Here is a truth many marketers don’t want you to know: branding is simpler than they say it is.
It might even be as simple as a bouquet of flowers.
To illustrate this point, here is a video of Alex Hormozi talking about branding to a group of entrepreneurs. As he explains: “brand isn’t actually a thing. It’s an association of things we know and what people don’t know…which is usually our company.”
He explains that it’s like a bouquet of flowers. A bouquet of flowers looks like a singular entity – until you drop it on the floor and realize it’s just a bunch of individual components. That’s like your brand, too. A brand is a series of associations, which, combined, help someone grasp who you are and what they should expect.
For example, let’s consider the brands of two very famous billionaires, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Both of these men are white, middle-aged, multi-billionaires, who made their fortunes aggressively building tech monopoly empires. Yet their brands could not be more different. In Gates we have a sweater-wearing, philanthropist nerd who is now commonly associated with vaccines, nuclear energy and the developing world. In Bezos, we have the recently buffed up owner of the Washington Post who wore a cowboy hat to Space. For all that is similar between these two, the differences create vastly different images and feelings.
Here is another way to illustrate the bouquet idea: imagine that you gift a client a basket of fruits for their birthday. All the fruits are pristine… except one. One is terribly smelly and rotten.
Would the inclusion of that one rotten fruit taint the image as a whole? Almost certainly. It only takes one bad apple to ruin the fruit basket.
There are two points here to takeaway. First, branding is a bit of an art but simpler than many realize. Don’t allow marketers to make you think it’s
Second, if you want to create and shape a brand, then define and nurture associations. What are your values, core messages, and reputation? How do you want to look, speak, act and write? What associations can you make that will help people take you a certain way? Even deceptively small choices can have surprisingly big consequences, like wearing pearl earrings or showing up in jeans.
It’s all just a bouquet, and there many flowers to choose from.
