The challenges of branding in 2025: from staying relevant to designing for Gen Z

I think a lot of us struggle with how quickly the world moves and how quickly things need to roll and keep pace with evolutions or brands growing. Or the enormous growth in terms of all the various touch points that brands now have to cater for, online, offline, etc. I'd say that's a huge challenge.

[There’s also] the pace at which the world and sociology and culture is evolving – staying relevant is difficult, but it’s absolutely a joy to come up with solutions. And zooming out from all of that, we're not in control of the future. We might know thematically where it's going, but in the end, the future is a little bit chaotic or unknown.

And [we need to be] aware of that chaotic effect, and design a brand to be able to deal with that. There's a layer of prediction going on there.

I think they're really important. My worry sometimes with some awards is that it's very hard to put lots of different projects into the same space to judge success or failure.

And what I mean by that is – if you put in a super-sexy trend-led, let's say, coffee shop brand or CBD brand, up against, let's say, a shift with a huge bank like Nationwide, which was a marginal gains approach as well. By default, it's quite hard to balance. As a judge or as a user, you might lean towards the more trend-led project versus the bank project, which might have an awful lot of interesting things underneath the brief, but it's not necessarily viewed in the same space.

I think it's really hard to moderate where a brand has done something really special, and where perhaps you might grade them lower when you look across category, and you look across budgets and you look across agency.

But I've always loved the Brand Impact Awards. I judged it once and have submitted projects as well. And how you guys look at the impact: the effectiveness of branding, and look at things through that lens compared to some of the other categories of other awards out there, I think that's a really, really important stance that our industry needs to always come back to a bit more.

The 'why' we're doing stuff, what was behind it, what was the reason, and what did it achieve, rather than surface level discussions, it gets right into the mechanics. And that's something I personally believe a lot in as well.

I'd say it's a real asset to have and to own for multiple reasons. In that you own your own space – no one else can have that, and you can get incredibly detailed in how you own that. Whether it's in the shape, the outline, or whether it's even in the name, and [you can] cement that with the culture of your business, so that you really feel the brand is alive throughout. No one else can can take that from you [when you customise].

But I do think there's a lot of variety out there off the shelf as well. When you just go straight from the shelf, there's 1000s of type places out there. So you can still own a space, but you can't know that you're going to be able to own it for the future.

I would say starting with the why is just incredibly important, and I can't pick on a brand here and say they didn't think about the why, because I'm not in the project to know that or not.

But I would say, unless you know why you're doing it and what you're trying to achieve, you don't really have a brief and you're really going to be going with gut instincts. And [you need to think about] whether that position you end up taking will hit the right notes or not, not just when it rolls out, but let's say 12 to 18 months afterwards, when perhaps at that point you might be a bit tired of it or bored of it, because you didn't get the right position.

We need to start with the why as much as possible. And I would love to see the 'why' framed a little bit more in many of the conversations that take place after a rebrand, because I think it's absolutely critical to understand that to have an answer on the outcome.

I think it's really hard to get the right note, the same note that is right for everybody. And I think what people are realising is that you need a lot of intention in how you apply your brand. So either you have a brand which is mouldable to the various audiences: fragment somehow for an audience, or you're incredibly intentional through the channel you're in.

For example, you might play differently in Instagram to in LinkedIn or pick any channel, and you could say the same thing. Just being right in the moment as the brand, I think that that really matters too. But having a brand system that can adapt and evolve to the segment of your audience truly matters as well.

For me, fashion was all about creating emotion. It wasn't necessarily selling a product. It was selling a vision of somebody's mind, of whether that was Lee McQueen, or whether that was Christopher Bailey at Burberry. And with that, there isn't necessarily a literal set of ingredients or approaches that you can take. It's minutia. It's lots of everything, and it's a lot of passion, and it's a lot of craft.

Being surrounded by people that thought like that was a really beautiful entry into the industry for me, because I've kind of carried that on, whether it was in typography at Monotype – there it was all about the silhouette of the typeface in the same way as the silhouette of the form in fashion.

And over here at Frontify, Frontify is in the centre of a huge brand universe of brand ingredients, whether that is type or colour or illustration or sound... whether you're in marketing teams or creative teams or agencies or even like C-suite level, and it's this place that all of that exists. So we're really lucky in that we can see how brands are built across pretty much any industry, any region, and see how they work and are built and grow over time too.