You’ll be rail-ly surprised by who is the UK’s most consistent brand

I’m guilty of having loads of ideas on a night out or mid-run and my long-suffering housemate, Sam Trevethyen is often there to hear me pitch them at him in a mad flurry of dopamine. Most never see the light of day. I’m still hoping the tinned fish shop targeted at ‘East Londoners with too much cash’ happens, but I’m here to tell you how an idea I had a year ago has materialized.

Compound Creativity.

System1, like many others, has been banging on about the benefits of creative consistency for years. Our founder John Kearon shouts “familiarity breeds contentment”. Jon Evans, our CCO has grilled CMOs on his podcast of its benefits. Our CIO, Orlando Wood, even invented the term “Fluent Device”, a brand-owned creative concept or character that takes advantage of mental fluency. We’ve even released research showing ads don’t wear out.

But one of my (many) beefs with the marketing industry is that we all agree on an idea and never challenge it. Creative consistency is one of them.

We all agreed at some point that we need to try to stick to our positioning, creative ideas, agencies, brand assets, etc, for as long as possible. And that consistency across channels was a good thing. Sure, there’s research showing media channels benefit other media channels. And the brilliant James Hurman worked with WARC to show that longer campaigns put across more channels lead to greater effects. So, we all agreed creative consistency makes sense.

But where’s the bulletproof evidence that a brand committing to consistency over many years, in every definition, wins? And what counts as creativity consistency? That was the idea. An all-encompassing brand creative consistency metric that is linked to real-world results.

Effectiveness advancements have allowed a group of us to pull it off, finally. System1 started research with the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), gathering all the ads over five years from 56 brands, their brand data, and business effects from their campaigns.

A brilliant team of System1-ers then spent two months analyzing all these ads, researching how they behave across media channels and how long they stick with their creative agencies, and modeling these features against ad, brand and business effects.

It’s resulted in new, hopefully industry-defining research that we are launching on October 8. You can be the first to see that here.

Now, I won’t spoil the whole research here, our lawyers won’t let me. But what I do want to share is a particular detail that I’ve been losing sleep over. A detail that really explains the entire concept of Compound Creativity.

Our analysis found that Great Western Railway was the most consistent UK brand. Sure, we didn’t analyze every brand. We had to match the group of brands to the datasets we could find so they skew towards brands that use TV and appear in the IPA effectiveness databank. So, they are larger brands. But GWR is such a good example – I’m rather confident we can call it the most consistent brand in the UK. Here’s why.

Creative Foundation – lighting the creative spark that will return compound growth

Out of all the consistency codes we explored and those we found led to effectiveness, we grouped them into three sections. The first is the ‘Creative Foundations’: consistent proper positioning, a creative idea and choosing a creative team to execute it.

In 2017, GWR worked with Adam&EveDDB to achieve brilliant positioning, brought to life through an even more brilliant creative idea. It followed the 3Cs framework to leverage customer insight.

• Company: GWR had updated its trains and network and raised its service level to something it was proud of.

• Competitors: Planes and cars were now offering cheaper and quicker alternatives to travel.

• Customer: But the experience a GWR train could offer makes the choice obvious. Something Rory Sutherland talks about a lot.

Adam&EveDDB worked to bring this positioning to life through The Famous Five, a bunch of characters we love that now could be owned by the brand to show this through the spirit of adventure. It’s excellent work, so much so that it has stuck with the agency for over seven years.

A culture of consistency

It then committed to it. Its average ‘ad life’ (measured here as how many days a campaign is on TV) is almost a year. Considering the average for some brands in 15 days, you start to see where I’m going with this.

GWR has executed this creative idea across all its channels ever since and is also “committed to the show,” adopting a right-brained entertaining advertising strategy and consistently investing in it. As you can see from its Instagram feed, I’m not saying they only did this campaign. We understand that brands need to drop some sales activation in there. But these short-term campaigns have ruthlessly landed the idea that GWR is great for an adventure as well. And it kept this brand idea alive for over seven years.

Consistent execution

What I find most impressive here is their consistent execution. It held the wheel and did not updated the brand look and feel for seven years. It held a consistent tone of voice, and kept the same brand slogan (an entire column in itself, a slogan being the customer-facing expression of the idea). The only aspect it didn’t ‘ace’ was trying to own a soundtrack in this time.

You could argue that smashing these guidelines would lead to stale work. But GWR proves again that this isn’t true. When you’ve nailed that positioning and creative spark, the challenge is then using it to tell entertaining stories. As well as making it culturally relevant as time passes and land interesting new messaging (like its subtle lower CO2 message). It has kept creative and essentially not become dull, and we know there’s a big Cost of Dull.

My favourite geeky fact is GWR has of course used cutdowns to make the most of campaigns and eek out media efficiencies, but in 2023 it released an ad made up of all the other ads since 2017. Wrapped up in a clever blockbuster idea.

Finally, The Famous Five are arguably celebrities. We call these ‘hired devices’. Brands often chop and change them. While it used Nick Grimshaw for some digital activation on its feeds, it never ditched The Famous Five. Constantly building associations and linking them to the brand. Making the most of them. It even turned these characters and the concept of a GWR train triggering a mad adventure into a brand-owned ‘Fluent Device’. Brand assets that can delivering drama for the brand, bringing the creative idea to life across media and time in a distinctive way.

All this got GWR to the top of our list. It’s leveraged mental fluency for the brand, making it easier to digest their messaging even in lower attention channels. It’s grown distinctiveness and allowed it to focus on the long game. And in the full research, we found it led to over-and-above advertising effectiveness, brand strength and business effects. GWR got the strategy right and used consistency to build a distinctive brand that is meaningfully different.

As I’m pulling together slides for this research, I felt that was worth sharing. A marketer quietly doing their job, nailing the foundations and choosing consistency. And it’s compounded their creativity over time.

If I ever meet anyone from the GWR marketing team or its agency partner, I’m going to feel like I’m meeting a celebrity. It feels special and makes a year’s work worth it.

Catch us in person in London on October 9, or online here. Or bother me on LinkedIn for the full research when it’s launched.