In twenty-five years of changing one company, nobody ever handed me a list of what I could not change.
One exception. The physical product had rules, held to three decimal places, older than almost everyone applying them. I watched people spend weeks on a case and get turned down over a decimal.
It held for decades, through a near-collapse. It covered the product and the name. Nothing else.
Plenty else got written. Ask a marketing leader whether she has continuity through her transformation and she points at real things: a brand book, a design system, a tone-of-voice guide. She is not bluffing. But the ones with teeth govern the marks. The rest describe who the company is without naming what it costs.
So it gets answered anyway. Not once, in a room, by people accountable for it. Several hundred times a week, in briefs and pricing calls, by whoever is building that piece that day.
Drift is the sum of those answers. You pay for it in re-acquisition: next year’s budget, spent re-explaining yourself to people who already knew who you were.
The full piece is about the three tests that tell a line from a poster.
Read the full piece here.
