The Consistency Conundrum: Keeping Fashion Brands Fresh

This report from System 1 and  Mark Ritson’s recent Marketing Week column got me thinking about the importance consistency when you are building a brand.

In my world – fashion – newness is an essential element for keeping customers coming back. Balancing brand consistency and freshness is a delicate dance between ensuring brand recognition while constantly delivering fresh, exciting products.

Here's how to strike that balance:

Define Your Core: Identify the unchanging elements of your brand - your values, mission, tone of voice and brand personality. These should remain consistent across all touch points.

Create a Flexible Visual Identity: Develop a visual system that allows for seasonal variations while maintaining recognisable brand elements (for example combining primary brand colours with complementary seasonal palettes or creating a logo that can be adapted to reflect each new collection).

Consistent Messaging, Fresh Stories: Keep your brand message consistent, but tell new stories to bring each collection or season to life.

Evolve, Don't Revolutionise: When updating your brand, make gradual changes that respect your brand's heritage while keeping it modern and relevant (with the current creative director musical chairs at fashion’s top brands, it will be interesting to see how many of them will adhere to this!)

As Ritson points out, consistency is a secret weapon in marketing. For fashion brands, the key is to be consistently fresh, always exciting, but always recognisably you.