The Myth of Consistency

Your audience doesn’t want absolute consistency. They want coherence with enough variation to remain interesting and authentic.

MUJI’s flagship stores worldwide offer an enlightening case study in brand storytelling. What strikes visitors isn’t just their famous minimalist aesthetic but something far more subtle and powerful—the elegant tension at the heart of their brand identity.

MUJI, whose name literally means “no-brand quality goods,” has built a global empire on a fascinating series of apparent contradictions. Their products simultaneously feel luxurious yet affordable, industrial yet warm, anonymous yet distinctive. There’s a deliberate tension between their minimalist approach and the rich philosophy behind their products.

This tension isn’t accidental. As Kenya Hara, MUJI’s art director since 2001, explained in his book “Designing Design,” their approach isn’t about pursuing rigid consistency but rather about creating “emptiness” that allows for various interpretations while maintaining their core philosophy. “Emptiness,” Hara writes, “is the possibility of being filled with imagination.”

This insight crystallises what we observe in the most magnetically positioned companies: they understand the profound difference between coherence and consistency. And this distinction might be the most underappreciated asset in your storytelling arsenal.

The Consistency Paradox

The human brain is designed to filter out the predictable and notice the unexpected. Perfect consistency literally makes you neurologically invisible.

We’ve been fed a dangerous myth in business: that perfect uniformity in messaging, tone, and storytelling is the golden standard of brand discipline. That rigid consistency across all touchpoints demonstrates professionalism and builds recognition.

There’s just one problem: cognitive science tells us the exact opposite is true.

Our brains evolved to filter out the predictable and notice the novel. Studies in neuroscience show that our attention spikes when we encounter a pattern break or something that diverges from expectations. Perfect consistency doesn’t create attention—it actively destroys it.

This isn’t just theoretical. Look at Mailchimp, who deliberately embraced what they call “serious whimsy” as a core tension in their storytelling. They combine genuine technical gravitas with unexpected playfulness—from their chimp mascot to error messages that might contain a joke one day and straightforward information the next.

What appears on the surface as inconsistency is actually a sophisticated strategy to remain neurologically visible. Their framework allows intentional variation within meaningful boundaries. The result? Mailchimp stands out vividly in a category where most competitors’ messaging blends into a sea of sameness.

Companies obsessed with messaging consistency often create the corporate equivalent of wallpaper—present everywhere but noticed nowhere.

Variations vs. Contradictions

The critical distinction here isn’t whether your stories should vary—it’s knowing which elements should remain consistent and which should deliberately change.

Not all inconsistency is created equal. There’s a profound difference between harmful contradictions that undermine your positioning and productive variations that strengthen it.

Consider BrewDog, the Scottish brewery that began as the archetypal rebel, explicitly positioning against “industrial beer.” As they’ve grown—now with breweries across continents—their storytelling has necessarily evolved. Today, they balance their rebellious origins with messages about sustainability, quality, and even corporate responsibility.

Measured against a rigid consistency standard, this would be failure. But BrewDog understands that evolving expression around a consistent essence creates more authentic, engaging positioning. Their willingness to adaptively tell their story—sometimes emphasising sustainability, sometimes community, sometimes irreverence—creates a richer, more credible narrative tapestry.

By contrast, when WeWork’s expressions directly contradicted their essence—preaching community while practicing ruthless expansion—the dissonance wasn’t interestingly provocative; it was existentially damaging.

The quest for absolute consistency is often a fear response masquerading as brand discipline.

Three Tension-Creation Principles

So how do you create productive tensions in your storytelling without descending into chaotic inconsistency? Three principles can guide you.

1. Framework, Not Formula

Rather than rigid templates and scripts, develop flexible frameworks that establish boundaries within which authentic variation can flourish.

Notion, the all-in-one productivity tool, demonstrates this brilliantly. They speak to designers, engineers, and business users with substantially different language, examples, and emphasis—without ever betraying their core position as the connected workspace. Their product storytelling varies dramatically across audiences: emphasising flexibility for creative teams, integration capabilities for engineers, and organisational clarity for business users.

They maintain coherence not through identical messages but through consistent underlying values and benefits, adapted to each audience’s context.

2. Strategic Juxtaposition

Deliberately combine seemingly contradictory elements to create memorably distinctive positioning.

Virgin Atlantic built their entire brand on precisely this principle. Richard Branson understood that the deliberate tension between luxury and irreverence would create something more distinctive than either attribute alone. Their in-flight safety videos might be humorous one season and artistic the next. Their lounges combine high-end amenities with unexpectedly casual touches.

This isn’t accidental inconsistency—it’s strategic tension that makes their position impossible to confuse with British Airways’ more uniformly formal approach.

3. Evolution Over Repetition

Approach storytelling as progressive development rather than exact reproduction, building connection through thematic consistency rather than identical execution.

Patagonia’s famous “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign epitomises this principle. What seemed like a contradiction—a retailer telling consumers not to buy their products—was actually a perfect expression of their environmental essence.

By encouraging customers to consider the environmental impact before purchasing, they strengthened rather than undermined their positioning. This apparent contradiction created far more engagement and authenticity than any amount of consistent sustainable messaging could have achieved.

The evolution of their storytelling—from early environmental activism to today’s climate emergency focus—shows how productive tension within a consistent essence creates magnetic positioning.

The Adaptive Advantage

This flexible approach to storytelling doesn’t just create more interesting communications—it builds resilience into your positioning as markets and channels evolve.

Consider Noma, René Redzepi’s revolutionary Nordic restaurant. Their storytelling combines seemingly contradictory elements: deeply historical yet wildly innovative, luxuriously premium yet elementally rustic, technically complex yet conceptually simple.

This deliberate embracing of productive tensions has allowed Noma to continuously reinvent itself—changing locations, concepts, and even business models—while maintaining a coherent identity that’s instantly recognisable. Their story feels authentic precisely because it allows for evolution without losing its essential character.

Contrast this with traditional luxury fashion brands whose formulaic storytelling has created a sea of indistinguishable campaigns that consumers increasingly ignore. Or enterprise software companies whose relentlessly standardised communications actively reduce information retention and engagement.

The Healthy Variation Audit

How do you assess whether your current storytelling embraces productive tension or suffers from rigid consistency? The Healthy Variation Audit provides a simple framework:

1. Essence Consistency: Identify the core elements of your positioning that must remain consistent. These typically include fundamental purpose, values, and key differentiators.

2. Expression Variation: Evaluate how your current communications allow for context-appropriate variation. Do you permit different tones, formats, and emphases depending on situation?

3. Audience Adaptation: Assess how your storytelling adapts to different audience needs while maintaining coherent positioning. Are you creating relevance without sacrificing identity?

4. Channel Optimisation: Measure how effectively you optimise for different channels’ unique characteristics without fragmenting your overall narrative.

Companies scoring high on essence consistency but low on productive variation typically create forgettable, wallpaper-like positioning that fails to engage. Those with the opposite problem risk confusing audiences with disconnected messaging.

The sweet spot lies in maintaining unwavering essence consistency while embracing deliberate, strategic variation in expressions.

Beyond Perfect Consistency

The narrative approach that truly builds gravitational pull isn’t mechanically consistent—it’s authentically coherent.

This doesn’t mean abandoning guidelines or embracing chaos. Rather, it means creating frameworks that establish clear boundaries while allowing for human variation, contextual adaptation, and strategic tension.

Perfect consistency isn’t just boring—it’s unnatural. Even nature, the ultimate designer, uses variations on themes rather than exact repetition. The human face is roughly symmetrical, but perfect facial symmetry appears unsettlingly artificial. Similarly, your storytelling needs healthy variation to appear authentically human.

As we move into our final section on Learning, remember that your ability to balance consistency with evolution—maintaining essence integrity while allowing expression flexibility—will determine whether your positioning remains relevant in a changing market.

The most magnetic companies don’t pursue perfect consistency. They pursue perfect coherence—a far more sophisticated, effective, and sustainable approach to becoming the obvious choice.