Earn the right to be recognised

Today, more content is generated by AI than by people, but it's mostly average… big surprise. People are developing sharp instincts for what's original, actively scrolling and searching for content that feels real, and moving away from spaces that aren’t overrun with AI; booktok, goodreads, newsletters, podcasts, YouTube. 61% of marketers agree that having a clear brand point of view is now more important than ever. Distinctiveness has become the most valuable asset a brand can have, and it's what separates the brands people feel something about from the brands that simply exist in their peripheral vision.

You know where

In February 2026, McDonald's New Zealand ran an outdoor campaign that stopped the industry in its tracks, not because it was loud or extravagant, but because it was almost nothing at all.

No Golden Arches, no logo, no product photography, no tagline. Just the names of iconic menu items, cheeseburger, fries, apple pie, in large white typography on a red background, with a single small line in the corner, 'You know where'.

That's it. That's the entire ad.

Created by McCann New Zealand, 'You know where' is one of the most elegant demonstrations of earned brand distinctiveness I've seen this year. As McCann's chief creative officer Gary Steele put it "Macca's is an iconic global brand, and their products are so iconic they need no explanation, so we let the words do the talking." Leigh Benvie, head of brand and media at McDonald's New Zealand, agreed "There aren't many brands that could pull that off and confidently trust people to instantly connect the dots. That's the kind of brand power Macca's has."

The reason it works, the reason it can work, is not a clever campaign idea. It's decades of consistent, patient brand-building that has embedded the brand into cultural memory. The campaign didn't create recognition. It revealed recognition that was already there, from showing up the same way, in the same colours, with the same products, in the same moments of people's lives, for over eighty years.

The ad is the proof. The brand is the work that made the proof possible.

So I ask a direct question to every other brand... what have you built that is so distinctively, recognisably yours that you could strip everything back and still be known?

Recognition

McDonald's didn't arrive at 'You know where' by posting constantly or rigorously following their content calendar. They got there because the brand's identity, its colours, its products, its place in people's routines, has been applied with near-obsessive consistency across every touchpoint for decades.

This is what Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow calls mental availability: the ability to be thought of instinctively in buying situations, without prompting. Research aligned with Sharp's work suggests mental availability accounts for roughly 60–70% of the variance in market share between brands of similar size. Binet and Field's The Long and the Short of It agrees, stating that brands that sacrifice long-term brand building for short-term tactics systematically underperform over time. (I delve further into this in my piece on the psychology of growth)

Oatly is a more recent example of the same principle. They didn't have eighty years under their belt. What they had was a complete knowing of who they were and what they stood for from the moment they rebranded in 2014/15; provocative, self-aware, funny in a way that felt entirely unlike anything else in the food and drink aisle. Their packaging reads like a stream of consciousness. Their outdoor advertising asks uncomfortable questions about the dairy industry. Their social media sounds like a person, not a brand. Whether you encounter Oatly on a supermarket shelf, a billboard, or an Instagram post, the imprint is immediate and unmistakable. You don't need the logo to know who's talking.

Innocent Drinks has operated the same way since 1999. Their voice is playful, warm and just slightly absurd, and it travels from their bottle caps and knitted hats to their annual reports to their social media. The feel of Innocent is consistent enough that their tone of voice functions as a visual identity in its own right. You could read a line of their copy with the branding removed and still recognise it immediately.

What connects McDonald's, Oatly, and Innocent is not sector, or budget, or scale. It's that each of them made a decision, consciously or culturally, about who they were, and then never stopped being that thing.

Even a disco ball can't always sparkle

Spotify handed us the perfect example just this month.

They temporarily replaced their iconic green app icon with a shimmering disco ball to mark their 20th anniversary, and everyone lost their shit. The backlash was instant. Users called it hideous, pixelated, and said it looked like a stalled download. Spotify responded with exactly the kind of voice a brand should have in a crisis “Alright, we know glitter is not for everyone. Our temp glow up ends soon. Your regularly scheduled Spotify icon returns next week.”

Self-aware. Calm. Completely on brand. No damage-control language. No lengthy statement. Just the brand, sounding like itself.

But the real story isn't the somewhat questionable logo. It's what the reaction proved. Spotify's green circle has become so embedded in people's daily routines, on home screens, opened dozens of times a day, that even a temporary logo felt like a violation of something personal. People weren't angry about a design change. They were protective of something that had become theirs.

That's not brand recognition. That's brand ownership. And it doesn't come from copying content from AI. It accrues over twenty years of showing up consistently, sounding like yourself.

Everything sounds the same

Most brands know what they want to sound like, they just don't sound like it, consistently, across every touchpoint, over a long enough period of time for it to turn into anything meaningful.

A 2026 brand voice study found that 60% of marketing materials fail to conform to brand guidelines, and 81% of companies struggle with off-brand content despite having documented guidelines.

AI has made this worse. The logos look right, but the words sound generic. Visual brand consistency holds up while verbal and tone consistency collapses.

The brands that are building real distinctiveness right now are not necessarily the ones producing the most content. They're the ones where every single piece of output, from a billboard to a social comment to an email footer, feels like it came from the same mind.

What this means for brands

The 'You know where' test is a useful place to start. Start with your strategy. Strip your brand back to its most minimal form and ask whether people would still find you. If the answer is anything other than a resounding 'yes', the question to work backwards from is - what is the one thing only you would say, in the one way only you would say it?

This isn't about writing a new set of brand guidelines or creating another tone of voice document, though those things can help. It's about making a clear decision about what your brand stands for, one repeatable way of seeing the world, and then applying it with consistency and patience across your entire marketing mix.

Consistency, over time, becomes a signal. In noisy feeds, the brand that feels the same every single time you encounter it starts to feel like something you can rely on.

McDonald's New Zealand didn't need to say their name. They'd already said it a million times in a million places over eighty years.

That's the work. It's slower than a campaign. It's harder to measure than reach, and it's the only thing that actually compounds.

Rachel Lyndon-Jones is Co-Founder and CMO of Ouma, a strategic growth partner helping ambitious UK businesses build connected growth systems. Rachel's work sits at the intersection of marketing psychology, brand trust and commercial strategy, helping businesses understand not just what to do, but why it works.