I like this framing of a brand’s core position being an aspect of its intrinsic character versus a specific product or service.

The core position is long-range, low-turnover holding. Ralph Lauren’s preppy style or Hermès equestrian aesthetics belong here, as well as Burberry’s trench or check pattern. These are positions held for 60 years and 200 years, respectively.

Building a brand is having the patience and fortitude to do the same thing over and over and over. It’s about being boring in one way to be creative in others.

What role does your brand fill in the garden?

Unchanging evergreen or moment of glory
Summer stunner or winter warmer
Flower factory or shade sculptor

Know the seeds you’ve planted.

❤️‍🔥🧭

Markets are niches all the way down.

You don’t have to drill to the bottom. Match a sub-niche to the moment.

Don’t build your brand a faraday cage. Allow signal in and out.

❤️‍🔥🧭

Is the base stable?

Or are you building on a haphazard stack of guesses and gut feelings?

I thought that advertising is about spreading the message of your brand. “Please try my product.”

That’s not the role of advertising in marketing.

The role of advertising, turns out, is to inset the experience. It’s not just about increasing awareness, it’s that you are creating a belief that creates an anticipatory response that actually effects the feeling.

-Nir Eyal

Belief and expectations shape experience.

In many cases, your ad is the first experience someone has with your brand. What expectations are you setting?

You get tired of saying it long before customers get tired of hearing it.

If you make the best burger in town you’re going to get tired of making the best burger in town.

And when you get tired of it you’re tempted to change it.

But no one who comes through the doors is tired of it or wants you to change it.

Keep serving the burger.

Sometimes looking for something new and fresh is a reaction to boredom. But people don’t go to burger places to try the escargot.

Embrace the boring.

I got my head checked
By a jumbo jet

We spend a lot of time craft the message. What we say.

But how we say it and where we say it is just as (even more?) important.

Just ask Damon Albarn

for more proof