Brands with big personalities need a different kind of agency

We see this one a lot.

A founder builds a brand with a real point of view. Loud packaging and a color nobody else in the aisle would touch. It works. Then they hire an agency to scale it, and six months later the feed looks like everyone else's. Clean sans serif, muted palette, captions that could be anyone's.

Nobody decided to do that. It's what an agency process produces when nobody's paying attention.

Everything looks the same now

Alex Murrell's essay The Age of Average catalogs it across categories: luxury houses swapping to identical all-caps wordmarks, car brands going flat and monochrome, tech logos converging on the same rounded sans serif, 27 different brands running a "Find Your…" tagline. The 2026 update of the piece adds a study Twitter ran with Pulsar that looked at 20 big brands over three years and found their posts got shorter, their tones converged and their keywords overlapped. When people were shown a redacted tweet and five possible brands, only 38% could pick the right one, which means most of that spend went to the category instead of the brand.

Most brands don't own a single thing people recognize

The thing that makes a brand recognizable at a glance (the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute calls them distinctive brand assets) is something most brands don't have. Ipsos and JKR rated over 5,000 brand assets with 26,000 consumers and found only 15% did the job, meaning they brought the brand to mind on their own. Colors came in at 4%, slogans at 6% and logos at 19% (Marketing Week).

So if your brand has a look, a voice or a color that people recognize, you have the thing most brands are trying to buy. The first thing to ask of an agency is that they don't break it.

Dull ads cost more to run

Peter Field's analysis of IPA effectiveness data, done with System1 and Adam Morgan, found that a dull campaign in the UK needs roughly £10 million more in media spend to match the commercial impact of an interesting one. System1 has tested over 100,000 ads, and a 30-second clip of a cow chewing grass outperforms half of them (Contagious). The bar is low, and the brands that clear it spend less to get the same result.

And you have to keep it up

The other half of the research is about sticking with it. System1 and the IPA's Compound Creativity study looked at 4,000 ads from 56 brands over five years. The most consistent brands, the ones that kept the same characters, look, tone and ideas instead of reinventing every campaign, produced 27% more very large brand effects and 28% more very large business effects. AMI's summary breaks that into 10% more sales value, 18% more profit and 19% more market share. Brands that never changed agency over those five years also scored higher on creative quality than brands that changed twice.

This is where personality-forward brands get burned. Your personality only compounds if it shows up the same way every week, across every channel, for years. An agency that wants to refresh your look every quarter, or has a different freelancer touching each channel, is throwing away the compounding.

What a bold brand needs from an agency

Most agency processes are built to reduce risk. Brand guidelines get interpreted conservatively and copy gets written to a template. Then there's the pitch team problem. The people who sold you have never been in a client review, and the people in the client review have never heard your founder talk.

A brand with a big personality needs the opposite. The people doing the work have to get the joke. Somebody in the review has to defend the weird color instead of offering a safer one, and whoever writes your captions has to have heard you talk first. The same few people should be touching content, social and email, because you don't get consistency from six people who've never met.

Four questions to ask before you sign

1. 1

   Who, by name, will be making my stuff, and have they seen my brand?

2. 2

   Show me a client who came in with a strong personality and what their feed looks like two years in.

3. 3

   How do you handle a brand color or voice that makes you nervous? The answer you want is a story about a time they pushed a client to keep something, not a line about "balancing brand and performance."

4. 4

   When was the last time you talked a client out of a rebrand?

If you get vague answers, walk.

Where we land on this

Written by

Hana Brenner-Katz is the founder and creative director of Beyond Bright Creative. She started her own design studio in 2018 and turned it into a full-service agency in 2023.

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