A Brand System Is a Recipe, Not a Rulebook

Somewhere on a shared drive, in a folder called something like Brand_FINAL_v3, there is probably a PDF of brand guidelines. It was expensive. It has a page explaining the exact clear space around the logo, a page of forbidden colour combinations and a page showing what the logo must never be stretched into. It was last opened in 2022, by the designer who made it.

Meanwhile, the business has carried on producing things: social posts, a new website, an animated story, a podcast intro, a sign for the new shop, a slide deck someone made at 11pm. Most of these were never imagined by the guidelines, and some of them quietly contradict them.

This is why design agencies are now talking about “living” brand systems: identities designed to move, flex and sound as well as look, managed as toolkits that people actually use rather than documents they’re supposed to obey.

It’s a sensible shift, but it raises an awkward question. If a brand is allowed to change shape across every screen and situation, how does anyone still recognise it?

One Like insight: A good brand system tells people what must stay the same, so everything else is free to change.

Why the rulebook stopped working

Traditional brand guidelines were designed for a world of print. A logo sat still on a letterhead, a sign or a newspaper advert, so the rules could describe it precisely: this size, this colour, this much space around it.

That world hasn’t disappeared, but it’s no longer where most people meet a brand. They meet it on a phone screen, in a three-second video, in a story that disappears after 24 hours, in a podcast, in an app that pings when an order is ready. Sydney agency UntilNow, in a review of this year’s design trends, cites Wyzowl research finding that 91% of businesses now use video as a marketing tool. Its blunt verdict on motion is that a brand designed only to sit still is designing for a world that no longer exists.

The problem with the rulebook isn’t that it’s wrong. It’s that it answers questions nobody is asking any more, and stays silent on the ones they are. How should the logo appear in a five-second Reel? What sound plays when a customer pays? What should the slide template look like when someone has three charts and a deadline? When guidelines can’t answer, people improvise, and a brand slowly drifts into a dozen slightly different versions of itself.

Highlight: Brand guidelines rarely fail because people ignore them. They fail because they don’t answer the questions people actually have.

Flexible, but recognisable

Here’s where the trend needs a little caution. A brand that changes shape everywhere risks not being recognised anywhere, and recognition is the whole point.

Professor Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has spent years studying what she calls distinctive brand assets: the colours, shapes, characters and sounds that let people identify a brand without reading its name. Her research measures them by fame (how many buyers link the asset to the brand) and uniqueness (whether it points only to you). Her warning to marketers is memorable: “you don’t want your distinctive assets to be fashion items.” Change, she notes, is the thing that weakens them.

So does that rule out flexible, living identities? Not quite. In the same interview, Romaniuk draws a crucial distinction between consistency of form and consistency of use. Form is what the asset looks like. Use is how and where you deploy it. Her example is KFC’s Colonel Sanders. The white suit, the tie, the white hair and the goatee stay the same, which is consistency of form. But because that form is so well known, KFC can cast very different actors as the Colonel and still be instantly recognised. Once an asset is firmly established, she argues, you can play with how you use it.

That’s the real answer to the flexibility puzzle. A good brand system locks down the form of a few core assets and frees up almost everything else.

Motion fits neatly into this picture. Research by Luca Cian, Aradhna Krishna and Ryan Elder, published in the Journal of Marketing Research in 2014, found that even static logos which suggest movement held people’s attention for longer and improved attitudes towards the brand. But Krishna also warned that a dynamic logo can backfire for a traditional or conservative company, because people sense something amiss when the movement doesn’t match the brand’s character. Motion works when it expresses who you already are, not when it’s added because everyone else is doing it.

Highlight: Consistency doesn’t mean doing the same thing everywhere. It means being recognisably you everywhere.

From PDF to living toolkit

If a brand system is going to protect the core and free up the rest, it needs to live where people actually work. That’s the thinking behind the shift from static guidelines to “living” toolkits: ready-made templates, components and assets that people can use directly, often stored on brand management platforms such as Frontify or Bynder. UntilNow puts the distinction simply. A logo and a colour palette are ingredients; “The system is the recipe.”

The practical difference is that a good toolkit makes the right choice the easy choice. Instead of a page explaining how a social post should look, there’s a template that already looks right. Instead of a hex code buried on page 14, the colours are pre-loaded in the design tool everyone uses. People stay on brand not because they’ve read the rules, but because the rules are built into what they pick up.

Sound is increasingly part of that kit. In a 2024 research note in Psychology & Marketing, Oxford psychologist Charles Spence and sonic branding specialist Steve Keller pointed to Ipsos research from 2020 which found that ads using sonic brand cues, such as audio logos, were 8.53 times more likely to be high-performing. They also highlighted a revealing detail from UK research company SoundOut. Recognisable sonic identities were linked to an average 5% increase in perceived value. But when people heard a sonic logo and couldn’t connect it to the brand, perceived value actually fell by 7.7%.

That finding brings us straight back to Romaniuk’s point. A sound, like any brand asset, only works once people know it’s yours. A new audio jingle that changes every season isn’t an asset. It’s noise.

Highlight: A good toolkit makes the right choice the easy choice.

What this means for a small business

You don’t need an enterprise brand platform to build a living system. Most small businesses already have the tools: a shared folder, a design app with a brand kit, a handful of templates. What’s usually missing is the decision about what stays fixed.

Start by naming your core assets, the few things you want customers to recognise you by. For most small businesses that’s three or four: a logo shape, a main colour, a typeface and perhaps one other distinctive element, such as an illustration style, a phrase or a sound. Protect the form of those ruthlessly. Then build a small set of templates for the things you produce most often, so the core assets turn up automatically.

Everything else can flex. Your seasonal campaign can look different from last year’s. Your Instagram can be playful while your proposals stay formal. A video can animate your logo, as long as it still looks like your logo when it settles.

A few questions can help:

• Which three or four assets do we want customers to recognise us by, even without our name?
• Have we changed any of them recently, and did we have a good reason?
• Do the people who create our content have templates, or just rules?
• When our brand moves or makes a sound, does it still feel like us?

Which brings us back to Brand_FINAL_v3. The problem was never that it existed. It was that it tried to control everything and ended up controlling nothing. A recipe works differently. It tells you which ingredients matter, then trusts you to cook.

Sources

1. UntilNow, “6 Brand Design Trends Shaping 2026 (And How to Use Them)”, 20 October 2026. Source of the “recipe” quote and the Wyzowl video statistic.
2. Contagious, “Jenni Romaniuk on Distinctive Assets”. Interview with Professor Jenni Romaniuk, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Source of the fashion-items quote and the form versus use distinction.
3. Phys.org, “Research highlights the importance of logos”, March 2014. Summary of Cian, Krishna and Elder, “This Logo Moves Me: Dynamic Imagery from Static Images”, Journal of Marketing Research 51(2), 2014.
4. Charles Spence and Steve Keller, “Sonic branding: A narrative review at the intersection of art and science”, Psychology & Marketing 41(7), 2024. Source of the Ipsos and SoundOut findings.