Featured Work
Featured Work
Adam Gill | Creative Director
Businesses want a brand people remember. But achieving that means finding a balance between standing out and fitting in. Stand out too much and you risk alienating your customers. Play it too safe and you risk being forgettable.
This guide is about getting that balance right. Adam Gill, Creative Director at Smith, shares his experience on what makes brands distinctive and memorable, how to navigate the line between bold and off-putting, and how to evolve your brand without losing your identity.
Most memorable brands share the same building blocks. A distinctive colour, considered typography, a clear message, a strapline that sticks. But those ingredients aren’t what set the strongest brands apart.
As Adam puts it, the ones that stay with you are “brands that aren’t scared to differentiate.”
Sometimes that’s subtle, a visual “zig” in an industry that’s zagging. Sometimes it’s the out-there campaign that ends up “tattooed on our brains.” What they have in common is a willingness to make a choice most competitors won’t.
Being noticed and being chosen aren’t the same thing. A brand can be instantly recognisable and still lose the sale. So what actually makes someone pick you?
Distinctive is about recognition. It’s the set of assets that make a brand easy to spot and recall, the colour, the logo, the typeface, the strapline. Differentiated is about reason. It’s what makes someone choose you over the alternative rather than simply recognise you.
You can have one without the other. A brand can be instantly recognisable and still give no real reason to buy. The strongest brands work on both, easy to remember and clear about why they’re the better choice.
This is a debated area. The Ehrenberg-Bass school, associated with Byron Sharp, argues that distinctiveness does more for growth than differentiation, that brands grow mainly by being easy to notice and recall.
Others argue the two have to work together. For most businesses the practical answer lands in the same place. Being memorable gets you into the running, and a reason to choose is what wins the work.
This is where the balancing act comes in. Standing out has a limit, and that limit is set by what your customers need to feel before they’ll buy.
Adam gives an example: “You could turn heads by making a law firm look like a burger joint, but I’m not sure clients would feel confident bringing their serious legal matters to the counter.”
The point isn’t that bold is bad. It’s that bold has to fit the emotional job the brand is doing for the customer.
That judgement is the real skill. The expertise, as Adam describes it, is knowing “where on the balancing scale of familiarity and impact a brand can be effective.”
Lean too far toward familiarity and you disappear. Lean too far toward impact and you chip away at the confidence customers need to commit.
If you’re weighing that balance for your own brand, it’s worth pressure-testing the direction with a Leeds branding agency before you build around it.
Most of the damage a brand does to itself is avoidable, and it usually traces back to one of a few decisions:
The common root is authenticity. A brand with a clear identity makes better creative calls, because it has something solid to measure them against.
Sometimes, though, the problem runs deeper than the creative, and what’s really needed is a full rebrand rather than a fresh coat of paint.
Trends aren’t the enemy. They usually become popular for a good reason, something fresh that’s genuinely worth exploring, and Adam is clear they “should always be factored into brand evolution.”
Staying relevant is part of staying trusted. The danger isn’t using a trend, it’s using one that dates badly or pulls the brand away from itself.
Two tests keep that in check:
The first is Adam’s starting question, “does this idea meet our own brand values?” If it does, it has a place in the brand’s future. If it doesn’t, it’s just decoration.
The second is whether the idea serves the actual brief. Trying to crow-bar a brief into a style, Adam says, is “a rookie mistake,” and one customers tend to notice.
The same logic covers evolving a brand over time. Change is healthy when it’s anchored to what the brand stands for, and risky when it’s change for its own sake.
A few of the questions that come up most often when businesses start thinking about this.
Consistent, distinctive assets used again and again. The same colours, type, tone and strapline across every touchpoint, until people come to associate them with you. Recognition is built through repetition, not reinvention.
A solicitor’s brand that looks polished and reassuring rather than loud stands out in its category without unsettling its clients. It’s differentiated by fit, being the confident, credible choice, not by being the most eye-catching thing on the street.
Anchor every change to your brand values. If a new visual trend or shift in tone genuinely fits what you stand for, it has a place. If it doesn’t, it’s a passing fashion, and consistency will do more for you than novelty.
Knowing where your brand should sit between bold and familiar is the hard part, and that’s something SMITH helps businesses with across Leeds and Yorkshire.
If you want help finding that balance and building something both memorable and reassuring to your customers, a brand built on strategy is the place to start.