The grammar.

§I Brands have grammar.

A consumer brand is, at the level of its material, a set of syntactic choices repeated enough to become grammar. Choices about how type sits; how colour repeats; how copy begins; how packs describe; how the brand greets the customer in the subject line; how it signs off; how it describes itself, in one line, to a new audience. These choices, repeated, are the brand's grammar. Grammar is what the brand actually is, separable from what the brand claims to be.

In the first half of 2025 we reviewed roughly sixty consumer brands — twelve that have aged well over fifteen to forty years, twelve that have aged badly, and a reference set of thirty-six more. The intent was to see whether there were syntactic moves common to the ones that age well and absent from the ones that do not. There are. We found twelve positive moves and four negative moves that appear reliably across the cohort. They are laid out below, in compressed form.

This is not a style guide. It is a grammar. It does not tell you which font to pick. It tells you which relationships between your choices produce the consistent, renewable sense of this is the brand that ageing well requires.

§II The twelve moves.

Brands that age well, in the cohort, share twelve recurring syntactic moves. Not all twelve appear in every brand; most brands use seven to nine. The twelve: declarative voice; specific noun preference; restrained palette; one dominant type family, consistently set; a named primary colour with a defensible reason for being the primary; a pack hierarchy that repeats across SKUs; a single recognisable signature mark; a pack tone that treats the shopper as an adult; copy that refuses winking; a ritualised season rhythm; a specific relationship to craftsmanship; a well-rehearsed short sentence that the brand uses to describe itself.

Each of these is, on its own, a small thing. Together, they are the brand's grammar. The point is not that a brand must have all twelve. The point is that the combinatorial logic — the consistency with which the chosen moves repeat — is what produces durability. Brands that drift, across seasons, from one grammatical set to another do not age well; they thin.

The single most diagnostic of the twelve is the last: the short sentence the brand uses to describe itself. A brand that can describe itself in one short, specific sentence, used consistently across twelve quarters, is almost always a brand in the ageing-well group. A brand that has four sentences, each used in a different context, is almost always a brand drifting.

§III The four anti-moves.

Brands that age badly repeat four syntactic errors. One: tonal inconsistency between pack and marketing — the pack sounds like an adult, the Instagram captions sound like a teenager, the founder's letters sound like a philosopher. Two: palette sprawl — each season accumulates a new colour, never retires one; within eight seasons the brand contains a rainbow and anchors nothing. Three: category-conforming voice — the brand's sentences could belong to any of six competitors; nothing about the syntax is distinctive.

Four: unsignatured signatures — the brand has a mark, but uses it inconsistently; sometimes below the name, sometimes replacing the name, sometimes absent; the mark never learns to stand for anything specific. All four errors are reparable; all four are, in the ageing-badly cohort, persistent.

The four anti-moves share a cause: lack of an editing function. The twelve positive moves are maintained by someone whose job is to maintain them. The four anti-moves accumulate in organisations where no one holds that job. This is the operational consequence of The founder is the product — if there is no editor, there is no grammar.

Grammar is the brand. Style is the grammar as it appears today. A brand without grammar has style and no spine. — Strategy practice, internal

§IV How to set the grammar.

Grammar is not set by writing a style guide. We have reviewed thirty-plus style guides in the process of this research. Almost none of them are used consistently by the teams they are given to, and almost none of them actually describe the brand's grammar; they describe its style. Style guides date fast. Grammars do not.

The way to set grammar is to write, in plain prose, about ten pages long, a brand grammar document. It describes each of the brand's syntactic moves, with examples, and forbids, explicitly, the anti-moves. It is updated annually by the edit function, with additions to the positive moves and removals of the ones that have stopped serving. It is read, by every member of the brand team, every quarter.

This is more work than issuing a style guide, and it is fragile at any scale above roughly sixty people in the brand function. At small scale — which is where most of our clients operate — it is the single highest-leverage brand artefact the firm produces.

§V What this pays.

Brands with a documented, enforced grammar are, in our cohort, substantially more resilient across founder transitions, rebrands, new markets, and category shifts. The grammar survives moves that style does not. A brand with a codified grammar can lose its creative director and keep its character. A brand without one cannot.

If we were to make the commercial case in one sentence: grammar is what is worth paying the editing function for. It is the repeating, renewable substrate of the brand. Everything visible to the customer is a sentence inside the grammar. The better the grammar, the more variation the sentences can tolerate without the brand breaking. This is the permission to stay interesting for twenty years.