Are Branding Principles Holding Back Creativity?

Let me hit you with a truth bomb: if your branding principles are holding back your creativity, your branding sucks.

Branding isn’t supposed to fence you in. It’s supposed to fuel you. It’s not a cage, it’s a springboard. The best branding doesn’t limit ideas, it sharpens them. It gives your creativity edges, so when it hits the audience, it leaves a mark.

The problem? Most people confuse brand guidelines with creative guidelines. A Pantone swatch and a boilerplate mission statement aren’t creative constraints. They’re the starting line. Real branding — the kind that sticks in your head, the kind that builds actual equity — is about memory, mental availability, and distinctiveness. Byron Sharp didn’t write “How to Be Cool on TikTok.” He wrote, "Make it easy to remember, make it easy to buy."

Let’s look at Coke’s 70/20/10 formula. It’s not some buzzword bingo, it’s an actual strategy. 70% of their marketing stays in the safe, consistent, memory-building zone. 20% pushes the edges. And the last 10%? That’s their freak zone. That’s where wild ideas go to stretch, challenge, and evolve the brand, not abandon it. Because if your brand never flexes, your audience stops paying attention. You train them to tune you out.

Here’s the irony: the best creative ideas, the ones that go viral or live rent-free in your head for months, usually aren’t "off-brand." They’re perfectly on-brand, just not in the way people expected. That surprise? That’s what makes them sticky. That’s what makes them unforgettable.

Take The Ordinary. That brand is clinical, minimalist, almost aggressively boring. But they owned it. They leaned into their vibe so hard they made it stylish. They took their whole philosophy and distilled it into one brilliant line: “Scientists are terrible copywriters so we stuck with Hyaluronic Acid.” Boom. Distinctive. True. Emotionally resonant. That’s not just a clever sentence, that’s decades of brand strategy in ten words.

Too often, creatives want to detonate the brand to chase something "fresh." They think they’re being bold, but they’re really just making the brand unrecognizable. If you toss the sonic logo, ditch the typography, change the color palette, and rewrite the tone of voice, congratulations, you didn’t make the brand cooler. You made it forgettable.

Let me make this painfully clear: attention without memory is noise. You can flash all the creative fireworks you want, but if no one remembers who it came from, what’s the point?

So no, branding isn’t holding you back. Lazy thinking is.

Use the codes. Then stretch them. Build memory. Then break expectations just enough to make people lean in. Because surprise within the familiar is way more powerful than surprise for surprise’s sake.

In other words: if you want to do bold creative work, start by respecting the brand. Then make it sweat.