Fire and Rain
The opposing ends of poor brand stewardship and how to avoid them both
Part 4 of 5. This week I’m putting what I believe about brand in writing, one question a day.
Armed with stellar creative assets, it's time to use them
Apply it
Here’s the hardest part of a new brand: you have to start making new stuff. Visual identity touches everything. Your emails, your social avatars, your business cards, your collateral, your signage. Once you have a new one, all of it needs to feel the same.
Thankfully, for most software companies almost all of that is digital, so the cost is largely time. But you do have to bring everything into line, and the order matters.
If you can roll it out everywhere at once, great, do that! If you can’t, start with your website and get the new brand live there first. Then work through everything else someone sees before they buy: ads, social, emails, the sales deck.
Anything after the point of purchase, like onboarding docs, invoices, and the help center, can wait. Those people already said yes.
I can hear the naysayers now, "We have to launch with everything all at once."
And I agree. In an ideal scenario, that is exactly what I would want. I'm assessing the real world trade-offs that I've seen play out over dozens of clients trying to roll out the new creative that we gave them and the likelihood of being able to do this perfectly requires a bunch of manpower, time, and it stalls the launch of at-the-ready improvements.
At minimum, get every touch point within your funnel before somebody converts buttoned up. Then work on the stuff that is internal or happens after the deal is paid.
Keeping your brand off the ice and out of the fire
Once it’s live, keep your head on a swivel for two ways a brand dies.
A brand on ice stops adapting. Coca-Cola’s script has barely changed since the 1880s, just a few subtle refinements along the way. McDonald’s has had the golden arches for decades. But neither one advertises the way it did when those logos were drawn. The mark stayed relatively similar and everything around it moved to new mediums.
Software can do the same thing. Keep the core of your brand (colors, logo, type, and pattern), and expect to adapt it, because new mediums will show up.
Remember when every website suddenly needed a mobile version?
The brands that ignored it looked like dinosaurs. Ten years from now, will we even be looking at websites? Maybe it’s holograms, in "help me Obi-Wan Kenobi" style. Maybe we talk to brands through an avatar. Whatever it is, there will still be something to look at, and your brand needs a baseline it can evolve from.
A brand on fire is the opposite problem, and it starts with boredom. You’ve been looking at the same colors, the same type, and the same patterns every single day, and if you see your logo one more time you're convinced it will invoke a gag reflex.
So you start adding new elements that have nothing to do with the brand, just to spice things up. A new gradient here, a different illustration style there, a font somebody spotted on Twitter.
Here’s why that's an issue and why you're being selfish: you see your brand constantly, and everybody outside your company sees it in passing. What feels stale to you has barely registered with the people who interact with it outside of your company. The new stuff doesn’t read as fresh from the outside. It reads as off brand, confused, and haphazard.
Every off-brand piece burns down a little of the trustworthiness you worked so hard to build.
Beat the drum, no matter how bored of it you get. You’ll be tired of it long before your customers even start to recognize it.
To put it into perspective, James Taylor has been playing “Fire and Rain” for 56 years. People expect it. At this point it’s fused to his soul. Do you think he’s ever been bored playing it? Absolutely. He plays it anyway, and the new songs he adds to the set still sound like James Taylor. Trust me, I'd know. Here is a photo of him from Rady Shell when I saw him in 2025... and yes. He played "Fire and Rain," wonderfully.
You have a balance to strike in stewarding this brand: Keep playing the hits, and make sure the new material still sounds like you. Too rigid and your brand goes cold. Too loose and it burns the house down... not in the cool, Talking Heads way, either.
So which one is yours closer to right now, fire or ice? Go fix that one first.
— Zach
