One brand, many faces: How far can your content change and still feel like your brand?
Whist attending the recent Technology for Marketing, two sessions raised a shared question: how can brands explore different voices and content styles while staying recognisably themselves?
On the Creator Marketing 2.0 panel, Pret A Manger’s Alba Torres spoke about finding creators within the brand’s community and giving shop teams a voice. In a separate session on innovation within heritage brands, BSH Home Appliances’ Leo Cutler explored how controlled testing can help teams try unfamiliar approaches.
For those commissioning and producing content, these ideas belong together. One opens up who can tell a brand’s story. The other considers how to give new approaches room to develop.
A crafted campaign, a creator’s video and a colleague’s product story each contribute something different. The challenge is connecting them and supporting each with the right creative and production expertise.
Let people bring something of their own
Alba’s comments about Pret’s shop teams offered a useful starting point. These people work with the products every day. Their knowledge and customer interactions give them something specific to contribute to the brand’s storytelling.
That broadens the question of who belongs in front of the camera. Alongside finding someone with an audience, brands can look for people whose experience gives audiences a reason to listen.
M&S provides a compelling example. Its Director of Product Development, Kathryn Turner, shares product stories, bakery favourites and farm visits through her personal TikTok account.
Her knowledge and access open up a part of the business consumers rarely see. It illustrates the opportunity in Alba’s observations: people within a business can reveal qualities of the brand that a campaign might express differently.
A thoughtful brief establishes purpose and boundaries while allowing someone’s language, knowledge and personality to shape the work. Predetermining every phrase risks losing what made them worth involving.
Give experimentation a clear purpose
Getting an established organisation comfortable with a different approach takes care. Leo’s session addressed that hesitation. Teams have invested years in building an identity, and unfamiliar content styles raise reasonable questions about reputation and audience response.
His discussion of controlled testing offers a useful principle for creative production: agree what you want to learn before deciding what to make.
Consider a hypothetical home-appliance launch. A lifestyle film could help people imagine the product in their home. A demonstration could explain a feature. A creator could show how it fits into an everyday routine.
Each piece has a different job. Clear objectives help teams commission the work and assess its contribution.
Does the audience understand the feature? Does the demonstration address a hesitation? Does this person make the explanation more engaging?
Defining the question early helps teams scope production, choose talent and agree what would justify developing the approach further.
Be precise about what stays consistent
Alba’s and Leo’s contributions connect through creative freedom with a clear purpose. People need space to contribute, and teams need a shared understanding of what they are trying to achieve.
“Keep it on brand” leaves too much open to interpretation.
A useful brief identifies what must remain true: perhaps the product promise, a distinctive sense of humour, an approach to casting or selected visual cues.
It also identifies where variation would help. A creator may need their own language. An employee may be most engaging in their usual environment. A campaign may require a constructed setting.
An informal film still benefits from considered framing, sound and editing. A crafted image can feel immediate and human. The right intervention depends on what makes the idea work.
Three questions help:
What should the audience recognise about our brand?
What does this piece need to help them understand or feel?
What freedom does the person making it need?
Connect the work from the first thought
Considering campaign, creator and product content together gives each team a clearer understanding of its role.
That connection must happen early enough to influence creative direction, talent selection and production scope. Intended channels and usage matter too, particularly when content spans brand, creator and partner environments.
Experienced creative production oversight connects these decisions. It identifies where precise art direction matters, where contributors need freedom and which specialists will strengthen the idea. It focuses resources on what matters most to the brand and audience.
At Another, we bring the right people together around each brief, from the first thought to the final frame. We consider what the work needs to achieve, then build the team and production approach around it.
Alba highlights the knowledge within a brand’s community. Leo offers a way to explore unfamiliar approaches with purpose. Together, they prompt a useful question for your next brief: which qualities make this unmistakably our brand, and where could a different voice help people see something new?