Eventually, Everyone Knows Your Playbook—Why Great Brands Never Stop Evolving

Prior to my time at Moxie Sozo, I spent six years as a collegiate athlete at the Division I and Division III levels, winning three Division III National Championships in women’s lacrosse along the way. You might wonder what my sports background has to do with my work at an agency, and as it turns out, quite a bit. 

When people ask me about my three championship teams, some often assume that we simply rinsed and repeated the same approach to the season, each opponent, and practice plans that worked before. Sure, our championship teams had a recognizable identity in our style of play, our culture, and our integrity on the sidelines and towards the referees. Sure, each new season we had returning players who knew and could model our ethos for our new teammates. To those simply looking at our record from the outside, they might think we just do the exact same thing forever. However, this is a huge misconception. 

In lacrosse, resting on your laurels is a losing strategy. The rules change. Key players graduate. New captains are elected. What won us the national championship in pre-Covid 2019 was not going to win us a title in 2022 or 2023, after losing our 2020 and 2021 seasons to the pandemic. 

In reality, our ongoing success created new challenges. Competitors studied our film more closely. They learned our tendencies and strategized on how to best counter our strengths. In order to stay winning, we couldn’t run the same plays year after year. Even the best play grows stale.

In 2022, we lost in the conference championship because we were unprepared for a faceguard on yours truly. For those who don’t know what a faceguard is, basically they had a defender follow me around and stay within a foot of me at all times to deny my touching the ball. We couldn’t even rely on our best players scoring at will, because they were stacked up against our opponents’ best defenders. Instead, we had to maintain a clear team identity while constantly evolving our approach. 

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Culture is the Constant

Before I ever learned the playbook, there was a culture. In the fall, because of our league’s rules, we didn’t have access to our coaches. Our winning seasons were built on captains’ practices in which we built chemistry, learned new drills, and conditioned (I’m talking a lot of 300-yard sprints). We didn’t even look at a playbook during this time. This foundational part of our season was about establishing our ideals for the year, and holding each other accountable to them. As first years, we learned to show up early to every practice and that brittle Vermont winters were never an excuse; better layering was our responsibility. We talked about how we were never going to be the team that argued with the officials, nor would we be the team that disrespected our opponents. Our standards for both effort and kindness would not bend at the whim of the scoreboard. This part of our winning culture didn’t live in a binder somewhere, like our playbook; it lived in how the captains acted when no one was watching and how we showed up for each other when things weren’t going our way. This culture was the one thing that didn’t change year to year, even as rosters turned over and coaches introduced new strategies and systems. 

Brands have their own version of this, or at least they should. It’s easy to overlook or put the culture piece on the backburner in pursuit of the perfect logo or tagline. That’s understandable because culture isn’t as tangible. However, the why behind your brand, the purpose, the values, the ideals, the point of view that doesn’t move no matter what channel you’re targeting or what year it is, is what should inform every decision you make. This is the part of a brand that should never be up for revision every time a trend shifts. It’s the anchoring identity that your playbook should be built for.

The playbook is something different, and it’s important not to confuse the two. In lacrosse, our playbook consisted of sets of plays, formations, lineups, and strategies built to win in a specific season, against a specific set of opponents, under our sport’s ever-evolving set of rules. However, our playbook only worked because our culture beneath it was strong enough to execute it under pressure. For us, those pressures included Covid-19, starting players sick or injured, and games scheduled in 40mph winds, sleet, and even snow. It was our playbook that had to be rewritten, season after season, game after game, in order to keep us winning. 

For brands, this is where brand guidelines, messaging frameworks, and visual identities come into play. These are not the unchanging soul of your brand; they are the best expression of it in that exact moment.

As we explain to our current and future clients all the time here at Moxie Sozo, “Consumers Change. Categories Change. Markets Change. Success is driven by knowing what to keep and what to evolve. The brands that win adapt to what’s next while protecting the beliefs, assets, and experiences that made them valuable in the first place.”

And here’s the thing I had to learn after winning my first NCAA National Championship in 2019: Winning doesn’t make the playbook great the next year. Once you start winning, competitors work harder to keep up. They figure out how to counter or at least match the exact things that made you great. The same is true for brands. Once you find some white space or a new callout starts to work wonders, competitors copy it. The same approach that won last season starts to lose this one. 

But luckily, we also aren’t starting from scratch with an entirely new playbook every year. The insight that took me the longest to learn as an athlete, the one that I now see play out constantly in branding and agency work, is that principles have to remain while execution has to evolve. While tactics can be studied, copied, and countered, a brand with a strong sense of purpose and identity is far harder to imitate. Competitors can mimic what you do, but they can’t convincingly replicate who you are. In lacrosse, this meant upholding our same culture and identity, while introducing new tactics depending on who we were facing and what the season demanded. In branding, it means safeguarding the same overarching purpose, the same “why,” but with different expressions as the environment around the brand changes. This should feel freeing rather than daunting, and it’s where we here at Moxie love to roll up our sleeves.

Consistency and evolution aren’t opposites, they’re actually partners! The best teams and the best brands must balance consistency and adaptation. 

The strongest teams aren’t rigid. They’re disciplined. The strongest brands aren’t static. They’re intentional. Both winning brands and winning teams understand that consistency was never about repeating the same play forever. It’s about returning, again and again, to the same key principles while adapting to whatever’s actually in front of you in this season, in this category, and in this moment.

The mistake many brands make is confusing their brand guidelines for their one forever truth. But unlike culture, your playbook is supposed to change. Your messaging, campaigns, visuals, and tactics should evolve as your audience, competitors, and market evolve, while your purpose, values, and identity remain the north star guiding those changes. 

The best teams and brands give themselves permission to agilely change their execution without losing their identity in the process. That’s the playbook. Not a script to rinse and repeat forever, but a foundation disciplined enough to hold steady, and flexible enough to keep you winning.