“I’ve seen this picture 1,000 times:” Carving Your Creative Journey through Smart Repetition
After hours of collaboration resulting in changes that clarify your narrative, research that connects your client succinctly to your offering, you receive the biggest, most glaring piece of criticism: a stakeholder has seen the image on the cover not once, not twice, but repeatedly.
This is not restricted to photography. We can all recall points where we've heard: “I don't love our primary color.” or “I find our [principle element] distracting” (despite the fact that it's not an experimental application and it's 100% in the standard approved position). Rarely are your value proposition, your taglines, or other key brand elements so openly questioned. But with visuals being such a prominent fixture of the expression of your brand, multiple repeated elements can build fatigue among your internal users.
The real question is: Is your stakeholder's boredom (or even personal aversion) with the cosmetics of your asset indicative of a greater brand triumph?
As marketers and creatives, we've come to recognize the brands we work in aren't always composed of our favorite elements. Many of us disagree, quite wholeheartedly, with some of the prescribed elements. And maybe you agree with your stakeholder, purple isn't your favorite color, either. But a brand is not built solely or primarily for the purpose of targeting its internal audiences— it's built to brilliantly differentiate that brand in a loud, competitive market.
At this point, it's wise to raise a few questions. Not all criticism should be dismissed, after all.
The foremost questions: (1.) Is the element in question not reflective of the offering? (2.) Is it in direct conflict of a crucial detail of the project? (3.) In the applied scenario, is it misrepresenting the needs, the situations, or the realities of our target audience?
If the answer to the above set of questions unequivocally results in qualified no's, we need to reposition the element in the minds of our stakeholders to remember that their boredom is actually contributing to an external pattern that builds visual brand recognition. Put more bluntly: “Your audience hasn’t: (1.) Seen this at all; or (2.) Has only seen it a handful of times, contributing to a thoughtful pattern of recognition.
As creatives and marketers, we're not entertainers. We strategically position our brand across every touchpoint. We build cohesion and clarity. We build differentiation within our systems when and where appropriate. Our job is not to excite our internal parties for external communications: it's to build a smooth, recognizable, targeted client journey that supports our organization's goals.
Just as your colleagues don't read every word of your brand guide, your audiences can't be expected to read every word on page. Many identify your brand at a glance, recognizing the most prominent visual cues, the markers of your brand, making smart repetition the foundation of any visual expression of a brand.
If you constantly remix your key visual cues at a stakeholder’s request, what aspects of your brand are remaining to truly hold stake? What visual elements serve to immediately indicate your organization's proprietary thought, its specialization, its voice? If you abruptly break the pattern, what impact does that have upon your brand’s recognition and its active client journeys? Furthermore, what does it say about your offering? Does that message align with the persona of your brand and the value it aspires to ascribe to through the holistic experience?
By contrast, let’s look back at that initial set of questions: Is this element in question not reflective of the offering? Is it in direct conflict of a crucial detail of the project? In the applied scenario, is it misrepresenting the needs, the situations, or the realities of our target audience?
What happens if the answer to any one of those is a qualified yes? For some of these there are simple fixes that still maintain a pattern of brand recognition and/or maintain the coherence of your brand’s value proposition to its visual expression:
Maybe the image chosen is a generic stock photo that misrepresents core technical details and standards held within an industry.
While this is one of the easier fixes, our libraries and stock resources don’t always represent the details we need. Work with your business to determine what technical details are misaligned. If you can’t crop or edit an image, what other options does your brand allow or how can you flex your standard in order to accommodate a more accurate depiction?
Maybe there’s an element that, despite the broad use within your organization, lacks finesse for a certain offering.
It’s easy to blame the brand development for a product or the client-type that was pursued when all of a sudden your brand doesn’t fit… and sometimes that is the actual issue, but how do you tailor your brand to fit the situation when all internal voices point to fixing the visual expression? If this conversation knocks down a primary visual indicator of your brand, lean into your other primary visual stakes and consider how you can remix the experience, heightening the repeatability of the primary’s stand-in, to evangelize the core intention of your brand for the momentary “campaign.”
