Set the framework, then be willing to loosen it. Most of us already do the first half well. We define our audiences, establish brand guidelines, study the data and put processes in place to help us make better decisions, and for good reason. A framework tells a team why it’s doing something, which is what makes bold choices possible in the first place. The trouble starts when it becomes the thing a team hides behind. Analysis can sharpen an idea or stall it, and a little risk is usually where the creative work comes from.
That idea was a throughline in nearly every session I sat in on at Advertising Week in New York earlier this month. Across conversations about brand building, creativity, research and culture, I kept hearing different versions of it: the strongest brands know what they stand for, but they’re willing to loosen their grip on how that comes to life.
It echoes one of our culture codes at Brainlabs, Freedom in Frameworks. Structure should empower people to do great work, giving them the clarity and confidence to make decisions without prescribing every move.
Here are a few ideas from AWNY that put it into practice, each with a challenge from me to all of us marketers.
Know what to protect, and what to leave open
On a panel about balancing relevance and attention, Target’s Michelle Mesenburg shared how the brand stays consistent while still leaving room to evolve. Target has a clear sense of who it is. Its corporate marketing team protects the brand’s identity and intellectual property, but customers and creators have room to bring their own perspectives to it. For a brand as big as Target, that’s a bold move. The result is a brand people can experience and interpret for themselves, rather than one where every expression is dictated from the center.
Having a strong brand identity doesn’t mean controlling every interaction someone has with it. In fact, knowing exactly what makes your brand recognizable should give you more confidence to let other people build on it.
That extends beyond customers. Linda Boff, who spent two decades helping shape GE’s brand before founding Said Differently, made a compelling case for bringing outside perspectives into the creative process. Even the most talented internal teams benefit from people who see the world differently, whether that’s artists, collaborators or people who simply aren’t immersed in the same thinking every day.
Letting someone else influence something you’ve worked hard to build can be uncomfortable, particularly when you’re accountable for the outcome. But if a framework is strong enough to guide the work, it should also be flexible enough to accommodate ideas you wouldn’t have arrived at yourself.
Challenge: Where are we holding too tight to the reins? Pick one place this month and invite someone from outside the team to push on it, whether that’s a customer, a creator or a collaborator. Then act on what they bring back.
How much evidence is enough?
Holding too tightly to a framework is one risk. Waiting on more data is another. Anthropic and its creative partner Mother spoke about the role of AI, research and human judgment in marketing. Mother’s Amy Willemse described data as a way to validate thinking and guard against groupthink, while Anthropic’s Lia Breunig emphasized that research is an informer rather than the decision maker. Together, those ideas offer a useful reminder of what the relationship between data and creativity should look like.
We need the evidence to challenge our assumptions and make the risks we take more considered. But there’s a point where gathering more information stops making a decision better and starts delaying it. And I think that’s particularly relevant now, when we have access to so much data and so many tools to help us analyze it. There’s always another question we could ask, another scenario we could model or another piece of evidence we could look for. The challenge is recognizing when we know enough to move.
A framework should help us understand the risks we’re taking, rather than convince us we can eliminate them entirely.
Challenge: Where is data holding the brand back instead of moving it forward? Pick one decision that’s been waiting on more analysis, set a deadline, and make the call.
Show up to the party before you throw your own
Rocket Mortgage’s Doug Buser described the brand’s approach to culture in three stages: anticipate, participate, shape. Spot the trend, show up to the party, then throw your own. Showing up is the part I’d underline. Before a brand can credibly influence culture, it needs to understand the people and communities it wants to engage.
Rocket Mortgage started with a simple human insight: only about 25% of people know their neighbors, a number that has dropped roughly 60% over the last 50 years. Pairing that with a deep understanding of who its audience is and what they care about (millennials, pop culture), the brand turned it into a Super Bowl spot with Lady Gaga and the Mister Rogers theme song.
Bringing a Lady Gaga/Mister Rogers collab into a Super Bowl campaign is a bold creative decision, but the thinking behind it wasn’t random. The insight and the audience knowledge were Rocket’s framework, and they’re what turned a big creative swing into a calculated risk.
Challenge: Where is our audience already gathering that we haven’t shown up? Pick one place this month and participate there before you plan anything of your own.
A framework is a springboard, not a safety net
Every example above worked for the same reason: someone had a framework and the nerve to loosen it. The brands that stood out to me weren’t abandoning structure. They were clear about their identity, their audiences and the decisions that mattered, so they knew exactly what they were protecting and could leave the rest open to see what came back. That clarity gave them the confidence to bring other people into the process and make creative choices that carried some risk.
That’s what Freedom in Frameworks means to me: the framework gives us a shared understanding of what we’re trying to achieve, and the freedom is what allows people to find new and sometimes unexpected ways of getting there.
So are the frameworks we’re working within giving us the confidence to explore what’s possible, or simply boxing us in?
