KitKat Has Said "Have a Break" For 20 Years and it Still Works.
Why the World's Best Brands Treat Repetition as a Strategic Advantage.
Marketers Get Bored Before Consumers Do
A truth that experienced marketers know but frequently ignore: the people making advertising tire of messages long before the people receiving them. Campaign teams live with creative for months. Consumers encounter it occasionally, often barely noticing.
This asymmetry creates pressure to refresh, update, and reinvent. Marketing departments seek novelty because they're saturated with the existing work. The impulse feels like responsiveness, keeping the brand current, avoiding staleness. In practice, it often destroys the consistency that builds memory.
The CMOs interviewed by Contagious throughout 2024 and 2025 pushed back against refresh culture. The strongest brands, they argued, stay on message long enough for markets to actually remember what they're saying. Consistency isn't conservatism. It's a strategic act that compounds over time.
KitKat: The Same Platform For Two Decades
"Have a Break, Have a KitKat" has anchored KitKat's marketing for over twenty years. The line hasn't changed. The core insight, that breaks are necessary and KitKat belongs in them, hasn't changed. What has changed is how that insight gets expressed as culture and media evolve.
Wael Jabi, Global Head of Marketing for KitKat, explained the logic to Contagious: "The basic human need for breaks remains constant. What's kept the Have a Break platform fresh is our willingness to evolve how we interpret this truth."
The framework separates what stays fixed from what adapts. The platform, KitKat owns break moments, is permanent. The executions—how individual campaigns bring that platform to life, change continuously. Stability at the strategic level enables flexibility at the tactical level.
This structure solves the marketer boredom problem. Creative teams get novelty in execution. The brand gets consistency in positioning. Neither undermines the other because they operate at different levels.
Twenty years of "Have a Break" has accumulated memory that newer platforms cannot match. Consumers know what KitKat stands for because they've encountered the same message hundreds of times across decades. That repetition isn't a failure of creativity. It's the mechanism through which positioning becomes memory.
Asics: Repetition is Fundamental
Gary Raucher, Global Head of Marketing at Asics, goes further. Consistency isn't just valuable, it's foundational to how the best brands operate.
"The strongest brands in the world are the ones that are masters at repetition," Raucher told Contagious.
The claim reframes repetition from weakness to capability. Most brands treat repetition as what happens when you run out of ideas. Raucher treats it as a skill that distinguishes market leaders from everyone else. Mastering repetition requires discipline that novelty-seeking doesn't demand.
Asics uses brand positioning as a strategic filter across decisions. Rather than evaluating each campaign in isolation, the company tests whether activities align with established brand meaning. "We try to use our brand and our brand positioning as a strategic filter for everything we do."
The filter function only works if positioning remains stable. A brand that reinvents itself regularly can't use previous positioning to evaluate new activities, there's no consistent standard to filter against. Stability enables the coordination that creates coherent brand experience across touchpoints.
British Airways: Consistency Beyond Campaigns
Calum Laming, Chief Customer Officer at British Airways, extends consistency beyond marketing communications. The principle applies to entire customer experience, not just advertising.
"Consistency isn't even a question for us. Consistency is a fundamental," Laming told Contagious.
British Airways operates across hundreds of touchpoints, booking, check-in, lounges, boarding, flight experience, arrival. Inconsistency at any point disrupts the experience customers expect. A brilliant advertisement means nothing if the airport experience contradicts it.
Laming makes the connection explicit: "People think marketing stops at the campaign, it absolutely doesn't. It has to go right through."
This observation expands the consistency discussion from message repetition to experience delivery. Staying on message matters. But staying on experience matters more. Brands that nail advertising consistency while delivering inconsistent experiences still fail the fundamental test.
The implication for marketing leaders: consistency is an organizational challenge, not just a creative one. Marketing communications can repeat the same message for twenty years. If operations don't deliver on that message, repetition just amplifies the gap between promise and reality.
Uber: Undervaluing What Actually Works
David Mogensen, VP of Global Marketing at Uber, identifies consistency as systematically undervalued by the industry. Marketers know repetition builds memory. They choose novelty anyway.
"I'm increasingly of the view that consistency is one of the things that we undervalue," Mogensen told Contagious.
The undervaluation has structural causes. Marketing careers reward visible impact. New campaigns are visible. Maintaining existing campaigns is invisible. The incentive structure pushes toward novelty even when repetition would be more effective.
Agency economics reinforce the bias. Agencies generate revenue from creative development. Repeating last year's campaign requires less development than creating this year's new campaign. The business model favors new over consistent.
Mogensen advocates for resisting these pressures. The brands that break through aren't necessarily creating more, they're repeating what works rather than replacing it. Discipline to maintain outperforms the impulse to refresh.
The Compounding Effect of Memory
Brand memory works through repetition. Consumers form associations between brands and ideas by encountering those associations repeatedly. Each exposure strengthens the connection. Inconsistent messaging fragments memory across competing associations. Consistent messaging concentrates memory around unified positioning.
The compounding effect means early consistency investments pay returns indefinitely. KitKat's twenty years of "Have a Break" didn't just build twenty years of awareness. It built memory depth that new entrants cannot replicate regardless of spending. Time in market with consistent positioning becomes a competitive asset.
This compounding explains why established brands often outperform better-funded challengers. The challenger can outspend on media. It cannot out-accumulate on memory. Decades of consistent positioning create advantages that money alone doesn't buy.
Brands that refresh positioning reset the compounding clock. Whatever memory the previous positioning accumulated gets abandoned. The new positioning starts from zero. Over a career of frequent repositioning, a brand accumulates nothing, each cycle erases the previous one.
Why Consistency Requires Confidence
Staying on message for twenty years requires confidence that the message is right. Brands that don't trust their positioning naturally drift toward alternatives. Every market shift, competitive move, or internal transition becomes an excuse to reconsider.
The confidence can't be blind. KitKat's "Have a Break" works because breaks genuinely matter to people and KitKat genuinely fits break moments. The platform reflects something true. Consistent messaging amplifies a truth rather than insisting on a fiction.
Brands without that foundation shouldn't pursue consistency, they should find positioning worth being consistent about. The discipline of repetition only creates value when what's being repeated deserves repetition. Consistently wrong is worse than inconsistently right.
For brands with sound positioning, consistency becomes a test of organizational confidence. Do you believe your strategy enough to maintain it when competitors change? When executives change? When agencies change? The ability to hold position across transitions distinguishes strategically confident brands from those that chase whatever seems urgent.
The Creative Challenge of Consistent Platforms
Consistency at the platform level doesn't mean stagnation at the execution level. The KitKat example illustrates the distinction: same platform, continuously evolving interpretation. The creative challenge shifts from inventing new positioning to finding fresh expressions of permanent positioning.
This challenge is often more demanding than blank-slate creative development. Anyone can generate new ideas. Finding the twentieth year's expression of the same truth, while keeping it culturally relevant and creatively distinctive, requires deeper skill.
Agencies and internal teams accustomed to reinvention may resist the constraint. Working within an established platform feels limiting compared to the freedom of repositioning. The resistance reflects misunderstanding. Constraints focus creative energy. The best work often emerges from the tightest briefs.
Brands pursuing long-term consistency should evaluate creative partners on their ability to work within platforms, not just their ability to generate platforms. The skill sets differ. A brilliant platform-creation agency might fail at platform-expression work.
Recommendations
Separate platform stability from execution novelty. Fix what the brand stands for. Vary how that positioning gets expressed. The separation lets creative teams pursue novelty without undermining strategic consistency.
Evaluate refresh impulses against memory economics. Before repositioning, calculate what accumulated memory gets abandoned. The sunk cost of previous consistency often exceeds the potential value of new positioning.
Extend consistency beyond communications to experience. Customers don't distinguish between marketing promises and operational delivery. Inconsistency anywhere, not just in campaigns, undermines brand meaning.
Build organizational structures that resist refresh pressure. Individual incentives favor novelty over consistency. Counterbalance those incentives with metrics and processes that value maintenance alongside creation.
Use positioning as a strategic filter, not just a message. Stable positioning enables evaluation of new activities against established brand meaning. Unstable positioning eliminates the filter function entirely.
Select creative partners capable of platform expression. Long-term consistency requires agencies skilled at finding fresh executions within fixed platforms. That capability differs from platform-creation capability.
Bottom Line: Audiences Remember Brands that Repeat, Not Brands that Refresh.
KitKat built two decades of memory around "Have a Break" while competitors cycled through forgotten positions. Asics, British Airways, and Uber reinforced the same principle: the strongest brands master repetition rather than chasing novelty. Consistency creates compounding memory effects that new entrants cannot replicate regardless of spending.
The discipline to maintain outperforms the impulse to refresh, but only when what's being maintained deserves the commitment.
Brands confident in their positioning should hold it long enough for markets to actually remember.
