Conductors and composers are the most important responsable figures who can take care of preserving the sound identity of a specific wind band or of wind bands in general.
Composers and conductors must understand the importance of preserving and considering the “sound identity” of the wind band they have in front.
Conductors and composers in my opinion should take a step back and take care about the musical qualities of the "older" professional wind bands and try to work with the same mindsetting also nowadays. Brass bands and Fanfares have greatly preserved the identity they had since their beginning, the wind band scene instead has been overdone by the American tradition.
The American tradition though has a completely different aim, it focuses on the school band system which is looking towards another direction than our European wind bands.
Why can't conductors and composers take care about this difference and reintroduce the use of some instruments which have been abandoned such as the flugelhorn family and the saxhorns?!
Do we realise that if we analyse the situation, the loss of instruments is still happening?!
Why don't composers write interesting music also for instruments such as the Eb clarinet, the alto clarinet, the english horn, the flugelhorn, the baritone, just to name a few. In the last decades the standardization of the wind band setting has reduced the scoring for wind band, many instruments have disappeared and composers, being them European, American or other, compose for the same colour pallette, same combination of instruments, and everything easily sounds "the same" except a few very rare and precious examples.
If conductors would perform compositions taking care of having all the required instruments at their disposal, composers would certainly be more motivated to use these instruments more and in different ways. Our repertoire would return to be interesting, various, colorful and rich...but mostly it would have a specific identity, could be the identity of the band, or even the identity of a composer, still it would have a personality and this is what we are loosing, not only in music but also in our society.
In our days globalization is overriding traditions and cultures, in the wind band scene this is creating a big loss but composers and conductors could avoid this loss!
Composers could look back to the older settings and restart composing for each instrument with more attention to the identity of each single instrument. An example, a baritone saxophone is a baritone instrument but in the majority of the contemporary compositions it is treated as a bass instrument. The alto clarinets is seldom used and when a composer includes it in the setting, it is always treated as a 3rd clarinet or bass clarinet, never with an own line or own identity, always doubling and becoming "useless" till the moment conductors don't include this instrument in their settings anymore.
It should though be in the opposite way, when choosing the repertoire, conductors should make sure they have all the required instruments at their disposal and this should not be difficult in the professional world. In this way composers would be sure that all the instruments listed in their scores would be available and could once again, after many years write lovely solos or important and motivating parts also for those "rare" instruments which would gain value and be a great opportunity to have a more colorful instrumentation and many more possibilities of registers and combinations to enrich the sound.
All in all, conductors should defend the originality of a score while composers should respect the identity of each instrument and enlarge the colour palette with consciousness.