Marketers are an impatient lot. We adore the pornography of change. Look at how much we drop our disciplinary pants at even the faintest new trend or technology. We question the basic foundations of our industry upon even the flimsiest bit of evidence that marketing has changed. I cannot make it through a conference without some postmodern, sockless imbecile with zero training pointing to Gen Y or AI and the suggestion that everything is now totally different from what has gone before and therefore all the basics are now out of date.

And we match these ephemeral obsessions with an almost total disregard for patience and the past. Marketers are pathetically imbalanced in almost every respect when it comes to time. Their disciplinary watches are always fast. We are too short and never long enough in our brand building. We jump ship from agency partners too often and too early. We brainstorm new campaign ideas the morning after our new campaign went live. And we grow impatient with the world-beating, enduring slogan or jingle we inherited from the previous brand manager, who we replaced because… well… because.

This idiotic obsession with new at the expense of old is the subject of a remarkable report from System1 and the IPA. ‘The Magic of Compound Creativity’ is a powerful assessment of just how fucked up most marketing is. And how easy it would be to fix it with a little patience, a more accurate respect for the past and the ability to stick with things.

The report establishes a Creativity Consistency Score (CCS), which in itself proves a powerful intervention for an industry obsessed with change at the expense of effectiveness. Shown above, it rates brands first on their creative foundations, looking at how long the brand positioning, creative idea and agency have been in place. Next comes the degree to which ads are allowed time to wear in, using the same channels, media and creative assets. Finally, the scoring system measures whether the brand has used the same consistent brand assets in its execution, or if it has wandered around like the proverbial drunken sailor with new campaign after new campaign clouding the brand’s presence.

‘Repeat the same message over and over’: Puma on the power of consistency to drive results

Consistent brands are stronger

It’s easy to recognise that most brands fail at most of this. Much harder to come up with examples of brands that have managed to maintain a high score across these metrics and build on their creative consistency. I would nominate Guinness. Tesco. Ralph Lauren. Specsavers. Compare the Market. KitKat. Dove. BMW. It’s a roll call of some of the biggest and most effective brands in the UK market. But that should not surprise anyone.

We have talked a lot about the cost of dullness, being too short term, ignoring effectiveness principles or underspending. But hidden within this list, perhaps at the top of it, was always the advantage of keeping doing what you were already doing.

What the report lays out with blinding empirical clarity is that consistent brands are stronger brands. The ones that score in the top 20% for consistency are more likely to generate awareness, differentiation, fame and attitude change. You can argue against these questionable correlations – maybe brands that see growing awareness or fame hang onto their approach because it’s working. But I doubt it.

I’ve seen too many great campaigns killed, not because they were not working but because it was time for something new. I watched great brands like Hilton scrap legendary slogans like ‘Take Me to the Hilton’ and replace it with ‘It Matters Where You Stay’. What?

Too many times great brands with great brand codes would turn to me and suggest that it was “time for an update”. Not because there was anything wrong with the existing palette but because the company felt that “they might be overdoing it”.

The brands that score in the top 20% for consistency are more likely to generate awareness, differentiation, fame and attitude change.

For me, marketing patience and creative consistency start with positioning. There is a paradox at the heart of good, effective brand positioning in that it takes no more than a page but always more than a decade for good positioning to play out.

Most brands have the opposite: five or six pages of mission, mantra, personality, purpose and attributes, all lined up in circles and pyramids and full to the brim with stupid words written across pages that are always changing. Most brand positioning is a total shit show. Complex, constantly shifting PowerPoint nonsense that has zero chance to ever establish the brand in the consumer’s mind and start to work its magic.

Then comes the advertising. Research has now confirmed that ads simply do not wear out. We had a giant industry orgasm at the sight of Beyoncé taking off her jeans in the new Levi’s ad. Almost nobody mentioned that the original version of this ad, starring Nick Kamen, smashed the newer version for effectiveness when tested on contemporary audiences – despite it being (gulp) 40 years old.

More clients should show more of their old ads to new customers. Hell, play them forever. And if not, at the very least, make sure you return to the same theme for a lifetime. Specsavers keeps finding new ways to say the same basic thing, brilliantly. Its recent tour de force – welcoming weary travellers to Melbourne when they were actually standing at Sydney Airport baggage reclaim – is creative brilliance at its best. But it’s the same, the same, the same. The key, as this excellent report suggests, is understanding that there is no need to change things. In fact, there is a strong argument against it.

Ritson: Consumers don’t get tired of ads, only marketers do

Return to consistency

It all comes down to market orientation; most things do. While marketers spend many years focusing on one brand for eight hours a day, they forget that their consumers, the important people, think about thousands of brands each for a mere few seconds every year. Bad marketers and brand managers grow tired of positioning, brand codes and advertising execution. Good ones remember that they see their brand differently from the eyes of the market. They realise that what they perceive as overuse and exhaustion is actually just the start of a lifetime of impact that might take years to reach its zenith.

And even for marketers who make this mistake, there is still a chance to fix the error and make up for lost ground. Increasingly, we are seeing smarter marketing teams returning to long-lost consistency to restore a brand’s fortunes. M&S was dumb to walk away from its ‘This is not just food’ campaign in 2007, and completely correct (and later vindicated) to bring it back in 2019. It’s a similar story over at John Lewis. It killed the ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’ slogan two years ago (dumb) but brought it back last month (genius).

These companies have realised they could spend a lifetime trying to find a slogan as superior as the one they walked away from and still fall short. Partly because each is a stonker. Partly because these slogans had years, decades to establish themselves. And partly because it’s almost impossible to replace them with something new given how cemented the original ones are within consumer culture.

The same return to form can also happen with agency partners. Häagen-Dazs has returned to BBH, for example, after walking away more than a decade earlier from the single greatest thing that ever happened to the brand. Codes and rebrands are also cases for consistency.

Burberry’s incoming creative director Daniel Lee took only a few months to scrap the 2018 rebrand by predecessor Ricardo Tisci. Back came the charging knight from a century-old design and out went all the modern, non-descript nonsense. You can and should return to the magic of old. Especially when the current approach is off the pace.

Thanks to System1 and the IPA, we finally have proof that consistency is perhaps the single most important aspect of marketing and advertising planning. Start with the team and their agency of record and aim for longevity and chops. Let the competitor have all the young hot people. Stick with your people. Move to positioning and the palette of brand codes. Then to the campaign media and the recurring ‘fluent device’ behind the ads. Give these ads longer to play out and let them live in media for years, not months. Give everything more time. And feel comfortable letting what you have done become what you are going to do in the months and years ahead.

Ignore purveyors of change – those who tell you the consumer has changed more in the last three hours than the previous 30 years. They are morons. And more importantly, they are instigators for exactly the kind of change that will hurt your brand.

And don’t be afraid of your brand’s past. It’s not a foreign country. It is a rich and potentially superior source of positioning, codes, ads and other elements to which you should always be open. You have worked on the brand for two years; it has a 50-year history. Run the odds and you will realise that the past is probably the better bet.

Blessed is the CMO who comes into a company and announces “nothing major will change”. Holy is the marketer who recognises the weaknesses of current work and the superiority of her archive, and has the uncool temerity to go backwards rather than forwards in a discipline that worships only mindless progression.

Aim for excellence. But then aim to not change it. As this new report clearly confirms – consistency is not to be underestimated. 

Mark Ritson has hardly changed the syllabus of his Mini MBA in Marketing in the eight years that he has taught it. For this, and many other reasons, please consider the April 2025 programme, which is now recruiting.