Why corporate best practices kill brand innovation
Almost every rebrand hits a moment when a client who asked for dramatic change suddenly wants to see work that looks like their competitors. In this clip from You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl unpacks that moment and Parliament’s long-held belief that best practices never create innovative ideas. He explains the tension between optimization, which minimizes risk, and innovation, which creates possibility, and reminds viewers that every best practice was once a risky, weird idea that enough people copied. It’s from the You’re Not the Audience episode on best practices and innovation, How Best Practices Kill Innovation.
Watch the full episode
Outline
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl opens with a story that plays out with almost every client. During brand strategy, the client insists on dramatic change and wants to look like no one else. Then, once the work moves into visual identity or a campaign, fear of risk creeps in, and they ask to see examples that look like their company or their industry.
That moment, when vision butts up against reality, is a reminder to push harder. It connects to a belief Parliament has long held: best practices never create innovative ideas, and innovation only happens when you defy them. Parliament’s motto, be brave, stand apart, keeps that idea at the forefront.
Calvin then defines the two opposing forces inside every company. Optimization makes things cheaper, faster, and more dependable, and it can be measured. Innovation questions whether something should exist at all and invents new systems. Best practices, he notes, are just yesterday’s innovations that became so popular everyone copied them.
Highlights
Clients who ask for dramatic change often retreat when execution begins.
Parliament believes best practices never create innovative ideas.
Optimization minimizes risk; innovation creates possibility.
Most companies let optimization win because it can be measured.
Every best practice was once risky, weird, and wrong-feeling.
Key insights
The moment of doubt is the moment to push
When a client asks to look like everyone else, it’s a signal for both client and agency to remember why they started: to reach real distinction.
Measurability tilts the scales
Optimization already exists and can be assessed with numbers, which makes it easier to sell to the boss than an untested idea.
Innovation questions existence
Where optimization improves what’s there, innovation asks whether something should exist at all, then invents the systems to replace it.
Copying erases originality
Once everyone can produce the same best practice, it can no longer make anyone distinct.
Detailed analysis
The clip frames best practices as a lifecycle rather than a rulebook. A crazy idea breaks through, others copy it, and it hardens into the standard. Calvin recalls the early web, when new ideas would spread across the internet within a week, as a vivid example of how quickly innovation turns into convention.
That lifecycle explains the client moment at the top of the clip. Asking for examples from the industry is asking for best practices, which by definition can’t deliver the distinction the client wanted in the first place.
Conclusion
Both optimization and innovation are necessary, but brands that let optimization win end up following yesterday’s ideas. Calvin’s challenge is simple: be brave, stand apart.
Transcript
So we’re going to be talking about best practices and optimization, and how they can kill innovation and new ideas.
But let’s start with some story time. This has been on my mind a lot, because of a client we’ve been working with recently, and this kind of happens with almost every client at some point. We usually start doing brand strategy with the client. We’re diving deep into the background of the company, and the client says they want a dramatic change, and they keep saying this over and over and over again. They don’t want to look like anyone else. They don’t want to look like any competitors, and they really want it to be shocking and stand out and be truly distinct as soon as this whole new rebrand launches.
But there’s always a point that we hit every single time, where you get through strategy and you start entering the point of visual identity, or sometimes it’s a campaign. You’re having to start actually executing on the campaign, and clients will then take a little step back. You can see the fear of the risk creep up. They say, “Can you show us examples of work that looks like our company, or looks like us, or looks like how other people in our industry look?” And it always happens in just a split second, where that vision and the conviction of “We need to look different, we need to do the thing” butts up against reality, and the fear of making a mistake starts hitting them.
I think that’s a really, really important moment, because that’s usually where, internally for them and for us, it’s a reminder to push harder, to remember why we’re all there, why they’re paying us, essentially: to get them to that point of distinction from others.
And this is all on my mind a lot because it feels like a provocative statement, but it’s been a really long-held belief at Parliament that best practices never create innovative and new ideas. That’s maybe a little bit hyperbolic, but it’s just been something that we’ve really stood by. And I think it takes a lot of courage to remind ourselves that innovation only happens when you defy best practices. So we’ve always had the motto of “be brave, stand apart,” and that’s always put this idea at the forefront for us. So I encourage anyone out there to always say, be brave, stand apart. That’s our challenge to everyone: it’s okay. It’s scary. The future is unknown.
Oh yeah, Ryan: the realization of marketing saying, “Oh, how do I sell this to my boss?” Yes, we’re going to talk about that, because how you sell it to your boss usually is a question around measurable data, which we’ll chat about in a little bit, because it’s kind of the enemy of innovation. Yeah, that’s always the big one.
So, okay, we’re talking best practices and innovation. One thing to start out with is that corporate thinking—larger corporations, companies—both need and tend to focus on optimization. Big, elaborate companies, even small companies, want to focus on optimization, and you want to min-max everything, all the effort you’re putting in, for assessing risk, all these things. But within every company, there are always these two opposing forces of optimization versus innovation, and both are necessary. But the problem is that most brands and companies end up letting optimization win, and best practices become the only thing that matters. And that’s because, to get back to the “how do I sell it to my boss” thing, you can measure optimization. Generally, it’s something that already exists, and you can put numbers to it. You can assess whether it was successful, whether it might continue to be successful, things like that.
So that’s where the tension between these two things comes in, the tension between optimization and innovation. The two are just accomplishing completely different things. Innovation and optimization have two completely separate goals within a business. One minimizes risk, and the other creates possibility. Optimization wants to do things cheaper, faster, more profitable, more dependable, more reliable. That’s the goal of optimization, and it would also help you sell things to your boss. Innovation challenges whether something should even exist at all, and then, if it challenges whether something should exist, it creates new systems. So that is the job of innovation: to invent new systems and question whether something should continue to exist.
But maybe we should establish what I mean when I talk about best practices. We all know what they are. It’s the standards that are just, this is the way you’re supposed to do it. This is the right way. This is the guaranteed way to get to success. But I think we also forget that best practices are just yesterday’s innovations, and they were so good everyone started copying them. You especially saw this—I mean, it’s still happening—but I remember in the early days of the web, there were always new, fast-paced innovations, nonstop, but then they would really quickly get adopted. You’d basically see, in the span of a week, somebody create something new, and it would start getting pushed out through everything. It was really cool.
So that’s the reminder: best practices were once crazy ideas. It just became so popular people started copying them, and then it became the best practice. And since everyone starts using it, best practices can’t inherently produce originality anymore, because everyone is capable of producing that same thing now. But it is worth remembering that every best practice was once risky. It was weird. It felt wrong, until enough people copied it. That’s it. All it takes is one of those things breaking through, and then enough people start copying it.