Beyond The Brand Book: Designing Fluid Identities For 2025.
Rigid Brand Codes Fail In A Saturated Market; Fluid Identity Secures Distinction.
When Rules Collapse Into Noise
The brand book was designed for a different era: fewer channels, slower cycles, and audiences with attention to spare. In 2025, those same rigid systems collapse under scale. Consumers are now exposed to around 10,000 advertisements a day, and 65% of brand assets fail to establish clear associations with the companies behind them (Ipsos & JKR, 2024).
The outcome is not distinctiveness but invisibility. Uniform design codes, flat palettes, templated grids, recycled slogans, no longer secure attribution. They produce overlap, where ads blur into one another and audiences can’t tell who paid for what. The structural result is misattribution, with competitors benefiting from your media spend, and capital inefficiency, where budgets are burned without building memory.
Rigid identity, once the insurance policy against brand drift, has turned into a liability. The signal is clear: design that does not adapt to scale and saturation fails to return on investment.
Anchoring In Purpose, Flexing In Form
The volatility hitting business in 2025 is not creative theory, it is structural. 60% of global CEOs cite geopolitical instability as their top concern (Fortune/Deloitte CEO Survey, 2024). In that environment, brand identity that functions only as a fixed visual guideline cannot stabilize a company’s market position.
Spotify illustrates the alternative. By stating that “work is what you do, not where you are”, it designed an employer brand that travels fluidly across office policy, digital product, and social content. The message holds to purpose, trust and autonomy, but adapts in form to different markets and audiences.
This is the strategic shift: purpose anchors, identity flexes. Without that balance, brands risk two extremes. They either harden into symbols that feel politically brittle, or they scatter into incoherence, with no consistent thread connecting their signals. Purpose-centered flexibility prevents both outcomes, turning identity into a stabilizing force rather than a fragile aesthetic.
Case Evidence Of Fluidity
Jaguar: Using Controversy As Distinctive Fuel
Jaguar’s transformation, branded “Exuberant Modernism” launched with the Type 00 concept car at Miami Art Week. The design language divided opinion online, but that division was the point: in a luxury category where muted minimalism dominates, sharp edges and bold gestures reasserted Jaguar’s cultural space. Fluidity here meant choosing friction over harmony to secure relevance.
Petit Bambou: Silence As Signal
French mindfulness app Petit Bambou ran a campaign with no logo and a trompe-l’oeil background, effectively disappearing into its environment. In a landscape oversaturated with logos and slogans, invisibility became the distinctive move. Fluid identity here was restraint, using quiet to carve out recognition.
e.l.f. Cosmetics: Turning ESG Into Entertainment
With its “Dupe That!” campaign, e.l.f. reframed its annual Impact Report as playful content. By inviting competitors to “dupe” its corporate practices, the brand transformed compliance-heavy ESG material into a cultural story. Fluidity here was translating governance into shareable identity.
BarkAir: Absurdist Humor As Purpose Delivery
BarkAir, positioned as the first airline for dogs, dramatized its mission with a video of its CEO locked in a dog crate in the cargo hold, a parody of how pets usually fly. The absurdity wasn’t decoration; it carried the core message that the airline’s purpose is animal-first. Fluidity here was aligning humor with function, embedding identity in the experience.
Together these cases show that fluid design isn’t a single tactic. It can be friction, silence, humor, or reframing, as long as the anchor is clear purpose and the outcome is cultural distinction.
The Economic Cost Of Uniform Codes
Advertising clutter is not just a creative problem, it is an accounting problem. In the UK, half of tested ads underperform a simple video of a cow chewing grass (System1, 2024). Attention data from Amplified Intelligence confirms the structural failure: 85% of ads never pass the 2.5-second memory threshold needed to lodge brand recall.
When assets blend into generic templates, two consequences follow. First, misattribution: consumers confuse one brand’s signal for another, effectively subsidizing competitors’ equity with your spend. Second, wasted investment: campaigns fail to generate mental availability, so incremental dollars don’t build long-term memory structures.
Uniformity does not lower risk; it compounds it. A rigid brand system designed for consistency now erodes efficiency. Distinctive, fluid identity lowers cost-per-recall, increases attribution accuracy, and prevents leakage of marketing budgets into the void of indistinguishable communication.
Bottom Line: Fluid Identity Protects Capital And Secures Distinction
Rigid brand codes drain budgets through wasted spend and misattribution. Purpose-anchored but flexible identity systems convert design into resilience, efficiency, and market separation.
