The most expensive sentence in marketing
“This is just how we do things.” I hear it in almost every audit, said with pride, and it is usually the moment I know where the problem lives. Somewhere years ago, a campaign worked. The company, sensibly, did it again. Then again. At some point the repetition stopped being a decision and became furniture: the annual promotion nobody questions, the newsletter with the same subject line structure, the trade fair stand with the same banner. Nobody is measuring whether it still earns anything. It has become identity, and questioning it feels like questioning the company.
Here’s the uncomfortable distinction: consistency is strategic repetition of what works. What most established companies practise is ritual: repetition of what once worked, defended by habit.
Why good teams fall into the ritual trap
Not because they’re lazy. Because they’re busy, and because inside a company, sameness genuinely reads as stability. When you see the same campaign for the fourth year, you feel order. Your buyer, seeing it in a feed between two hungrier competitors, feels nothing at all. The repetition that comforts you is invisible to them.
There’s also a structural reason: changing course needs someone senior enough to own the risk. A junior marketer who inherits “the way we do things” has every incentive to keep shipping it. If it underperforms, the ritual is to blame. If they change it and it underperforms, they are. So the safest personal move is repetition, and the company pays for that safety in slow decline.
The test: could you defend it from scratch?
Take any recurring piece of your marketing and ask one question: if this didn’t exist, would we invent it today? Not “is it doing badly enough to kill”, which is where most reviews set the bar, but “would we choose this now, knowing what we know”. The gap between those two questions is where budgets quietly die.
Run the test honestly and every activity lands in one of three piles:
- True consistency: you’d invent it today, and the numbers back it. Keep it, protect it, and stop fiddling with it.
- Ritual: you wouldn’t invent it, but it feels like “us”. This is the dangerous pile, because it’s defended emotionally and audited never.
- Noise: nobody remembers why it exists. Easiest to kill, least resistance, smallest savings. Most reviews stop here and declare victory.
What you should actually keep the same
None of this is an argument for novelty. Constant reinvention is the startup disease, and it’s just as expensive as ritual: a new logo every two years, a new tone every hire, a brand that never accumulates meaning. The things worth keeping rigidly consistent are the deep ones: what you stand for, who you serve, the promise you make, the way you sound when you make it. Position and voice compound over years. The surface, the campaigns, the formats, the channels, should be reviewed like an investment portfolio: yearly, coldly, with exits.
Ironically, companies tend to get this exactly backwards. They redesign the logo every few years, which is the layer that should barely move, while running the same lead campaign for a decade, which is the layer that should be ruthlessly re-earned every year.
How to break a ritual without breaking the brand
Start with evidence, not opinion. A diagnosis of what each recurring activity actually produces turns “this is how we do things” into a conversation about numbers, which is a conversation ritual can lose. That’s the audit’s job. Then rebuild from position outwards: once you can say in one sentence why you specifically should win, it becomes obvious which rituals serve that sentence and which just have seniority.
And when you find the true consistency, the thing that still works after honest examination: double down on it in public. The goal was never change for its own sake. The goal is a company where everything that repeats has earned the right to.