We’ve been doing a lot of work lately with different organizations – from large corporations to non-profits to small single-owner businesses – on the topic of brand. Some of the work involves the importance of projecting a consistent brand, some of it is about building a brand, and some of it is about what constitutes a strong brand.
But all of it revolves essentially around what a brand stands for and why that matters.
Certainly, here, I must credit Toby Trevarthen and Rob McLoughlin for their work on brand narrative (both company and personal) that has influenced us at Marketing Nice Guys greatly.
After all, an organization’s narrative, both what it tries to project and how customers view it, makes up what any brand stands for. The two concepts are not always the same. Indeed, the hard part in marketing is getting customers to view your brand the way you want them to (basically getting them to see the brand in a similar way in which you’re projecting it).
The Problem of Not Being in the Consideration Set
Let me give a quick example of a company that faces challenges in this area: Olay.
For many years now, Olay has been known as your mother’s skincare brand. The problem with that, of course, is that as its audience continues to age, the company needs to replace those customers with younger consumers. But Millennials and Gen Z are opting more and more for Korean or younger brands.
What happens, as a result, is that Olay isn’t even in the consideration set right from the beginning of the buyer journey. In other words, Olay could do all the lower-funnel, buy-our-product-now type marketing it wants, but if it’s not even considered at the start, it won’t show up as an option for most of the younger consumers.
Olay has been trying to change its brand projection to more aggressively court those younger generations with campaigns that take a more youthful approach. The issue faced by the company, though, is that it has to do that without alienating its core older audience.
That’s not easy, as you can imagine.
What’s happened at the company, if you watch it closely over the years, is that its marketing seems almost to be a split personality. It’s trying to feel younger in places such as on Instagram, but often reverts to a more “classic,” older messaging to appeal to older audiences on the website.
In other words, now, neither audience really gets what the brand stands for.
What’s happening in Olay’s case points to a deeper issue that goes beyond just “messaging” or “campaign strategy.” It gets to the core of how disciplined a brand is, and how consistently it shows up.
The Importance of Maintaining Brand ‘Rigor’
One of the biggest challenges organizations face isn’t defining their brand, it’s sticking to it.
Brand rigor is the discipline of consistently reinforcing what your brand stands for across every touchpoint, channel, and campaign. It means making intentional choices about what you say yes to, but more importantly, what you say no to.
Because here’s the reality: every time you deviate from your core narrative, you dilute it.
This is where many organizations struggle. Internally, they may have a clear understanding of their positioning. But externally, that clarity starts to erode:
- A sales team tweaks messaging to close deals faster
- A marketing campaign experiments with a different tone “just to test it.”
- A website update introduces slightly different language or value propositions
- Social media takes on a personality that doesn’t quite match the rest of the brand
Individually, these decisions may seem small. Collectively, they create confusion. And confusion is the enemy of a brand.
When your audience encounters inconsistent signals, they don’t try to reconcile them; they simply fail to form a clear perception at all. And if they can’t quickly understand what you stand for, they’re unlikely to remember you, trust you, or include you in their consideration set.
Brand rigor, then, is not about being rigid. It’s about being coherent.
It ensures that whether someone encounters your brand through a Google search, a LinkedIn post, a sales conversation, or your website, they are getting the same core story reinforced again and again.
That repetition is what builds memory. And memory is what drives consideration.
The Importance of Being Aggressive in Brand Projection
Even if you have a clearly defined brand and the discipline to maintain it, there’s another challenge: most companies simply don’t project it strongly enough.
In many cases, organizations assume that because they’ve said something once (or even a handful of times), the market understands it.
It doesn’t.
Your audience is not thinking about your brand nearly as much as you are. They are distracted, overwhelmed, and exposed to thousands of competing messages every day. That means your brand narrative needs to be:
- Clear
- Consistent
- And repeated far more often than feels comfortable
This is where frequency becomes critical. In the past, we’ve talked a lot in these blogs about being aggressive and why it matters.
And, indeed, if you want to be included in the consideration set, your brand has to be top-of-mind at the moment a need arises. That only happens through repeated exposure over time.
Think about it this way: brand is not built through single touchpoints. It’s built through cumulative impressions.
Organizations that succeed here tend to be unapologetically repetitive. They don’t constantly reinvent their message. What they do is refine and reinforce it.
This can feel counterintuitive internally. Teams often worry about sounding redundant or “saying the same thing over and over.” But externally, that repetition is exactly what creates clarity. In fact, often by the time you feel like you’ve said something too many times, your audience is just beginning to recognize it.
Bringing It Together: Clarity, Consistency, and Presence
At the end of the day, what your brand stands for is what your audience consistently experiences. If you are not disciplined in maintaining your brand, your message becomes fragmented. If you are not aggressive in projecting it, your message becomes invisible.
And in both cases, the outcome is the same: you fail to earn a place in the consideration set.
In a crowded market, the brands that win are not always the ones with the best products or services. They’re the ones that are understood.
As always, if you need help refining your brand, don’t hesitate to contact us for a free consultation.
