I've been thinking about the last rebrands I saw announced on social media, and I can't name a single one that actually changed what the brand was. New typeface, softer palette. A logo that curves where it used to angle. And then, somehow, the same company saying the same things to the same people in exactly the same way. What gives? The work looked finished. The press release said transformation, and three months later you'd be hard-pressed to explain what, exactly, had transformed.
This is what I've started thinking of as cosmetic identity, work that borrows the vocabulary of brand-building while doing something considerably more modest. It makes a company look like it's been somewhere it hasn't. It adopts the signals of cultural ambition without going through the discomfort of actually developing one. Some of these executions are genuinely beautiful, which is partly what makes the problem so persistent.
Beauty became a synonym for identity somewhere along the way. That substitution is the central confusion in contemporary brand work.
But here's what makes this more than a simple critique: decoration is not nothing. A well-designed visual system does something real. It creates coherence, signals aspiration, makes a brand legible to the people it's trying to reach.
The problem isn't that cosmetic identity exists; it's that it gets sold as, and sometimes genuinely mistaken for, the harder and more consequential work underneath.
The question most brands would rather skip
"Most clients come to us already knowing what they want to look like," says a creative director I spoke with recently, someone who has spent nearly a decade building identity systems for fashion and luxury brands.
"The harder conversation is always what they want to be."
In other words, the aesthetic question and the identity question feel interchangeable until they don't. That moment tends to arrive around year two, when the new visual language is no longer new. And it turns out no one ever answered the underlying question: what is this brand actually saying, and to whom, and from where?
The difference, as best I can articulate it (and I'm aware this risks sounding like the kind of thing embroidered on a studio wall somewhere), is structural. Decoration is reversible. You can update it next cycle, react to a trend, soften the edges when the mood changes.
Real identity isn't reversible, not because it's rigid, but because it's load-bearing. It carries the answers to the questions most brands would rather skip: what does this brand actually believe, where does it stand culturally, what does it want to leave behind? Those answers don't change when the logo does.
What's actually at stake
What's actually at stake here is specificity. The brands that accumulate cultural weight over decades, rather than refreshing every three years, are the ones where the visual and verbal language grew from something true. You can feel the difference, even when you can't name it. You can feel when a brand knows what it is. And you can feel, sometimes painfully, when a brand has simply learned to dress like something it wants to be.
One of those is infrastructure. The other is a very convincing outfit.
What a project with COMMUNE looks like
Every brand we work with goes through the same process. We find what it actually is and not what it wants to project, but what it genuinely stands for and where it sits culturally. From there we build the identity, the language, the creative direction, the narrative: everything that makes a brand specific and worth paying attention to. The filter is not the industry. It's the ambition.
If you are building something in the creative industry and you want a team that takes identity seriously, we would like to hear about it.
hello@madebycommune.com · Mexico City
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