Dare To Break The Rules

The winning brands are not always the ones that follow the category. They are the ones willing to redefine it.

There is a moment in every brand manager’s life when someone says: “But that’s not how our category communicates.” It sounds like caution. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it is the most dangerous sentence in the room, because every category eventually develops a rulebook. What the advertising should look like. What the tone should be. What the consumer supposedly expects. What the competition is doing. What research says will work. And slowly, without anyone deciding it, the category starts advertising to itself. Then someone breaks the pattern.

Think of Fevicol. Glue is not exactly the product category that naturally lends itself to entertainment. Its functional proposition is simple: it sticks things together. Fevicol began as a product primarily aimed at carpenters and woodworkers. Its early communication focused on functional strength. But by the 1980s, Pidilite’s advertising approach shifted towards real-life situations and humour. The brand began turning the simple idea of a strong bond into a creative language of its own.

And something remarkable happened. People began remembering the advertising. Then they began remembering the brand, and the brand began becoming part of popular culture. That is a very different achievement from making a good advertisement.

The courage to ask: Why not?

The easiest way to create a campaign is to look sideways. What is the competitor doing? What is the category doing? What worked last year? What does the research say? What will the consumer expect? The safer the category, the easier it is to produce something familiar, because familiar feels safe, and safe gets approved. However, safe rarely changes the game.

The brands that become memorable often begin somewhere else. They ask, why does it have to be done this way? That doesn’t mean throwing strategy out of the window. It means questioning the convention before accepting it. Fevicol could have spent decades talking about adhesive strength in technical language. Instead, it found a way to make strength entertaining. The product truth didn’t change, but the way people experienced that truth did. That is what matters.

The best unconventional brands don’t abandon their brand truth. They find an unconventional way to express it.

Breaking a rule is not the same as being reckless

There is a tendency to romanticise brands that “took a risk” after the risk has worked. Nobody remembers the hundred unconventional ideas that failed. They remember the one that changed the category. So the lesson cannot simply be, take bigger risks. That is not a strategy. The better question is: Which convention is worth breaking?

There is a difference between breaking a rule because you have found a better way of solving a problem and breaking one simply because you want attention. The first is strategy. The second is theatre. A brand should know what it will never compromise on: its product truth, promise, values, and its relationship with the consumer. Those are not rules to break, but the way the brand communicates those truths may be where the opportunity lies. Break the convention, but don’t break the brand.

What Fevicol understood

The real genius of Fevicol is not that it made funny advertisements. Lots of brands make funny advertisements. The real achievement is that it created a recognisable creative territory and stayed with it. The situations changed, the cultural references changed, media changed, the audience changed, and humour evolved. What really mattered was that the underlying idea of the brand remained recognisable. Consistency is always important.

Research from the IPA and System1, examining more than 4,000 advertisements from 56 brands across 44 categories over five years, found that creative consistency was associated with stronger creative quality, brand strength, and brand and business effects. That gives us an important correction to the usual “think different” advice: difference gets you noticed. Consistency makes the difference ownable.

One unconventional campaign may create a spike. However, a distinctive idea, consistently developed over time, can become a brand asset.

The brands that change the rules

Look beyond Fevicol, and the pattern becomes more interesting. Amul turned topical commentary into a distinctive, recurring brand voice. Dove challenged the conventional representation of beauty through Real Beauty, a platform that has continued to evolve for two decades. Nike turned a sports brand into a much larger conversation about human potential. Apple repeatedly challenged the convention that technology communication had to be dominated by specifications.

Different categories, audiences, and creative devices, but there is a common thread. They did not simply ask how to advertise their product. They found a different way to make the brand matter. That is the distinction between a campaign and a brand idea.

The real risk is becoming predictable

Perhaps the biggest threat facing a mature brand isn’t competition. It is predictability. The brand knows what worked. The agency knows what worked. The consumer knows what worked. So everyone repeats it, until what once felt distinctive becomes invisible.

This is how categories become crowded, not because everybody is doing something completely different, but because everybody is doing roughly the same thing. And the irony is that research, benchmarking, and competitive analysis tools designed to reduce uncertainty can sometimes make brands more similar to one another.

If everyone is looking at the same benchmarks, everyone eventually starts producing the same answers. The opportunity is not to ignore the evidence. It is to ask a question before accepting it: what are we seeing that everyone else is seeing? And then, what are we seeing that nobody is questioning? That is where unconventional thinking begins.

Also read: Be A Responsive Brand

Dare, but know what you’re daring to do

The boardroom doesn’t need more people saying, “Let’s be bold.” It needs people asking better questions. Which category convention are we following? Why? Is it genuinely strategic or simply familiar? What would happen if we challenged it? Would that make us more distinctive or merely more noticeable? Can we own the territory if it works? And, most importantly, is the unconventional idea still connected to a truth about our brand?

Because the objective isn’t to shock the market. It is to change the way the market thinks about you. That requires courage, but it also requires discipline. The brands that last are rarely unconventional for the sake of being unconventional. They are unconventional with purpose.

The Brand Custodian’s job

Perhaps this is one of the most important responsibilities of a brand custodian: not to protect every rule, nor to break every rule, but to know which rules deserve to survive. Every category has conventions. Some were created for a reason, some became habits, some became invisible, and some are simply waiting for someone to challenge them.

There will always be a brand willing to take that chance, a brand willing to hear, “Nobody does it this way.” That is where category-changing ideas begin, because the biggest brands don’t just break the rules.

Eventually, they write new ones.