For Heritage Brands, Commitment is the New Creativity

Every big brand I speak to faces the same tension. They need to stay alive in culture without throwing away decades of meaning, memory and expectation.

You can’t rip up your story every time a trend shifts. The answer isn’t another campaign; it’s a creative platform that honours what people already believe about you and evolves with the world outside. That’s a big commitment - but the alternative is fragmentation. Endless campaigns that do not add up to anything.

The best work for big brands starts with a simple, flexible platform that can hold for years, not quarters. It stays true to the brand while adapting to new contexts, new expectations and new creative behaviours. Simplicity is the only way a platform can survive society’s constant shape-shifting. Flexibility lets you evolve without breaking the idea.

Take Dove: Real Beauty endures because the central truth never changes, even as the world does. The brand keeps finding new expressions without diluting the platform. It stays recognisable while constantly moving. That balance is what most brands underestimate. They think relevance means reinvention. It doesn’t. It means evolution.

Learning beats reinvention

What matters next is how the platform learns. Big brands now operate across dozens of channels, formats and audiences at once. That should be a creative advantage. Every asset you put out is a sensor. Every interaction is a clue. Most marketers overlook these creative breadcrumbs. Follow them and the platform gets smarter; ignore them and you rebuild blindly.

This is the unglamorous but essential part of modern creativity. It’s not about squeezing art into an algorithm; it’s about treating the entire ecosystem as a feedback loop that upgrades the work. A strong platform can absorb that learning without losing its soul. The danger is reacting to every spike of engagement as if it’s a new direction. That’s where creative discipline matters.

Data shows the response. Creativity decides the meaning. You need to know which signals strengthen the platform and which flatten it. When you get that balance right, each new asset doesn’t just add to the platform; it elevates it.

Our modelling of the risk of losing cultural relevance with Gen Z showed Samsung the need to think long-term. That insight led to years of work in youth culture and communities. The skatepark project, the creator partnerships, the flip phone resurgence - none of these moments lived in isolation. Each one fed back into the system, making the platform richer. That’s how big brands stay alive in culture. Not by chasing every trend, but by letting each chapter teach them something.

It’s the same creative truth we live by at Iris – brands that participate meaningfully in culture endure; those that don’t, perish. Participation isn’t a campaign choice; it’s a commitment. And when that participation connects across every channel, it compounds.

This is what connected creativity really means: one idea expressed in different ways across paid, earned and owned, staying recognisable while shifting shape. Kantar’s latest analysis shows cross-channel synergy now drives close to half of total brand impact, roughly double what it did a decade ago. The more consistent your core idea is across platforms, the more powerful the compounding effect becomes.

Campaigns spike and vanish. Platforms compound. They create room for brand storytelling and performance to sit together without feeling like separate worlds. They let marketers measure short-term response without sacrificing long-term meaning. And they give creative teams the space to build something that gets stronger with time.

The future belongs to the brands that commit - not to slogans, but to creative platforms. Not to momentary relevance, but to systems that evolve with culture and learn from every asset put into the world. It’s not as flashy as scrapping everything every 18 months, but it’s the only way to build creativity that stands up to the pace of culture.

Big brands don’t need to shout. They need platforms that are simple, flexible and built to learn. Because in the end, real creativity isn’t about change - it’s about commitment.