Last week, the Houston Business Marketing Alliance held the 2025 AIM Conference. This is the second HBMA Conference I’ve attended and both have been fantastic.
In a morning session, David Saxe with ELL Creative gave a talk entitled “Storytelling that Converts: Crafting Content that Resonates”. The talk sure resonated with many intriguing thoughts and solid takeaways. I won’t give away the whole presentation, but one takeaway struck a chord with me. The session was running long, and I had a thought I wanted to share with the group but ran out of time. I told David later in the day, and I’ll share with you now:
One recommendation David made (paraphrasing here) was to “loosen up the brand”. Avoid rigid guidelines, detailed, overly complicated graphic standards. These lead to redundant, boring, and often forgettable marketing. You’d think this is heresy to a Designer like me, but you’d be wrong.
When David was talking about this concept, he showed a slide with dozens of ads for a single brand with many different visual expressions. Don’t get me wrong, they shared some commonalities like typography, color, tone and messaging. But they weren’t so ratcheted down so tight to be so prescriptive, like stating the logo must always be in the lower right-hand corner as an example. Or headlines have to be “x” points. When you looked at all the expressions in total, they felt cohesive. They looked branded. He was quite right.
I’ve been working along these lines for a while now. Partially because clients are demanding so many different kinds of brand expressions across different channels. What works in one format fails miserably in another.
Also, decision makers have different goals and objectives. Without boiling every design down to the lowest common denominator to accommodate everyone, you have to be flexible. The needs of HR are vastly different than IR or the sales team.
I told this to David, saying with brands I work on, I strive for unity, not uniformity.