Beyond Best Practices
Why Bold Brands Break the Rules
“Best practices.” It’s a phrase that’s everywhere in business—on LinkedIn, in conference keynotes, preached by consultants who haven’t shipped anything new in a decade. But here’s what bold brands know: Best practices make you blend in, not break through.
If your strategy is built only on what’s safe, market-tested, or already validated by your biggest competitor? You’re already behind.
At Un_Standard, we believe clarity comes not from copying what works for others—but from breaking rules with intent, focus, and creative courage.
Join The Movement
The Problem With Best Practices
They’re comfort food for the cautious. Best practices pull companies into groupthink. Innovation slows. Teams stop questioning process (“That’s just how it’s done here”). Suddenly, every campaign looks, sounds, and feels the same.
Best practices are snapshots—good for yesterday, rarely for where you need to go. In the Un_Standard movement, we rally brands and teams to take the risk that the market secretly craves: sharper stories, unconventional strategies, braver experiments, and messy-but-real momentum.
Why Clarity-Built Brands Ditch Copycat Moves
1. Markets Change. Playbooks Don’t.
Your competitors’ “proven” path was designed for their yesterday. If you’re growing, launching, or leading, your landscape looks different—your team, your culture, your market signals.
Companies addicted to best practices wait for status signals from others before moving. Bold brands set the trend—they don’t seek permission.
2. Rule-Breakers Find Meaning in Metrics—Not Just Metrics That Are Measured
Tracking “what everyone else tracks” feels safe but rarely leads to discovery.
Bold brands audit their metrics constantly:
- Will this number actually move my needle or just fill a status report?
- Would I keep this KPI if my customer or investor could see it?
Clarity means designing your own scorecard. It means focusing on leading indicators, not lagging comfort.
3. Teams That Break the Mold Outthink, Not Just Outwork
If you celebrate only what fits the industry’s template, you suffocate outlier ideas.
Movement-aligned brands:
- Reward creative dissent.
- Run regular anti-best practice brainstorms (What would a competitor NEVER try?).
- Encourage departments to build “test and learn” sprints that fail fast and find what actually scales.
When marketing, product, or sales raise a wild idea, don’t make the first move “let’s see who else has done it.” Instead, ask, “How do we make this work for us before anyone else figures it out?”
4. Breaking Rules Attracts Talent—and Creates Teams That Want to Stick
High performers crave the opportunity to push, question, and build new paths. They want the permission to un-stick process, kill bureaucracy, and invent future rituals.
If your culture is all about “how it’s always been,” don’t be surprised when the best people leave for your boldest competitor—or start their own company. The Un_Standard movement is built for rebels who want to ship clarity, not just survive quarterly check-ins.
5. Risk-Managed, Not Reckless
Breaking best practices isn’t about being reckless. It’s about testing, measuring, and being radically candid about what only your brand or team could pull off.
- Build “break the script” moments into launches (a campaign, a narrative, an offer).
- Set up retros to celebrate what worked and what failed with intention—not by accident.
Proof from the Un_Standard Movement
A scaling B2B client ditched the usual “whitepaper strategy” for a live client clarity sprint—a bold move, and a little risky. In three weeks, pipeline speed tripled, and NPS soared.
A startup challenged the “best practice” dashboard with their own bold metric: “meetings-to-a-ha-moments.” Turns out, conversion followed clarity—not old-school activity tracking.
Bringing It All Together: Rituals for Breaking Rules (and Winning)
- Clarity Sprints: Start the month outlining which rules deserve to be challenged now—not next year.
- Anti-Template Teams: Form a squad to identify and “break” one best practice per quarter.
- Customer Narrative Collisions: Invite early adopters, power users, or new hires to audit your process—what feels boring, stale, or ripe for reinvention?
- KPI Rebellion: Drop or change one metric, see what emerges, and celebrate the discomfort as growth.
Ready to Set—Not Follow—Standards?
Business as usual is where brands go to play safe, drift, and decay. Movements are built by those who ditch the template, add clarity, and scale their unique approaches with courage.
If you’re ready to join brands who do the breaking, not the blending, let’s rewrite what’s possible—together.
Book a CLARITY Call With Un_Standard →
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David Garrard
Agent Provocateur & Chief Creative Officer at Un_Standard. David helps ambitious brands unearth clarity, break the rules that hold them back, and co-create movement-level growth. When not challenging the status quo, he’s in the kitchen inventing new flavors or chasing after his three cats: Hallie Tosis, Lester Een, and Jim G. Vitis. #BeUnStandard
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