In our research across 277 brands, measuring seven behaviours and their influence on consideration, it came out as the strongest. Which tells you something about the gap between what organisations think customers want and what actually earns their decisions.

The research suggests that gap is in the doing as much as the thinking. The most common position in our study was what we called ‘Potential’ – brands that score higher on ‘proactivity’ than ‘consistency’ – working hard but not achieving consistent results.

In my experience this comes down to trying to do too much at once. Most customers, most of the time, just want to keep getting what they already get. They aren’t looking for novelty, and they certainly aren’t looking to be cross-sold (funny how no one ever says cross-buy). Those are things that businesses want. Customers are looking for organisations they can predict. The brands that emerge most clearly from our research – Macmillan, Tesco, Boots, Greggs – aren’t the sexiest. They’re the ones where what you were promised and what you receive have been aligned, consistently, across enough time and enough interactions for it to become something customers can rely on. Isn’t that what a brand is supposed to be?

There’s a version of this I see repeatedly in brand architecture work. There’s an instinctive bias towards newness – creating a new brand that signals ambition and announces change to the market. New brands are shiny, and they’re visible proof of personal impact within an organisation, but they’re also resource-intensive to properly launch and maintain. Often the enthusiasm for creating one is not backed up by the commitment needed for it to thrive. And organisations create more brands that try to signal greater breadth of capability, but end up taking both resources and customer attention away from the core offer. General Motors spent years running a bloated portfolio of overlapping brands, each competing with the others for internal resources and customer attention. When they finally consolidated down to four in 2009, they made more profit from less revenue. Fewer, bigger bets, properly committed to with the right amount of care and attention.

That takes discipline. It means having a clear enough sense of what you’re for that you can say no to things that don’t fit. It means resisting the reflex to copy whatever is working for someone else this year, and the pressure to keep adding propositions before the existing ones are properly working. And it means understanding that the primary question in any of these decisions isn’t what do we want, but what are customers already choosing us for?

The organisations that get this right have usually settled that question. And then they’ve had the conviction to keep going for consistency over newness.

Alexei Hartley, Director