Five assets and one page of rules, so a small skincare brand looks like itself every time.

Case study: DEW

The brief

DEW is a small skincare brand with one product, Serum 01. Brands like this rarely fail because their posts are bad. They fail because each post is made fresh, by whoever has time that week, in whatever style seems right that day. Every single post can be decent and the brand still never adds up to anything, because nobody scrolling past ever sees the same thing twice.

That was the brief I set myself for this collaboration proposal: make five assets that look like they came from one brand, and leave behind a system that keeps it that way after I’m gone.

One page of rules

The whole campaign runs on four decisions. The palette is three colours: sage green, warm cream and charcoal. There’s one type logic, one photographic treatment and one set of rules for how the brand talks. All of it fits on a single page, the mini guideline that came with the five assets ([list the five: Instagram post, carousel, Story, flyer, …]).

The page is the real deliverable. The assets just prove it works. A small brand will never open a forty-page brand book, but it will pin one page above the desk. If a rule doesn’t fit on that page, it probably won’t get followed.

The assets were built in Canva, which is also where a small team is most likely to keep making the next ones.

Why sameness sells

Consistency sounds like a designer’s preference. The research says it’s closer to how memory works.

In the 1960s the psychologist Robert Zajonc showed that people come to like things simply because they’ve seen them before, with no message or reward attached. He called it the mere exposure effect, and it has held up across faces, words, shapes and sounds. Later work by Rolf Reber, Norbert Schwarz and Piotr Winkielman explains part of the reason: familiar things are easier for the brain to process, and that ease is itself felt as something pleasant. So we tend to like what feels effortless to see.

The marketing scientist Jenni Romaniuk, at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, applies the same logic to brands. The colours, shapes and styles a brand repeats become what she calls distinctive assets, cues people use to recognise the brand before they read the name. Her point is that the change marketers love is exactly what weakens those cues, and that consistency matters most while a brand is still building them.

A small brand is always still building them. It gets very few chances to be seen, and every post that looks like a different brand spends one of those chances on nothing. Three colours, used every time, are how DEW gets credit for every post instead of starting from zero with each one.

What it shows

DEW started as a collaboration proposal rather than a paid commission. It’s systems thinking at the smallest possible scale: a campaign designed so that the client can keep it consistent without me. The same logic applies to a brand with fifty people making content. There are just more people who need the page.

Sources: Zajonc and the mere exposure effect · Reber, Schwarz and Winkielman on processing fluency · Jenni Romaniuk on distinctive assets

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