This is a business with a good brand but no brand operating system: there is no living set of rules that gets enforced, so every location interprets the brand its own way. The more it expands, the faster differences accumulate beyond what can be controlled, and the cost of fixing them rises with every new touchpoint.
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Your brand is remembered and valued by customers. Many businesses take years to get there. But there is a quieter problem, one that does not show up in customer reviews yet costs far more: inside the organization, no one is truly making sure the brand runs the same way everywhere.
The businesses Sinh Vũ recognizes right away
You can recognize this profile by a few specific signs. The southern branch uses different colors from the northern branch. A partner prints signage from a file they found online, because no one sent them the right one. Salespeople build their own flyers in PowerPoint because the marketing team takes too long. Each person runs a social media page in their own style, because there is no guideline practical enough to follow.
None of these people mean harm. They simply lack the tools to get it right. As a result, the brand customers remember gradually looks different at each new touchpoint.
What does this number tell us? For most businesses, the problem isn't a lack of brand identity. The problem is having no system to run that identity in everyday practice.
Why a good brand still drifts
When a founder or a small team controls everything, the brand stays consistent because a single mind sets the standard. Drift usually begins when the business grows beyond one person: more branches, more distribution partners, more new employees who never received brand training.
At this point, a static brand identity document, a PDF file sitting in a Drive folder that few people know exists, is no longer enough. Who prints what, who posts what, who designs what all comes down to personal judgment. And personal judgment is never consistent.
A brand shows up through four things: product, space, communication, and behavior. Miss one and the chain breaks.
Wally Olins, On Brand
Olins does not mention those four things just to make a list. He says a brand is the result of all four combined, not only the visible part. When a branch serves customers differently, when a partner prints a different color, when an employee introduces the company in different language, the brand is being diluted, even if no one notices right away.
The real cost of having no system
You may not see this cost in your accounting books, but it is happening. Every time a new employee needs a brochure and there is no template, the time spent recreating it from scratch is a cost. Every time a branch prints signage in the wrong color and has to redo it, that is a cost. Every time a partner uses the old logo because no one updated them, that is an identity cost.
These two numbers aren't about large companies. They show up at every scale, including small and mid-sized businesses that are growing. Without a clear system, every asset has to be reviewed from scratch because no one is sure which one is right.
Inconsistency compounds exponentially
For a business with one location, inconsistency is only an annoyance. For a business with three locations, inconsistency starts to create confusion in customers' minds. For a business with ten locations or many partners, inconsistency erodes exactly what customers value.
In How Brands Grow, Byron Sharp lays a clear foundation: a brand's distinctive assets only build up when they appear correctly and repeatedly. A color, a typeface, a way of speaking: each needs time to settle into customers' memory. If every touchpoint looks different, nothing is repeated enough to stick.
This is why expanding without a brand operating system doesn't just cost more money, it also steadily drains the assets you already have.
A brand operating system is not a PDF file
Identity documents are necessary. But static documents do not run themselves. A brand operating system combines three things: rules clear enough that everyone understands and can follow them, tools ready so no one has to recreate things from scratch, and a person or team responsible for keeping that system alive.
In its 2018 study The Business Value of Design, McKinsey found that companies that integrate design into operations, rather than keeping it separate, achieve markedly better financial results. In one example, a furniture company dissolved its centralized design department and embedded design in each operating team. Work moved 10% faster and revenue grew 30%.
Where do you stand in this picture
Not everyone needs to redo their entire brand identity. If the brand is still heading in the right direction and customers value it, the answer is not to tear it down and rebuild. The answer is to systematize: write the rules in language that print partners and new hires can also understand, build a ready-to-use toolkit so anyone who needs it can use it right away, and assign clear ownership so the toolkit stays accurate and available.
Here is a sign you need to sit down with this question: when a new employee joins, do they know where to look to do things right? When a new partner signs a contract, what do they receive to represent your brand properly? If the answer is “they ask around” or “we don't have a clear process yet,” then the operating system is missing, no matter how good the identity documents look.
A brand customers remember is a good starting point. Keeping it intact through each new expansion is the part that needs a system, not just goodwill.
References
Marq / Demand Metric, Brand Consistency Report (2016, 2019). Adobe, State of Creative and Marketing (2022). McKinsey & Company, The Business Value of Design (2018). Wally Olins, On Brand. David Aaker, Building Strong Brands.