Eine Marke aufbauen, die wirklich etwas bedeutet

0:00And so here's how I like to think about assembling the pairings for brand. So if you're at ground zero, you have you have no brand. You've got these elements that haven't been put together yet. So I think about it like a table full of flowers. So if you want to put a bouquet together, you start by having lots of different flowers all over the place. On their own, those flowers are not a bouquet. Just as products, values, experiences, people, etc. on their own are not a brand.

0:29The flowers are like the brand elements that we pair with stuff our audiences like. With enough pairing, over and over and over again, they form a bouquet. Now replace the word bouquet with brand. And so that assembly is the connection, it's the association between those things. Cuz the brand fundamentally doesn't actually exist. If I take the flowers out of the vase and scatter them across, was there ever a brand to begin with? It's simply the association we make between those things that creates the one-of-one brand.

1:04And if we unravel it, the brand disappears. And so the deliberate pairing of those things makes the brand. And if we want to get narrower on our brand, so let's say I talk about tacos, lifting, and philosophy, if I want to narrow my brand, I'll just talk a bunch about tacos. And then all of my flowers are just taco related. If I'm only talking about tacos, but I want to expand the stuff I'm talking about to my audience and maybe capture a wider audience, then I might talk about tacos, quesadillas, burritos, things that are tangential. And then if I wanted to expand even broader, I might just talk about food in general. And then I might talk in alcohol. Then I might talk in restaurants. And then things that go wider and wider from there. And so we get narrower as we niche down and we go double down on one type of topic and we go broader when we branch out.

1:56But distant and random pairings hurt a brand because they're so hard to make the associations with. And this is what most brands are and do. Most people's brands happen by accident. It's just whatever they appear next to, whatever the people associate their stuff with. Good branding happens on purpose. Cuz like what are we looking at with a a bike, a single flower, some socks, and a burger?

2:22Not a lot. Not a lot to hold together there. And so think about it like curating a garden. You want some flowers to grow, and you want to pull out the weeds. You have to do both. You have to add the good and take away the bad in order to assemble the ideal brand for you. And in the beginning, our brand won't be strong, just like yours will. If you're building it, then you might only have a couple flowers there. And it's because you haven't had that many instances to pair your brand for that customer.

2:53But, the more good stuff we pair with our brand for the customer, the stronger it gets. You go from one flower to many red flowers, or many red roses that become a bouquet of red roses. That's what you're about, and the more you're about it, the more the brand strengthens. Now, what if we make a branding mistake and pair with the wrong thing? Cuz it's going to happen. One bad pairing can absolutely hurt a brand. So if I now give my this lovely red rose uh bouquet to my wife and I say, "Hey, don't you love this bouquet?" And she sees this rotten flower sticking out the front. She might be like, "Ew, this bouquet sucks." Or, "This brand sucks."

3:31Or, "Hey, that guy got a DUI, and I thought he was this paragon of good ethics." Well, that would hurt the brand. And so just like one ugly flower messes up the whole bouquet, it changes how everyone sees the brand. This bouquet sucks. Now, to recover from something like that, you just have to overwhelm customers with the stuff they like until eventually the bad pairing shrinks into irrelevance. So, we don't try to eliminate the DUI. We don't try to eliminate the dead rows. It happened.

3:58There's nothing we can do about it. But what we try to do is just overwhelm it with way more of the stuff that the majority of our people actually like. And so Kanye, for example, has said some things that people don't like. But he also comes out with products that people love. He made a Super Bowl ad. He sold shoes. He just came out with an album that came out after having some cancel culture stuff around him and things he had said. And so over time, people forgot the bad stuff and associated the good stuff back with him and purchased.

4:27They still bought. And so you need to decide what values people experience etc. that you want to use to connect the audience to your product. And equally importantly, what things you want to avoid, remove, or ignore from the stuff they hate. And so it goes without saying that even if you say you're premium, but people think your thing sucks, that suck will stick. And so up to this point, everything I've talked about has been the things external to the product.

4:58They've been the people you associate the product with. Now, almost all of that occurs prior to purchase. So, you can absolutely get someone to buy the thing. But how many experiences are people are going to have with the thing once they've purchased it? Probably far more than they have with your advertisement. And so the advertisement can let people know about it. The branding makes a good association with the person. They make the purchase. And then afterwards, the product does a lot of the branding after that. Cuz if I buy that amazing Nike t-shirt and there's a hole in the armpit when it comes in, I might say, "This is the first time I've ever bought a Nike product. This product sucks. Therefore, Nike sucks." And then I think the whole thing is a sham. And then I also start to hate LeBron for even recommending, right? Starts to transfer backwards.

5:44Now, on the flip side, brand can influence how people see the product. So, if the product is what I would call good enough, so it's it doesn't have any holes in it. Now, is it the highest quality possible it could be? Maybe not, but it's good enough that no one's going to find an immediate problem with the product. That's where brand can carry you the extra distance to still make it a positive experience for the person. And so, brand in a very real way can affect how people perceive value through products.

6:13Now, me personally, this is a pro tip if I'm going to charge a premium price, I absolutely want to make sure that the product is dialed, so that I only further reinforce how much they like my brand, rather than let my brand carry me, or at worst, have it conflict with the impression that I gave them of the thing they're going to buy prior to them buying it. This is a quote from Oren, "Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it's not going to get the business."

6:38And the only two weeks I have on this is that it's not going to keep the business. You'll get the first purchase, you just won't get the ones after that. >> If you're a business owner, and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So, my team and I put together the $100 scaling roadmap, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had, and what stages of growth they went through, and more importantly, where they got stuck, and how they got past it. And so, we broke it into these 10 stages, and we made this little kind of quiz thing, where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at, and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources, and finance. And so, no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so, I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you deconstruct the business, and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page, you can book a call with my team, and we will look at the business, see if we can help, and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas, and we'll do this in person, live.