Your Brand Book Is Killing Your Team’s Creativity — Here’s What to Do About It

Most brand books are doing exactly what they were designed to do. That’s the problem.

They were built to protect the brand, create consistency, and give everyone a clear set of rules to follow. What they actually produce, more often than not, is creative that checks every box and connects with no one. Sound familiar? If so, this is the perfect interview to dig into.

We sat down with Josh Tankersley, Infinity’s Creative Director, and Brandon Godwin, our VP of Client Strategy, to get into why this is, how it happens, and what to do about it.

Here’s what we learned about branding:

• Brand isn’t your logo. Brand is everything. It’s how your product feels to use, how your store smells when someone walks in, and what people say about you when you’re not in the room. Your visual and verbal identity certainly matter, but a lot of other things do, too.
• The longer a brand book gets, the worse the work gets… usually. A few clear guardrails can actually sharpen creative work. But past a certain point, every added rule narrows the lane a little more, until what’s left checks every box and says nothing at all.
• Brand by committee is a creativity killer. Everyone in the room means well. But  well-intentioned feedback accumulates fast, and when you try to incorporate all of it, the creative work always pays the price.
• The Guiding Light changes everything. A 3–5-word brand essence should be the one thing every piece of work has to accomplish, and the lens that makes every other decision easier.
• Brand and performance are the same game. You don’t win market share by incremental optimization alone. You win with big ideas people like enough to choose you over everyone else. Then you get the most out of those ideas by watching the numbers and dialing things in.
• AI raised the floor of brand building, not the ceiling. Anyone can have an average brand now. The result is that standing out has never been harder, which means real creative thinking matters more, not less.
• People are hungry for authenticity. On the flip side, brands that feel engineered or overdesigned are automatic flops. The brands really poised to win in the future are the ones willing to be real (and, in some cases, to take risks).

Interview highlights: Josh Tankersley and Brandon Godwin on what brand really is and what a brand book is for

[This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.]

Josh: The longer a brand book becomes, the more rules that it conveys, the narrower the lane of creativity becomes. And what tends to happen is that you feel like your book needs a lot of rules — because if it doesn’t have a lot of rules, how will anyone know what the brand is like?

But in reality, what happens is that you flatten all of your creative because every single deliverable has 45 boxes it has to check. Things become bland. They don’t stand out. You don’t create a lot of room for your creatives to have fun.

The way I tend to think about it is: When you’re writing a good brand book, you want to think about it like building a playground. The number one goal of a playground is for kids to go have fun. If every single piece of that playground has a 20-rule list beside it, no one’s going to have fun.

“Remember, you must be seated at a 90-degree angle, and your feet must be facing up” — that’s not conducive to having a good time. And I believe customers can smell when your creative team isn’t having a good time. The way to build a successful playground that is safe — because that’s really what the rules are there for, to keep your brand safe — is to build a safe playground. It’s not to impose a bunch of rules on how they play.

Brandon: One project we worked on together really changed my perspective and my vocabulary around brand books. I remember the client saying some version of, “This brand book is really great, but our team can’t use it.” It led you to say that brand books should have handles, not —

Josh: Handcuffs. Right.

Why playing it safe makes brand books worse

That playground analogy really sums it up. Rules aren’t bad, and playgrounds do indeed need fences. But every playground exists to be played on, and if you spend all your energy writing rules for how to use the slide, you’ve built something safe, joyless, and completely beside the point. A lot of brand books work exactly the same way.

When you write rules to protect the brand, you’re betting that safety produces performance. Most of the time it produces consistency, which has value, but consistency without a compelling idea behind it is just… forgettable. Reliably so, but still forgettable.

On top of that, brand by committee can be a gravitational force. Every well-intentioned person in the brainstorming room adds a requirement, and all those requirements mash together into a heavy mass that forces everything else to orbit it. There’s nowhere else to go and no way to achieve escape velocity.

But what’s the fix? Not fewer guardrails: Instead, it’s building a foundation clear enough that you only need the bare minimum. Which is exactly where the Guiding Light comes in.

Interview highlights: The guiding light and why brand IS performance

[This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.]

Josh: We would have brand books — whether we created them or someone else created them — that told us what we look like and what we sound like and did not at all tell us what we care about and who we are. Maybe they had some core values, but there was this missing component. And we decided to label it for ourselves in our process: a Guiding Light. A big idea behind the brand. A big brand statement.

This type of thinking has been around for a long time — lots of brands have a brand essence or a mantra. I think what we decided to do is make that matter a lot more, and make sure that no matter what you were making, what ultimately mattered was: Is it doing that one thing? Is that still true? Because if that is still true, you can break some other rules. You know how far you can push things.

But if you ever stop bringing that one thing to life, you’ve failed the brand. We talked about Liquid Death — I don’t know what their brand book looks like, but I would imagine their Guiding Light is probably also their tagline: “Murder Your Thirst.”

Brandon: I think one thing that’s interesting is good brands have a lot of ideas. I think what a three-, four-, or five-word essence or Guiding Light does is it actually helps not only create focus, but actually creates alignment between the company and an agency partner like us. We can’t have seven ideas all vying for the same level of attention and importance — it inherently prioritizes the idea, the same way “Murder Your Thirst” does. That’s helped us gain really tight alignment with clients — I’d even say our success rate of hitting the bullseye went up significantly after that.

We have a phrase — I think you coined it — we believe that brand and performance go hand in hand. What do you think that statement actually means?

Josh: For years, there were kind of two types of marketing: brand marketing — big ideas, expensive videos, brand books, vibes. And then there was performance marketing, which was testing the ever-loving hell out of everything and trying to dial up the performance by fractions of percentages. And that’s all that mattered, because if good numbers go up, you’ve won, right?

I don’t think those two things are separate. I think if you want the good numbers to go up, you have to have a strong brand that people like. You can’t win by incremental growth. You’re never going to take market share with a 0.01% improvement. You’re going to take market share with big ideas that people like enough that they start to choose you over everybody else.

So if you want performance, you have to start with your brand. You have to build something that people want to support. And a lot of that comes from having an idea, having something to say, having a purpose.

How to build a better brand

Start with your Guiding Light. Before you touch the brand book, before you review a single piece of creative, answer the questions that matter:

• Who are we?
• What do we care about?
• What are we actually trying to do here?

If you can’t get those answers to 3–5 words you’d put on a T-shirt, that’s your first problem to solve. Leave the color palette for later.

From there, look at what you’ve built and ask whether it has handles or handcuffs. Can your team actually use this thing? Can they produce work from it without checking 45 boxes? If the answer is no (and for a lot of brand books it is), start cutting.

Not randomly, of course. But cut toward the Guiding Light. Keep what reinforces the one thing and really question everything else.

And then, probably the hardest part: let the creatives cook. These are the guys and gals who’ve been thinking about your brand deeply and who care about it just as much as you. After all, many creatives see the success of their brands (and yours) as a direct reflection of their worth as a writer, or a designer, or a videographer. They care. A lot. And don’t forget that there’s a real difference between giving your team direction and giving them a list of requirements. The first makes the work better; the second boxes in your team and stifles the very creativity you’re paying for.

Interview highlights: What AI did to brand building

[This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.]

Brandon: So how is AI reshaping the world of brand?

Josh: The first thing to understand is that AI has brought the floor up quite a bit when it comes to brand building. Anyone today can have an average brand. We’ve all got the same tools. You don’t have to be a writer, you don’t have to be a designer, you don’t have to have a big idea — you’ve got a thinking machine that can do a lot of that heavy lifting for you. Doesn’t mean your brand is going to be good, but it will be okay.

What it won’t do is help you stand out. Because as every brand starts to come up to that baseline, you’ll continue to get lost in the sauce.

Having access to the tools does not enable you to create a brand that stands out. It enables you to be mid. And that’s about as good as it can do.

Brandon: So what would you do to stand out?

Josh: I would start experimenting — capitalizing on some really big ideas, thinking about using the video side of AI to do things other people aren’t doing. The other thing I would do is lean into people. If you can’t find your answer in the machine, go outside and talk to people. Talk to your customers. Talk to your team. Get your team on camera. AI can’t do that. At least not well.

As AI-manufactured brands become more commonplace, people become hungrier for reality, hungrier for true people. I think this is why you see younger generations taking blurry photos — because it’s real. Why do you go to a farmer’s market and buy an ugly mug? Because somebody made it with their hands and meant it. Humans like a little bit of flaw. They like for things to feel handmade. Think about your brand like that.

The thing AI can’t do

Josh just made the case that brand and performance aren’t two separate games. If you want the numbers to move, you need big ideas people actually like.

More importantly, you need something real to say, especially when you think about what AI has already done to most industries (and what it’s set to do in the near future).

AI has lifted the floor of brand building significantly. The tools available today — for writing, design, video, and ideation — mean that a small team with a modest budget can produce polished, coherent work faster than ever. Or in other words, anyone can have a passable brand these days.

But AI hasn’t touched the ceiling.

Standing out has always required a novel, genuine, or otherwise interesting point of view, something to say that isn’t generic, something that makes a person go, “Huh, that’s neat.” That bar hasn’t moved, but the gap between average and exceptional is now so much more valuable than before.

And that means the people who can actually dream up ideas and execute them with craft are also critical. They’re the only competitive advantage that can’t be replicated by handing everyone the same tools, so smart brands should double down on folks who can think creatively and take big swings. They might not hit a home run every time, but they’re the only ones who actually hit home runs at all.

AI has made it easier than ever to build a decent-looking brand. What still separates the ones people actually remember is having something real to say. When you’re ready to figure out what that is, let’s talk.

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