Ask someone what makes up a brand identity and you’ll probably get the usual suspects: logo, colours, fonts, maybe a tagline, perhaps brand voice. All super dooper important. And all wildly insufficient on their own.
Because what you’re really building is the beginning of a world. The logo is part of it, but so is the language on the packaging, the tone of voice in the instruction manual, the art direction of photography and imagery, the sound of the voiceover on the radio ad, the experience of opening the box, the fit-out of the shop and, if you have enough budget and ambition, perhaps even the way the place smells.
Country Road stores have a smell. So does Darrell Lea. McDonald’s has sounds, phrases, product names, colours, packaging and decades of advertising layered over a logo that is itself one of the most recognisable marks in the world — which, by the way, has changed around 9 times since 1940.
The point here being that strong brands accrue meaning across many different places. And the clever bit is getting all those pieces working together.
Brand identity is cumulative
Take beauty, a category with no shortage of brands selling variations on the same broad promise: products that help you look and feel better.
Aesop, Go-To Skincare and Trinny London can all plausibly end up in the bathroom cabinet of the same person, yet each has built a very different world around its offer.
Aesop has long leaned into restraint, intellect and a particular kind of understated luxury. The apothecary-style packaging, amber bottles, store design, typography and language all reinforce the experience. You can often recognise an Aesop store before you see the name above the door.
Go-To plays in some of the same territory — effective skincare, a relatively premium price point, design-conscious customers — but the personality is very different. It is cheekier and more accessible. The Millenial pink colour palette, the ZFB-coded copy, the product naming all give the brand a particular energy that has very little in common with Aesop, even where the customer overlap might be considerable.
Then take Trinny London. The founder is central to the brand. Product education, transformation and confidence play a much bigger role. The stackable packaging system itself becomes part of the identity and part of the product proposition. You are buying beauty products, but you are also buying into a particular approach to getting dressed, getting ready and knowing what works for you.
The distinction between those brands hasn’t been created by a logo competition. It comes from hundreds of choices adding up in roughly the same direction. That is what a brand identity system does well. It gives a business enough ingredients to create a recognisable world while still allowing for range.
Every part of the system has a job
One of the traps in branding is expecting every element to communicate the entire positioning. If the brand is premium, everything becomes relentlessly premium. If it is playful, every line of copy gets a wink. If craftsmanship matters, craft starts appearing absolutely everywhere. It can make a brand feel more obvious, forced, even crass. A better system lets different elements play different roles, and sometimes even contrast with each other to create tension in a way that makes the brand more interesting.
Typography might establish credibility. Photography might add energy. Language might make the brand warmer. Packaging might emphasise craft. Advertising might be where the brand has permission to become much more entertaining. Social is often where things get a little bit unhinged.
Ryanair is a good example. Its social media presence is famously chaotic, particularly in the way it responds to customers. The humour is sharp, self-aware and often deliberately ridiculous. That works on TikTok or in the comments because the job there is attention, entertainment and cultural relevance. Carry that exact tone onto the booking flow, though, and it would become a liability pretty quickly. When someone is choosing dates, destinations, baggage and payment options, clarity matters more than the punchline. You still want it to feel like Ryanair, but the tone gets dialled right down so people can confidently book the flight they actually intended to book.
That’s an important distinction. Brand flexibility is not only about changing the balance between different elements. Sometimes the same element — tone of voice, photography, colour, even typography — needs to flex depending on where it appears and what that moment is trying to achieve.
The balance matters because people rarely encounter every part of a brand at once. Someone might first see an Instagram ad, then a website, then a product on a shelf three weeks later. Another person may hear about the business from a friend, Google the name and go directly to a sales page. Each encounter needs to feel connected to the same brand, while doing whatever job that particular moment requires.
Sometimes advertising does the heavy lifting
Kettle Chips is a useful example because the product itself has always had a fairly difficult commercial job. It sits in an enormous FMCG category where the shelf is crowded, switching costs are basically nonexistent and the cheaper option is right there. The brand needs to give shoppers a reason to spend the extra couple of bucks rather than reaching for Smith’s, the supermarket’s own brand, or whatever happens to be on special. Part of that is the product. We all have our favourite chippie brand right (looking at you Red Rock Deli, but I’d take the Aldi dupe any day).
For years, Kettle leaned into craftsmanship through its advertising. The original “Chip Whittler” idea played with the absurd suggestion that its chips were so carefully made they were individually whittled by hand. It was clever, but it also reinforced a useful association: these are the chips with more care and craft behind them. And it was enduring, with the original “Whittler” launching in 1999 and the “Watch out for the Whittler” campaign in 2012, the idea had a pretty good run.What’s interesting is that the rest of the identity didn’t need to perform the idea with the same intensity. The Kettle logo was relatively conservative and, in Australia at least, its packaging remained pretty conventional. The advertising was where the brand could really have fun and stretch the story.
That tension worked. The packaging helped people find it. The logo provided continuity. The product and price supported a more premium position. Advertising gave consumers a memorable reason for why Kettle deserved that position. Over time, those things add up. This is one reason thinking about a brand as a system is more useful than obsessing over individual assets.
Brand worlds extend beyond the things in your guidelines
There is another element — an opportunity or a challenge, depending how you look at it — once a brand has been in market for a while: customers start contributing. This is where the neat world of brand guidelines meets real world. And boy does it get real. People give brands nicknames. They use products in unexpected ways. They photograph them, parody them, turn them into memes, make unofficial merchandise and borrow bits of the brand language.
Sometimes those contributions become valuable enough that the company brings them back inside the official brand. Australians were calling McDonald’s “Macca’s” long before it became language the company itself was comfortable using. Today the nickname is firmly embedded in the local brand, right down to the logo and advertising campaigns built around the idea of a “Macca’s run”.
Vaseline took this a step further with Vaseline Verified. The brand had noticed thousands of organic posts sharing unconventional uses for its petroleum jelly, from beauty hacks to, well, more questionable advice. Rather than trying to control that conversation, Vaseline built a social-first platform around it. Its scientists tested the hacks, verified the ones that worked, debunked the ones that didn’t, and created a “Vaseline Verified” badge inspired by the familiar blue tick on social media. The result was more than a campaign. It gave Vaseline another recognisable layer of its brand world: part community participation, part product education, part scientific authority, all built from behaviour that was already happening without the brand.
Fashion gives us two other interesting versions of the same phenomenon. In 2023, an Instagram creator used AI to imagine a Lego collaboration with Hermès, including a Birkin made from Lego bricks. The images travelled because the Birkin is so recognisable that the idea still read as Hermès even when translated into an entirely different material and cultural context. Hermès left it alone. The internet played with the brand while the company kept a fairly firm boundary around what officially entered its world.
Loewe took almost the opposite approach. In 2024, a photo of an oddly perfect heirloom tomato went viral after someone described it as “so Loewe”. Jonathan Anderson spotted the post, shared it and, within days, revealed tomato clutch. What began as a social joke was absorbed into the brand world and eventually became a product people could actually buy.
These examples show three different ways a brand can respond when culture starts playing with what it has built. Hermès held the boundary. Loewe recognised an idea worth bringing inside. Vaseline went further and created an ongoing system for finding, validating and feeding community behaviour back into the brand.
None is inherently the right approach. The useful point is that the relationship inevitably becomes two-way. A brand puts things into the world, people interpret and adapt them, and occasionally what comes back is valuable enough to become part of the brand itself.
A good system gives you room to grow
At launch, it can be tempting to focus heavily on the immediate deliverables: the logo, website, packaging, socials, launch campaign. Fair enough. Those are the things you need to get the business into market.
But the creatives building the identity should also be leaving enough room for it to grow, evolve and endure. Branding ain’t cheap, and recall takes time to build. Rebranding every couple of years is rarely a good use of resources, particularly when you consider the brand equity and marketing effectiveness that can be lost each time you hit the reset button.
The practical questions are fairly simple. Will the identity still work if the product range doubles? If the business enters a new market? If you need to run a serious campaign one month and something much more playful the next? If a small social presence becomes a national advertising campaign? If a product designed for one customer starts finding an audience somewhere you did not anticipate?
A strong system makes those shifts easier because the basic logic is already there. There is a clear sense of what belongs to the brand, what can flex and what should stay put. That does not require a 200-page rule book or an elaborate branding exercise for its own sake. It requires clear decisions about the elements that matter most to the business, how they support the positioning, and how they work together across different contexts.
For some brands, the visual system will do most of the work. For others, language, service or experience will carry more weight. A hospitality business might build recognition through interiors, service and sound. An online service might depend more heavily on language, user experience and content. A consumer product needs packaging to work particularly hard because much of the buying decision happens with competitors sitting right beside it.
There is no universal checklist of assets that guarantees a strong brand. The right system depends on the business, the category and the way people will actually encounter it. The logo still matters. So do typography, colour and all the other foundations designers spend a lot of time getting right. Their value comes from how well they work together, and if they give the brand enough room to keep working as the business changes around them. And finally, whether it still makes sense a few years after the launch deck has been filed away. That is the real test of a brand identity.
