Building Brands That Outlast the Moment
- Mario
- Nov 4
- 4 min read
A few weeks ago, I scrolled through a lineup of new “brand refreshes” on Behance.
Different industries, different agencies, yet every identity looked like it came from the same mood board: lowercase sans-serif, soft geometry, friendly tone, flat color. The aesthetic was clean, confident, and utterly interchangeable.
Somewhere along the way, modern branding confused clarity with conformity.
It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when a logo carried the weight of a company’s story, when design choices revealed lineage, geography, and craft. Today, even global icons are stripping their identities down to what I call “universal neutrality” a visual Esperanto that offends no one, moves no one, and belongs to everyone.
The faster brands try to stay relevant, the faster they become replaceable.
The sameness epidemic
Rebrands used to mean something. They marked a shift in purpose or ownership, a new chapter in a company’s evolution. Now, they often signify little more than anxiety — a nervous attempt to look current in a culture that punishes hesitation.
Between 2010 and 2025, more than a hundred legacy companies, from Burberry and Balenciaga to Intel and Kia, flattened or sanitized their visual identities. Serif logos disappeared. Symbolic marks were replaced with wordmarks. Personality gave way to polish.
When Burberry recently reversed its own simplification, returning to a classic serif logo, it felt almost rebellious — a confession that clarity alone had become cultural white noise.
The shift isn’t about aesthetics; it’s about attention.
In an algorithmic world, where every brand competes for the same few inches of screen space, visual simplicity promises instant legibility. But legibility isn’t the same as longevity.
Why relevance fails
Relevance is a moving target. The more you chase it, the further it runs.
The most resilient brands — Apple, Patagonia, Braun, Hermès — don’t chase relevance; they generate it. Their value systems act like cultural gravity, pulling meaning toward them rather than chasing what’s trending.
Each has found a way to let form follow belief.
Apple’s design coherence creates trust through predictability. Patagonia’s activism evolves, but its visual tone has barely changed in decades. Hermès treats heritage not as nostalgia but as raw material for reinvention.
As Alice Rawsthorn wrote in Hello World, “Design is not a mirror held up to culture, but a tool that shapes it.”
Durable brands don’t mirror culture; they edit it. They decide what’s worth carrying forward.
Cultural metabolism
Sociologist Stuart Hall once described culture as “a constant state of translation.” That’s the heart of this problem. Meaning never stays still; it’s always being reinterpreted.
Durable brands accept this as part of their biology. They evolve like living systems — metabolizing change instead of fearing it.
Nike can oscillate between nostalgia and experimentation without losing its center because its DNA is athletic empowerment, not a single aesthetic. Coca-Cola can modernize its campaigns endlessly because its handwriting remains literal, a century-old logo that still signals comfort and familiarity.
The secret isn’t design consistency; it’s semantic consistency. What people trust isn’t the look, it’s the continuity of intention.
The danger of cultural amnesia
In a 2024 Havas Meaningful Brands study, 77% of consumers said they wouldn’t care if most brands disappeared. That statistic doesn’t reflect cynicism; it reflects fatigue.
When brands abandon their history every few years to chase new relevance, they erase the emotional continuity that makes memory possible. You can’t build cultural capital if you keep spending it.
Design has become so obsessed with the next iteration that it forgets the compounding power of familiarity. The past isn’t dead weight; it’s earned equity.
The irony is that, in trying to look fresh, many brands have made themselves disposable.
Time as a design material
Durability isn’t about resisting change; it’s about shaping how change happens.
It’s an art of pacing — deciding when to hold still and when to move.
Great designers have always known this. Dieter Rams’ “Less, but better” was not minimalism for its own sake; it was economy in service of permanence. His products aged well because they were built on values, not aesthetics.
Philosopher Walter Benjamin once wrote that “every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”
For brands, that recognition is the key. The future belongs not to those who chase what’s next, but to those who carry what still matters.
Designing for endurance
After thirty years in this industry, you start to see the patterns. The agencies change, the tools evolve, the language updates but the cycle never does. Every generation believes it’s discovered the new truth about branding, when in fact it’s rediscovering the same one: meaning outlives style.
We’ve watched brands lose themselves trying to stay young. We’ve seen them chase trends, flatten their stories, sanitize their identities, and call it “modernization.” And yet the ones still recognizable after decades are never the ones that followed the noise. They’re the ones that knew who they were and stayed true to it, even when the market told them to move faster.
Cultural durability isn’t an aesthetic choice. It’s a discipline, a belief that design isn’t supposed to mirror culture, but anchor it. Because when everything starts to look the same, conviction becomes the only differentiator.
We’ve spent years helping companies rediscover that conviction, stripping away what’s performative to find what’s permanent. We believe the future won’t belong to brands that adapt the quickest. It will belong to those that remember what made them matter in the first place.
Every era produces its own aesthetic and then outgrows it. But the brands that endure aren’t trapped in style; they carry a pulse that doesn’t age. That pulse is memory. And memory is what makes a brand human.
