Why Brand Consistency Drives Innovation
Marcos Malagris explains how familiarity cuts cognitive load and why sudden packaging redesigns fail.
Marcos Malagris explores the vital role of consistency in brand building, explaining how the human brain prioritizes familiar cues. The executive analyzes the balance between novelty and recognition across packaging, branding, and marketing communications.
Marcos Malagris, General Manager LATAM at System1, joined Bruno Gimenes on Marketing - The Podcast to discuss how brand consistency impacts business outcomes and the role familiarity plays in consumer behavior.
The full discussion on brand asset effectiveness and product testing can be watched in the video above, as part of a broader conversation on marketing measurement and data.
The study on brand consistency and effectiveness
Addressing how many companies lose focus on enduring creative assets, Malagris cited research conducted by System1 in partnership with the UK's Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA). The study evaluated the relationship between consistent communication and long-term commercial returns.
According to Malagris, the study analyzed "80 brands over 5 years, measuring communication quality and developing a consistency score ranking." This index comprised 11 elements, including tenure with advertising agencies, asset reuse across channels, and the long-term retention of distinctive assets like jingles and brand characters. Brands that maintained higher consistency outperformed their peers across both brand and financial metrics.
Familiarity bias and cognitive load
The reason consistent brands outperform competitors lies in how human attention works. Malagris points out that the brain filters out most environmental visual stimuli to conserve energy, relying on familiarity bias to recognize known patterns without requiring deep cognitive processing.
"When you constantly change your messaging, what are you doing? You are creating cognitive load for a human being who has no bandwidth left; they are already processing too much information," Malagris explains. For him, branding's role is not to demand constant reflection: "The best job a brand can do is to ensure people don't have to think about it," streamlining decision-making at every touchpoint.
The 80/20 rule in innovation and packaging design
The practical application of this principle appears frequently in product and packaging testing. Malagris referenced Byron Sharp's concepts of physical and mental availability, noting that radical visual redesigns consistently underperform compared to previous versions in System1 tests.
To guide product development, Malagris outlines an optimal balance: "Generally, the innovations that succeed in the market are those with 80% familiarity and 20% novelty." He pointed to the Tropicana juice redesign case, where dramatic changes to traditional packaging triggered sharp sales declines, ultimately forcing the brand to revert to its original design.
Distinctive brand assets and emotional memory
Long-term consistency does not stifle creativity; rather, it creates the foundation for greater creative freedom. Malagris argues that established companies can leverage isolated visual fragments of their identity—such as specific colors or silhouettes—because their codes are already deeply ingrained in the public's mind.
"The more consistent a brand is, the more it earns the right to play with its assets," Malagris states, citing examples from McDonald's and Coca-Cola. Finally, Malagris connected brand recall to neuroscientist António Damásio's somatic marker hypothesis, explaining that purchase decisions typically narrow to a consideration set of 3 to 4 brands pre-stored in memory based on emotional associations.