Following the rules of business

Creativity & Communication

Control Tower: ‘Maybe we ought to turn on the search lights now?’

Kramer: ‘No… that’s just what they’ll be expecting us to do.’

Most of business is run according to conventional logic. Finance, operations and logistics all operate through established best practice - there are rules, and you need to have a good reason to break them. But there are other parts of a business that don’t work this way, and marketing is one of them: in truth, it’s a part of business where there’s never best practice, because if you follow a standard orthodoxy your brand will become more like your competitors’, thus eroding your advantage. The above joke from Airplane! (1980) appears when the air traffic controller is trying to follow protocol, by turning on the lights on the runway for the approaching plane; Kramer, a war veteran, is frightened of being too predictable. It underlines a serious point.

Payroll should follow rules. So should aircraft maintenance. Marketing that follows rules merely because competitors do is just organised camouflage.

Visit twelve hotel websites and enjoy the parade of pale rooms, white linen and promises to “escape”. Every software company helps you “work smarter” inside the same purple gradient. Drinks brands borrow the last challenger’s bottle, origin myth and typographic squint, then wonder why nobody remembers them at the shelf.

Category conventions are useful road signs. They tell buyers what the thing is, roughly who it serves and how to buy it. Tear down every sign and customers get lost. Keep every sign and they drive past because the whole street looks identical.

Write the category rules down. Beside each, add two questions: who benefits, and what genuinely breaks if this disappears? Keep the rules that orient people. Attack the ones maintained by habit—tone, packaging, guarantee, unit, route to market.

A budget airline probably needs visible departure times. It does not need the vocal personality of every other airline. A bank must protect money. It can stop communicating like a Victorian undertaker. Random weirdness is a designer’s private day out. Useful difference expresses the position and helps the right customer choose. Operations earns trust through the right kinds of consistency. Brands earn attention through the right kind of surprise. Confuse the two and you get a reliable company nobody can see.