Consistency: The Creative Glue for Commercial Growth
Why has Guinness stayed with AMV BBDO for decades? Why has Apple never shifted its core positioning? Why do brands like GEICO, M&M’s, Duracell, Aldi, and Energizer stick with the same characters year after year?
The answer is simple: Compound Creativity.
In advertising, brands and agencies often tire of campaigns long before consumers do. It’s a well-known issue, famously challenged by Professor Mark Ritson in discussions of “wear-out.” New teams want to make their mark or worry a brand asset feels outdated. This leads to a misguided belief that familiarity breeds contempt.
But let’s be honest. Do you ditch your close friends out of boredom? Or change your daily routines every week just because they feel repetitive? Of course not. And yet, in marketing, we often reject the very thing that helps ads work: familiarity.
In System1: Unlocking Profitable Growth, our founder John Kearon reframed this thinking with a simple idea: “Familiarity breeds contentment.” But how could we take this idea further and demonstrate the profitable advantage of creative consistency? How could we convince marketers to stick with the status quo, not out of laziness, but because it actively drives commercial growth?
After analyzing 4,000 ads with responses from 600,000 people, the most comprehensive study on creative consistency was born: Compound Creativity. This report identifies 13 key consistency features, including characters, jingles, visual style, and soundtrack, matched against YouGov brand data, IPA effectiveness benchmarks and the Effie database. The findings provide the clearest, evidence-based case yet that sticking with familiar creative elements is not playing it safe but a proven way to drive long-term commercial growth.
Three’s Not a Crowd, it’s a Winning Formula
Consistency comes is various shapes and sizes, and our latest research pinpoints the three different ways consistency takes hold:
1. Creative Foundations
Creative foundations are the roots of any great campaign, shaping its look, feel and positioning. Brands like Baileys have shown the power of consistency, working with the same agency, Mother, for years to deliver a familiar and distinctive style. Agency tenure is a crucial part of this foundation. When brands commit to long-term agency relationships, they benefit from teams that are deeply embedded in their brand codes, positioning, and strategy.
Think of it this way: you wouldn’t hire one construction crew to lay the bricks and another to build the rest of the house. Cohesion from the ground up leads to stronger structures, and the same is true for creativity.
One of the key findings in the Compound Creativity report is that brands that change agencies less frequently tend to report stronger marketing results. System1 data also shows that longer agency tenure leads to higher creative quality and stronger brand distinctiveness. When matched against IPA effectiveness data, we saw a clear link between consistent agency relationships and improved business outcomes. It is just one example of how solid creative foundations lead to lasting commercial growth.
2. Culture of Consistency
Consistency isn’t just about slapping a logo on every ad. It’s a mindset. Just as market-oriented businesses outperform those that aren’t, brands that are consistency-oriented gain a clear competitive edge. This means maintaining coherence across channels, committing to entertaining audiences through “the show,” and re-airing ads with a belief in the power of wear-in, not fearing wear-out.
A perfect example of this is the GEICO Gecko. At face value, a talking lizard has nothing to do with insurance. But that’s the point. He’s playful, memorable, and cuts through the noise of a typically dry category. The Gecko stands as a testament to perseverance, distinctiveness, and long-term creative payoff. You can only imagine how hard it must have been to sell that idea to the C-suite at first, and yet here we are, more than 25 years later, with one of the most iconic brand characters in advertising.
This commitment to entertainment, or as Orlando Wood, author of Lemon and Look out, calls it “the show,” pays off, especially when it defies category conventions. Campaigns that lean into characters, humor, a sense of place, and human connection (rather than dry, sales-oriented features like product shots, flatness, voiceovers, and hard calls to action) generate more than double the word-of-mouth impact of sales-driven ads and are viewed for longer.
Extend this across channels, and the effect grows. Show up consistently with “the show,” and you don’t just entertain, you compound effectiveness over time.
3. Consistent Execution
We’ve touched on brand characters as part of a brand’s commitment to “the show,” but they’re also a defining feature of creative execution, alongside assets like distinctive visuals, soundtracks, and tone of voice. These are the core ingredients of consistency. Think of them as the cement that holds your brand house together, the creative glue of commercial growth.
In this case, it really is “the more, the merrier.” The more brand assets you build and maintain, the greater the effects. A Culture of Consistency and Creative Execution go hand in hand. You cannot execute consistency without first believing in its value. And the brands that do, those that invest in more brand codes, creative features, characters, music, and, crucially, time, see the biggest long-term payback in emotional response and brand distinctiveness.
According to System1 data, the most consistent brands increased their long-term brand-building potential, as measured by our Star Rating, by a full Star over five years. In contrast, the least consistent brands saw a decline of 0.3 Stars over the same period.
When we overlaid business outcomes using the IPA Effectiveness Databank, the results were undeniable: consistency drives growth. “Familiarity breeds contentment” is not just a creative philosophy, it is a proven commercial advantage.
Create with Confidence (and Consistency!)
This topic is so extensive, potent, and important that Cannes Lions invited me, Les Binet, and Sarah Carter to unpack the findings at the Palais. We have only just begun to scratch the surface on the many ways to build strong foundations, culture, and execution but the good news is you can download the research now.