This is the talk I gave at a design week in Porto, shortened for reading. The question from the floor was simple: how does a quiet brand survive a feed built for noise?
My answer was that it should not try to be loud. A feed rewards what is easy to recognise in half a second, and nothing is easier to recognise than a brand that never changes its voice.
Repeat until it is yours
The brands we admire post the same colour, the same type and the same kind of picture for years. Their followers do not get bored. They get fluent.
So we design feeds the way we design shelves: a few rules, kept long after they feel obvious to us and long before they feel obvious to anyone else.