Branding is Just Like Life: Brand-speak not spoken here

Branding is just like life. Most marketing people put everything they know about branding into one bucket. And everything they know about people into another bucket. This is a serious mistake. If you look at branding as a pseudo-academic discipline, you’re totally missing the point. This is like the person who reads all the self help manuals and misses all the cues because they weren’t in the book. If you want to get smart about building a brand for your company, forget all the sage advice dispensed by those books with the gimmicky titles and remember one thing. You already are a branding expert. And you actually know more about the subject than the branding consultants who want to entice you to buy their books.

You’re already a pretty decent expert on branding. You already have a pretty good idea how people work. How to approach them. How to avoid them. How to annoy them. How to intrigue them. You know this stuff because it is the stuff of life. It is what we all do every day. What may be hard to get through your head at first is that branding is about all this same stuff!

There’s only one set of rules and you already know them. You are walking around with an enormous database of human behavior: what makes people tick, what makes people smile, what embarrasses them, what makes them shake their head yes or no. So if you can accept the radical notion that your understanding of how people operate is the only set of rules you need to pay attention to, you have freed yourself from an enormous pile of bullshit and you are ready to make waves.

Use your powers of observation. Let’s get back to the most interesting person in the room and see if we can make a few observations about his brand. He has a strong point of view about the world. Let’s go one step further and say that he is passionate, maybe about his work, maybe about an experience. He is magnetic and a good story teller, but does not monopolize the conversation. In fact, he really cares about what other people think.

Watch your language.  I’m going to stop here because I could go on to write a short story about this guy. But for the moment I only want to make one point: that the above paragraph does not contain a single syllable of brand-speak. Which is exactly the point. If you can apply this kind of human thinking and language to your company’s brand, you will be way ahead of the game.

This is the first of a series called Branding Is Just Like Life. While we cook up more thoughts on demystifying branding, you can expose yourself to some of our startup branding advice.