Why the brand experience still feels fragmented — Graphics Design

The creative industry has become increasingly multidisciplinary. Brand studios now offer multimedia – production companies build digital experiences, digital agencies create physical installations, and technology businesses employ designers, writers, and filmmakers.

On paper, this should make it easier for brands to create coherent experiences. In practice, it often does not.

A brand identity may be developed by one team, a campaign film produced by another and the website commissioned separately. Social content follows its own schedule. A conversational interface, digital platform or physical experience may be introduced later by a specialist supplier with little involvement in the original thinking. Each individual output may be well designed. It may use the correct colours, typefaces, tone of voice and visual assets, yet the overall experience can still feel fragmented.

The problem is that consistency is not the same as continuity.

Brand guidelines can align appearance, but not experience

Traditional brand systems are effective at defining how an organisation should look and sound. They establish visual identity, typography, colour, language and rules of application. What they do not always explain is how an audience should move between a film, website, character, digital tool, conversation or physical environment.

A campaign film might create emotion, only for the website to reduce the same proposition to a conventional product page. A character introduced through advertising may disappear from the customer experience entirely. A digital concierge might answer questions accurately but still feel detached from the brand world surrounding it.

The assets are consistent, but the experience is not connected.

Clients also frequently arrive asking for a specific output: a film, website, interactive experience or conversational agent. The more important question is usually what the audience needs to understand, feel or do, and whether the requested output is actually the right place to begin.

That question is easily missed when each team is briefed to optimise its own part of the project. The film team wants to create the strongest film, the web team wants to build the most effective website and the technology supplier wants to deliver the required functionality. None of those ambitions is wrong. The difficulty is that the relationship between them is rarely designed with the same care as the individual pieces.

A studio or agency can employ many disciplines and still work in silos.

The word multidisciplinary often describes the range of services available, but says little about the system connecting them. A connected process should begin before anyone decides that the answer is a film, application, chatbot, installation or campaign. It should begin with the audience.

What do people need to understand? What should they feel? What questions are they likely to have? Where might they enter the experience? What could stop them from continuing? What should they be able to explore, ask, compare or do next?

Only once those questions are understood should the role of each medium be defined.

Film may be the best way to establish emotion and context. An interactive website may allow people to investigate detail. A character may provide continuity across different encounters. A conversational system may answer individual questions. A physical environment may make the idea tangible. Each medium should contribute something distinct. It should not simply repeat the same campaign message in another format.

Lego shows what connected thinking can achieve

Lego provides a useful example of this principle operating at scale.

The central idea is not confined to the physical product. Lego is built around creativity, construction, play and imagination, and that logic continues across films, games, publishing, digital experiences, retail environments and theme parks. These are not simply identical messages distributed through different channels. Each format allows the audience to participate in the wider world differently.

The products allow people to build. Films introduce characters and stories. Games allow exploration and participation. Retail environments make the brand physical and social. Legoland turns the same imaginative principles into a place people can enter.

The result remains recognisably Lego because the different experiences share more than a logo or colour palette. They share an underlying set of ideas, behaviours and rules. Most organisations do not need an ecosystem of that scale. The useful lesson is that every touchpoint should understand its role within a larger experience.

Someone must own the connections

Connected design rarely happens by accident. Someone needs responsibility for the relationship between outputs, not only the quality of each output. This does not necessarily require a new permanent job title. Ownership could sit with a creative director, brand director, experience director, design lead or an external narrative and experience partner.

The title matters less than the authority and remit.

That person or team must be able to look across brand, content, digital products, technology and physical experience. They need sufficient involvement early in the process to challenge channel-led assumptions and ensure that separate suppliers are working from the same audience journey. Their role is not to control every creative decision. It is to protect continuity.

They should be asking:

What role does this output perform?
What does the audience already know when they reach it?
What should they understand or do next?
Which elements must remain consistent?
Which elements should evolve between formats?
What information or narrative needs to pass from one experience to another?
Does this touchpoint deepen the experience or merely duplicate it?

Without this responsibility, each supplier will naturally concentrate on the success of its own deliverable.

What a connected brief looks like

A connected brief begins one level above the individual production brief. Before separate teams are commissioned, the organisation should define the common structure they will work within. That structure should include:

The central proposition: What is the one idea, challenge or change the experience is designed to communicate? This should be more specific than a broad brand purpose. It needs to explain what the audience should ultimately understand, feel or believe.
The audience journey: Where are people likely to encounter the organisation, and what might happen before and after each interaction? The journey will rarely be linear. Audiences may watch, search, compare, ask questions, leave and return several times before taking action.
The role of each medium: Every proposed output should have a clear purpose. A film might create emotional interest. A website might provide detail and comparison. A conversational system might remove uncertainty. An event or physical environment might create direct participation. When two formats are performing exactly the same function, one may be unnecessary.
The shared world rules: This includes tone, visual logic, character behaviour, terminology, knowledge, environments and the principles governing interaction. These rules help different suppliers make independent decisions without making the overall experience feel unrelated.
The source of truth: Organisations increasingly communicate through websites, customer service teams, digital products, conversational systems and physical environments. A connected brief should identify which information is approved, where it is maintained and how it should be interpreted across different formats. Without a shared knowledge structure, continuity can break down even when the visual design is consistent.
The handover points: The brief should explain how one touchpoint leads to another. What happens after someone watches the film? Where should a social post direct them? Can a conversational interface use the same knowledge as the website? Does the physical environment acknowledge what people may already have seen online? These transitions are often where fragmentation becomes most visible.
Shared measures of success: Individual teams will still require specific measures, but the project should also consider the performance of the overall journey. Did the film lead people into deeper exploration? Did the digital experience answer the questions created by the campaign? Did the conversational layer help people progress? Did the experience give them a reason to return? This shifts evaluation from the performance of isolated assets towards the quality of the relationship between them.

Connected does not mean commissioning everything at once

One reason organisations may resist this approach is the assumption that a connected system must be enormous, expensive and launched across every channel simultaneously.

It does not.

A connected experience can begin with one carefully chosen intervention. It might begin with a film and interactive website, a character and a small sequence of content, or a digital guide that later develops into a wider visitor experience. It might also begin with a narrative strategy that gives future suppliers a common structure to work from.

The important decision is not how many outputs to commission. It is whether the first output has been designed as an isolated asset or as part of something capable of growing. A strong system gives future work a foundation. New experiences can build upon an established voice, visual language, knowledge structure and audience journey rather than beginning again each time.

Connection is a mindset, not an agency model

No particular agency size or structure guarantees connected work.

A large agency may possess every relevant discipline but still separate them into departments. A small studio may work across boundaries but lack the authority to influence the wider journey. An internal brand team may understand the organisation deeply but struggle to coordinate external suppliers. The determining factor is mindset and ownership.

Does someone have responsibility for the complete experience? Are different disciplines involved early enough to shape the strategy? Are suppliers working from one connected brief, or are they receiving separate instructions with only superficial brand consistency holding them together?

Connected design also requires restraint.

Not every project needs artificial intelligence, a character, a film, an immersive website or a physical installation. The aim is not to add channels. It is to select the few that genuinely improve the audience journey. Sometimes the right answer is one film. Sometimes it is a website. Sometimes it is a conversational layer. The value comes from making that decision in the context of the wider experience rather than treating each commission as an isolated request.

Clients increasingly expect experiences to move across media, platforms and environments because audiences already behave this way. They watch, search, ask, compare, explore, leave, return, visit and share.

The industry has expanded its capabilities to meet that reality, but capability alone is not enough. The next step is to design the relationship between disciplines with the same care applied to the disciplines themselves. A brand should not feel coherent merely because every asset carries the same logo. It should feel coherent because every encounter understands what came before it, what the audience needs in that moment and where the experience should lead next.

Steve McPartland is founder and Head of Creative at Visually Sonic, a narrative design and creative technology studio working across film, interactive experiences, conversational systems, audio, learning and physical experience design.

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