine is to recommend you. Nobody has yet run the study that proves it directly. The adjacent research all points the same way: the signals that move LLM recommendations are third-party coherence and quality, not spend or awareness.
Plan B works on both. If outside of your product you have the suspicion the company does not mean much to anyone, get in touch.
