Episode Transcript

What’s up everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m guys. Welcome back to five minute rants.

So for those of you guys listening, I’m going to talk about branding today. It’s going to be a little more technical and more specific towards business than I generally am, but I think this is important, and the reason why is we have a lot of clients that we talk to, and I normally end up having this conversation with them about brand.

And one of the early mistakes that Andrew and I made is cool, brand is a logo. And that’s not true. Brand is not a logo. Your logo is like your fingerprint. It just identifies you as a person. That’s all your logo is it’s one of your fingerprints because you got multiple right? Each finger is different. And so along the journey, Andrew and I really began to realize and understand that brand is more than just marketing collateral. It’s more than a logo. It’s more than colors and fonts. Brand is essentially this. It is the entire comprehensive identity and character of your company and how people perceive it all produced down into a single gut emotional response when they think about you.

So if you think of McDonald’s, what’s the first emotional response that you had towards them? If you think about Nike, what’s the first emotional response you had towards Nike? If you think about Adidas, or if you think about Chick fil A, or if you think about some well known company, right? Those first gut reactions, that’s brand. Now the question is, how do you actually make brand? How do you actually create that? And it’s interesting, because it’s not just a one sniper bullet, if you think of it in terms of, like putting bullets down range or, or, here’s a better analogy, raindrops. It’s not a single raindrop coming out of the clouds. You got to have hundreds of raindrops to actually water your crops and grow your crops, and that’s what brand is. Okay.

You have lots of touch points out there, and they’re all small moments from everywhere, from in store customer experience to scripting and voicing and language, to the internal culture that helps shape the team and how they interact with your customers, how they interact with potential buyers, your marketing and advertising, right the visual appearance. And so there’s two things that we break brand down into normally. One is Brand Character, which is the heart behind the brand, and a lot of the internal workings behind the brand. And then we have brand presentation, which is how we actually visually display the brand, and how people tangibly interact with the brand. And it breaks down into those two subsets.

And if you take those and go further, you can map out the whole journey. But the reason why I’m talking about this is brand of the company. Your brand of the company is going to be whatever you want it to be, and how you design it to be. But there’s one small key piece about it, you cannot escape the leadership of the company. Leadership always directly influences brand. That’s why, when companies and boards pick CEOs and leaders, it is so vital because it directly influences brand.

The C-suite, the executive suite of the company, has such a direct impact on brand. It’s tangible across the audience and across the consumers and customer base of that company. And so you can’t take the human perspective out of this. You can’t just make it this rigid, nostalgic, not rigid, I mean, not nostalgic. But you can’t just take brand and make it this rigid, robotic item. It has a human component to it, and that’s the reason for that is businesses are made up of people, and people do business, and people at the heart of everything, that’s why business exists, is because of people. And so if you try and take that away, it will break long term.

You need to have that into consideration, and then you need to be okay with whatever it is going to be, and you need to be okay with what it will be and how it will be perceived, and then understanding that you’re not for everybody. Nike knows they’re not for everybody. Adidas knows they’re not for everybody. They’re trying to get as many customers as they want and as they desire. But they also know they’re not for everybody, and that is also part of the journey, especially if you’re starting out and growing up, you’re not going to know this stuff, and you’re going to know who you are.

When you’re beginning a company, unless you have a lot of experience in it, you’re not going to know who you are, and you’re going to have to figure it out. It’s like growing up from being an adolescent all the way through middle school and high school and then an adult, and then you’re still not quite sure who you are. And then you go through a maturation process and go. Oh, this is who I am as a person, and it takes a lot of thought, and even then, it’s not guaranteed to figure out who you are, you actually have to be purposeful and intentional about this.

Anyways, guys, that’s it. I’ll catch you later. Peace.