The Content Strategist Who Turns Founder Brands Into MILLIONS

In your opinion, what separates a bad brand from a good brand?

I think good branding, when you do it well, is an intentional pairing of relevant things done consistently.

So that's the action.

The outcome of branding is brand.

Good brand is when [laughs] the audience inherently associates you with the thing that you wanna be associated with, okay? And so the thing that I think a lot of people don't realize is that you're on one of two paths It's either the forgettable brand or the intentional brand.

And if you don't understand what you want to be known for, then you will be known for random shit.

If you want a good brand, you wanna know, what associations do I want? And the way that you create those associations is you just pair yourself consistently with the things that you wanna be known for.

However, people do a lot of work on figuring out what associations they want to have over here, but they ignore the work over here, which is, what associations do I not wanna have? What associations would make it harder for the outcome that I desire to occur? If we wanna be known as a trusted individual that actually delivers results, but we show up online with a bunch of characters who are known for not doing that, what does that lead to? The audience inherently associating us with them.

This is where the term lumped into the crowd comes from, right? We are who we surround ourselves with.

Right.

Because the negative associations, as we're seeing with a lot of characters in the public space right now, are actually more detrimental than the positive associations are helpful.

And so I try to use the language of toward or away.

Mm.

Does this association move you towards where you wanna go or away from where you want to be?

Okay.

That is then how you, on an individual basis, are able to determine what is a positive association, what's a negative association.

Right.

So which companies have paired themselves correctly in your opinion?

The classic example here is Nike and Michael Jordan, or LeBron James, right? And they've done this in every single sport now with the top athletes in the world.

They wore Nikes every night.

By doing that, Nike was able to pair themselves with greatness.

And what's crazy is, like, I remember as a kid, I thought if I got the Air Jordans, I was gonna dunk it.

[laughs] I thought I was gonna jump from the free throw line.

But, like, this is how branding actually works.

This is why the celebrity endorsement is so powerful.