When Being Trendy Backfires: The Hidden Risk of Over-Styled Branding

Why following design trends too closely can dilute your brand identity and waste your marketing budget.

11.09.2025 BY Jakub

When Being Trendy Backfires: The Hidden Risk of Over-Styled Branding header image

Introduction

What Happens When Everyone Looks the Same? ↓ Unintended Category Advertising ↓ Safe ≠ Effective ↓ What to Do Instead ↓ Summary ↓

The Problem With Trend-Driven Branding

In an effort to look “modern,” many brands jump on the latest design trends: glassy gradients, minimalist sans-serifs, millennial pinks, vaporwave blurs, lowercase everything. It looks clean, slick, and current.

These trends come in waves — think of neubrutalism with its raw, blocky aesthetics, or glassmorphism’s frosted glass effect that dominated UI design for a while. Each cycle promises freshness but often ends up saturating the market with similar-looking brands.

But it also looks exactly like everyone else.

That’s the problem.

“By chasing these cyclical fads, brands risk losing their unique voice and blending into a sea of sameness. The challenge is that trends are designed to be widely adopted, which inherently diminishes distinctiveness over time.”

What Happens When Everyone Looks the Same?

Branding is about recognition. But if your brand communication is too trendy, you risk blending in — especially within your own category.

Imagine:

Every fintech company is navy blue and lowercase.
Every DTC skincare brand uses beige gradients and sans-serif.
Every health-tech startup has soft blobs and pastel UI.

Customers can’t tell you apart. And worse — they don’t remember you.

Research supports this: a study by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute found that brands with visually distinctive assets are 60% more likely to be recalled by consumers. When brands look too similar, that advantage evaporates.

Unintended Category Advertising

Another side effect: your ads might be accidentally promoting your competition.

If your campaign looks just like your competitors’…

You’re training the customer to respond to a category look, not your brand.
You might boost awareness for the space, but not recall for your company.
You become forgettable — even if the campaign is well produced.

For example, in the telecom industry, many companies use similar blue-and-white color schemes and minimalist icons. This has led to ads that feel interchangeable, making it difficult for customers to distinguish between providers and inadvertently benefiting competitors.

Safe ≠ Effective

It feels safe to follow trends. It means fewer arguments with clients. Fewer creative risks. Faster design approval.

But safe doesn’t mean smart.

Trendy design without strategic thought leads to:

Weak differentiation
Generic user experiences
Lower brand memorability
Poor long-term equity

One notable case is Gap’s 2010 logo redesign. They shifted to a trendy, minimalist look that was widely criticized for losing the brand’s heritage and distinctiveness. The backlash forced them to revert to their classic logo within a week, illustrating the risk of abandoning brand identity for trendiness.

And in performance marketing? That’s expensive.

trendy design without strategic leads to

What to Do Instead

Start with strategy — not style.
Define what makes you you, before moodboarding what’s cool.
Use trends intentionally, not automatically.
Analyze your category, then deliberately design against it.
Look to challenger brands like Oatly or Dollar Shave Club, which often break norms by using bold typography, unexpected colors, or irreverent messaging to stand out.
Focus on creating memorable brand assets that can evolve but remain rooted in your core identity.
Test your designs for distinctiveness and recall before full rollout.

The goal isn’t to look “cool.”
The goal is to be recognizable, trusted, and unique.