So many brand teams think getting the right celebrity or influencer to promote their product will make them soar. Not true. If there is no magnetic concept or idea to latch onto, your campaign will not go off.
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🏛️ Do you have a solid brand platform that governs everything you do as a brand? Are you sure...?
Because I talk to brand teams all the time where not everyone (or in some cases, no one) on the team really knows what it means to be on brand.
I recently developed a test method so you can know for sure.
One big thing brands struggle with is TRENDS. Do you participate like everyone else, or sit out and miss all the fun?
Here's my advice: Do the opposite.✨
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There are two words you should never use when building a brand platform: "target" and "demographic." Read on to find out why, and what to say instead.
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Several years ago, I started giving my clients a brand sign. As in zodiac.
I'm not talking about pinpointing the date of the brand's founding and running its natal chart. What I do is assign it an astrological archetype as part of its emotional and intellectual operating system. This gives the brand one of the most essential things it needs to be successful: a VIBE. ✨
Have you ever tried to write a tagline for your brand and failed?
Maybe you realized, somewhere in the process, that you're not even sure what a tagline is, or what it's for. To write a good tagline, you need to understand how it functions.
It might help to know two things a tagline is often confused with.
Do you want to know one thing most people get wrong about brands? It's this:
Products are an expression of brand, not the other way around.
People think you develop a product or suite of products, and then you create a brand to wrap around it. But that's really not how iconic brands do it.
Many beauty clients say they want an About Page like ILIA’s.
That's good because I wrote it.
How did I do it? By identifying key brand pillars and dedicating a small, elegantly written section to each.
"Chucks & Pearls" is brilliant because it's an oxymoron. Elegantly gritty. Masculine femininity. Both elements are classic but in opposing ways. Priss meets punk.
This is revolutionary, world-changing energy. 💣
Evan Mock is the latest (joining Brad Pitt, Harry Styles, Jared Leto and many others) to have come out as a founder of a gender non-specific beauty brand. Here we are, still doing marketing backbends to get men to take an interest in their appearance. The way we’re doing it now, apparently, is by launching new brands and calling them “genderless.”
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There are reasons, beyond elegant design and desirable product, why iconic brands are instantly recognizable and very much themselves at all times. It has to do with the way they communicate their values, not just by the stories they tell, but by how they tell them. It’s what we call brand voice strategy, and it is absolutely essential.
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If any one element of a brand platform can stand on its own as what the brand is, it’s the tagline. Like an overarching theme or moral of the story, these few words say everything we need to know about the entity and how it might be relevant to our lives. They explain everything the brand ever does and why you should care.
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Creating a brand name is a task that should be approached carefully, with great intention. This is the beginning of the brand’s consumer-facing life, its inaugural advertisement. A brand name is a first impression. Choose wisely and it won’t be the last.
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No brand is an island. An iconic entity is a network of people—consumers, partners, critics and stalkers—who interact with it, support it and challenge it. The job of a brand is to build a world with a gravitational pull, a force that draws the right energies to its core. It’s essential to define who these people are, and what kind of energy you need to attract them.
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What kind of people are we and what kinds of things do we do to express that? The answer to that question is brand culture, that seemingly undefinable quality that draws people in. Except that it is definable. The culture of the brand is an institution that we need to create, with a set of values that we need to codify.
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A brand is not a thing, not a noun. Not exactly. A brand is better thought of as a verb. An action. In order to be relevant, it has to do something, and not just pump out product or perform services. That’s not enough. No, for a brand to really matter, it has to do something to your heart.
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Ultimate success can look quite different from market dominance—ask Patagonia. Not every brand will save the world, and success in commerce is still a noble goal, but even that remains elusive if a brand does not pin down a larger, deeper aim.
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Trends are hard on the psyche. They lead us to believe that everyone is doing this one thing this one way, and if we are not interested in that, then we are alone. In fact, the larger and louder a particular trend is, the more likely people are to be looking for something else.
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The most exciting part of an adventure film is the scene where the hero swipes everything off the table and lays out a map. Before the action, the drama, the trials and triumphs, there is the grand plan. It’s clear what needs to be accomplished, but how?
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Every brand-birth is the beginning of a universe of its own making. And it is up to its creators to decide how inventive and mythological that microcosm will be, what shapes and stories it will take on as it evolves through the decades.
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