My karaoke bar in Southeast Portland has been closed since March, so last month a few of us tried it over Zoom. I sang the song I always sing. It was not the same song.
Same lyrics. Same key, roughly. Same commitment, which is the only thing I have ever brought to karaoke. But the sticky floor was gone, and the host who calls everyone baby was gone, and a two second audio lag turned a duet into a hostage negotiation.
The song survived the channel change. Everything around the song did not.
I have spent most of this year watching brands make the same discovery, usually in public, usually in a quarter when they could not afford it.
Channel consistency is not saying the same thing everywhere. It is being recognizably the same brand in rooms with completely different acoustics.
Brands fail this in two directions. The first is lockstep. One asset, one caption, pushed identically into email, Instagram, a shelf talker, and a support macro, on the theory that sameness equals discipline. It does not. It equals a person shouting bar lyrics into a conference call.
The second is drift, which is more common and much harder to see from inside. Social is run by someone funny. Email is run by someone cautious. The packaging copy was approved in 2018. Support writes like a legal department because once, two years ago, somebody got yelled at. Four channels, four personalities, one logo holding them together by force.
Oatly is the counterexample everyone cites, and they have earned it. The carton, the billboard, the tweet, and the annoying little paragraph on the side of the box all sound like the same slightly unhinged person. Nothing is copied between them. Everything is recognizable.
What travels is short. What you believe. How you sound when you are relaxed. What you refuse to say. Three things, and they should fit on one page a contractor can read in four minutes.
Everything else is local. Length, format, joke density, how fast you get to the point. A brand that cannot flex per channel is not consistent, it is rigid, and rigid reads as a company that has never met its own customers.
A brand that cannot flex per channel is not consistent, it is rigid, and rigid reads as a company that has never met its own customers.
Truffles has this figured out. Kitchen, hallway, the middle of a client call, four in the morning: same brand, same demand, adjusted for the room. Barnaby is wildly inconsistent across every channel and gets fed anyway, which I try not to think about too hard.