Is your brand an improvisation brand?

It has been months since the rebrand; decks are shipping on point, the website still reads fresh, social media posts carry colors, typography, and composition better than ever, and the whole system seems to be working great. Suddenly, the agency’s files run out. The people who were there for the launch move on. There’s more video to make, so more of it goes to vendors, and each one starts from zero and improvises.

It might take some time for this to be noticed in static brand materials. At the end of the day, colors, typography, and graphic elements are usually all well-documented and easy to plug in. But when it comes to how the brand behaves in motion, that’s where improvisation comes in, faster than ever. Then you notice your videos don’t look like your brand anymore: the speaker’s name comes on screen differently in the webinar, the podcast, and the event recap; each one looks fine on its own, but side by side, they read like different companies.

Recognition comes from repetition

Some brands treat motion as the one place they’re allowed to loosen up. That makes sense for a campaign or launch film, where a piece is meant to stand out. It doesn’t work for the day-to-day: the webinars, podcasts, and social clips that make up most of what people see.

Motion patterns let a brand be recognized even before the logo appears. This kinetic identity has become vital for top players across many industries and is redefining branding as we use it today. Because recognition comes from repetition, improvisation can dilute a brand, and many leaders don’t even notice.

Why it happens

In many cases, it starts with a lack of system. More and more branding agencies are including motion in their guidelines. However, guidelines tend to be aspirational. They cover a few principles and give examples, but they don’t provide tools to replicate and expand on them.

In the middle of a busy week, someone takes the guideline and invents a new language for a piece or series they believe is somewhat aligned with it. Then, another person comes into contact with the brand and does the same. Over time, the brand ends up like someone on Duolingo with ten languages started and none past the first lesson.

Quality swings too. Some pieces move with the stiff default animation the software gives you. Others are so well made you’d watch them on loop. Both carry the same logo.

It’s easy to blame the person who owns the brand. But the reality is their schedule is full of tasks and meetings that can’t be ignored or put off to check whether a line of text enters with the easing from the guideline, or from the right corner. Even with the time, they’d have nothing to check it against.

The fix is smaller than it sounds

Systems and tools not only help teams and vendors stay consistent and avoid improvisation, but also enable non-technical teams to manage the brand. Nowadays, good motion guidelines come with those systems. These range from simple templates in the most widely used software, for adjusting and applying animations, to small tools that make customization and asset creation easy.

MOWE recently built one of those tools for social media posts, based on a social template we developed for a client. Anyone in the social media department, from creatives to managers, can simply open it, change the content, personalize it, and download it in a format ready to use.

The same principles extend to any other type of brand material you can imagine, enabling even the sales team to post something that looks like the company they sell for.

Someone at your company protects how the brand looks. They sign off the colors, the type, where the logo sits.

Ask who protects how it moves. If the answer is whoever edited the last video, your brand is improvising.

Not sure if the improvisation is real? Book a motion brand audit.