Why this branding expert thinks a trendy brand identity can be a weakness

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If you’re building a brand, it’s best not to break out the copy machine.

Don’t take our word for it—just ask Emily Heyward, the co-founder and CEO of the branding and marketing agency Red Antler, who has helped build the brand identities of iconic companies for decades.

“All of these aesthetic trends that we see, someone started them, and they come out with something that feels new and exciting and true to them,” Heyward said. “And then there’s all of these copycats, and each time it’s like a Xerox…it gets weaker and weaker.”

Heyward sat down with Marketing Brew at Cannes Lions to tell us more about the importance of finding a brand’s North Star and some of the branding that’s inspiring her today. Here are a few highlights.

On branding versus marketing: I think a common mistake is confusing branding and marketing…Branding, I really think of as a foundation that ultimately should stay true over many, many years. That’s not going to say you won’t evolve and build on it, but it really is about setting a North Star that, without very good reason, should hold for a long, long time. Whereas marketing is how you consistently tell your story in new and different ways to draw people in, to keep things fresh, to launch new things, to stay up with the times. Marketing requires a lot more flexibility. Of course, those two things need to work together, and you don’t want to think of them as completely discrete, but they are not the same…Campaigns, by their very nature, are temporal, and I think that if a marketing team has a great idea to jump on a trend, especially on social, which moves so fast, and the brand can do it in a way that feels true to them and not cringeworthy, go for it. It’s gonna pass so quickly anyway. But then, for that exact same reason, when it comes to your brand identity, I think you want to be extremely cautious about not being too trendy, because you want your brand identity to last for a very long time.

On branding she admires: Recently I have really loved the work that Rhode has done. I think that beauty is a category that I’m obsessed with, partly because it is so brand-driven, and it’s fascinating to me why some brands break out and others don’t. Rhode obviously has an incredible figure behind it with Hailey Bieber, but also has made just such smart, interesting choices. The phone case was so original, and I’ll tell you, I now have had so many brands be like, “We want our version of the Rhode phone case,” and it’s like, well, no. You need your version of something that hasn’t been done before.