The Walls Did Not Fall Overnight: What Jericho Teaches Brands About Consistency

By Rumbidzai Mashayahanya

There is a story in the book of Joshua that every brand strategist should study, not for its theology but for its discipline.

The Israelites arrive at Jericho, a city protected by walls so formidable that conquering it by force seemed impossible.

God gives Joshua an instruction that, on the surface, looks strange for a battle plan. March around the city once a day for six days.

Say nothing. On the seventh day, march around it seven times, then have the priests blow their trumpets and have the people shout. Only then would the walls collapse.

What strikes me most about this account is not the miracle at the end. It is everything that happened before it.

Six days of silence. Six days of repetition. Six days of doing the same thing, in the same order, with no visible result, and no permission to deviate from the instruction. It would have been easy, on day three or four, to ask why nothing was changing and to suggest a new approach. It would have been tempting to shout early, to try something different, to break formation.

Nobody did. The instruction was followed exactly as given, every day, until the walls came down.

That is not a story about a miracle happening quickly. It is a story about consistency compounding until the moment it mattered.

I have spent over a decade working across strategy, communications and partnerships for organisations that operate across multiple African markets, and if there is one thing I have watched brands get wrong again and again, it is this.

They confuse relevance with reinvention. The moment a new platform trend, aesthetic or cultural moment emerges, the instinct is to change. Change the logo. Change the tone. Change the message. Chase the algorithm. Chase the audience that seems to be moving somewhere else. And in that chase, many brands lose the very thing that made people trust them in the first place, their authenticity.

We are living through a period where brands are under more pressure than ever to move outside their comfort zone. Social platforms reward novelty. Consumers, particularly younger ones, are drawn to whoever feels most current in the moment. Marketing teams are told to be agile, to test, to pivot, to stay ahead of trends. All of this is true and none of it is wrong. But agility without an anchor is not strategy. It is drift.

Jericho offers a different model. The instruction did not change because six days passed without a wall falling. The people did not conclude that silence was not working and decide to shout on day two instead. The consistency was the strategy. And when the moment for the shout finally came, on day seven, it worked precisely because everything before it had been done exactly the same way, every single time.

What Consistency Actually Requires

It is worth being precise about what consistency means, because it is often misunderstood as sameness or stubbornness. Consistency is not refusing to evolve. It is knowing which parts of a brand are non-negotiable and protecting them fiercely while everything else adapts around them.

Apple is a useful modern example. Over more than two decades, its products, packaging, advertising and even its retail spaces have changed considerably. What has not changed is the underlying promise of simplicity, design discipline and a specific emotional register in how the brand speaks to its customers. Nike is another. Campaigns shift, athletes change, cultural moments come and go, but the brand has held to a singular emotional territory built around achievement and self-belief since the 1980s. Neither brand shouts on day two. Both understand that the instruction, the underlying promise that defines who they are, stays fixed even as the execution around it evolves.

Contrast this with brands that rebrand reactively every time a trend shifts, or that adjust their tone and values depending on which platform or audience they are speaking to in that particular week. These brands rarely build trust because trust requires predictability. A customer, a partner or an investor needs to know what a brand stands for regardless of which channel they encounter it on or which year it is. The moment that certainty disappears, so does the relationship.

The Coordination Problem

The Jericho story also teaches something that gets underappreciated in brand conversations, which is that consistency is not a solo act.

Priests carried the ark. Armed men marched in formation. The people held their silence together. If even one group had broken from the instruction, the coordinated effort would have collapsed before the walls did.

This is precisely where many organisations fail at brand consistency. It is treated as a marketing department responsibility rather than an organisation wide discipline.

A brand’s tone of voice can be perfectly documented in a guideline document, yet customer service responds in an entirely different register, the sales team pitches with messaging that contradicts the website, and leadership speaks publicly in a manner that has nothing to do with either. The instruction exists on paper, but it has not been coordinated across every group that touches the brand.

Consistency requires that everyone marching around the wall understands their role and executes it identically, day after day, regardless of whether they can see the result yet. That means brand guidelines need to live well beyond a design department. They need to shape how finance communicates during a crisis, how a call centre agent responds to a complaint, how an executive responds to a difficult question in an interview. A brand is not what a logo says. It is the sum of thousands of small consistent actions, repeated without deviation, over a long period.

Patience as virtue

Perhaps the hardest part of this lesson for modern brand teams to accept is the patience it demands. We operate in an environment obsessed with quarterly results and immediate engagement metrics.

A campaign that does not show traction within days is often declared a failure and abandoned for something new. But brand equity, unlike a single campaign, is not built on a sprint timeline. It is built the way those walls fell, through sustained, repeated, disciplined action that may show no visible movement for a long stretch before the shift finally happens.

This does not mean brands should be passive or slow to respond to genuine market change.

It means the core identity, the values, the tone, the promise a brand makes to its audience, should not be the first thing altered every time a new trend appears. The tactics can and should adapt. The instruction underneath them should not.

For businesses across Africa navigating fast moving markets, this lesson carries particular weight. Many brands here are still establishing themselves in the eyes of consumers, partners and investors who are watching closely to see whether they can be trusted over time, not just admired for a single clever campaign. In that environment, consistency is not a nice to have. It is the foundation on which everything else, credibility, loyalty, premium pricing and long-term partnerships, gets built.

The walls of Jericho did not fall because the people tried something new on the final day. They fell because the same instruction was followed without deviation for six days before that final shout ever came.

Brands looking to build something that lasts would do well to remember that the trend that feels urgent this week is rarely the thing that determines whether people trust you in five years.

What determines that is whether you showed up the same way, said the same things, and held the same standard, every single day that nobody was watching.

That is the whole lesson. Consistency is not the boring part of branding. It is the part that eventually brings the walls down.

Mashayahanya is the Head of Business Development and Communications as CEO Africa Roundtable. She writes here in her personal capacity.