Unsure How to Build Your Brand? Focus on the Feelings You Want to Deliver
Focus on the feelings, not the content
Building a brand is a tricky thing. When people start up companies or begin a creative career of any sort, we almost always run into one major problem: what genre will we produce?
My friend David knows this pain all too well. He has been a musician for as long as I’ve known him. For fifteen years I’ve watched him struggle with this internal battle. Like me, he loves a wide variety of music. And even worse, he’s skilled enough to play it all.
Seriously, the guy plays every instrument I can think of. He’s a virtuoso in every sense of the word.
But while that kind of virtuosity sounds like a blessing at first, let me inform you, dear reader, that it’s much more of a curse than a blessing.
He’ll write a Dubstep song today and a Future Bass song tomorrow. Then he’ll switch over to Hip Hop the day after that. And with each offering, he blows his friends’ minds with his ability.
But while he does each of these things exceedingly well, each and every song he releases goes nowhere. Fifteen years in, he’s stuck with less than 10 listeners per song and a gazillion songs that all sound really different.
David is tormented by his lack of reception for his music. He DMs me and asks me why the world just can’t see his awesome talent. He wants to know what he’s doing wrong.
“Well, Dave, I hate to say it, you just haven’t built a brand that people can’t get enough of. You’re erratic, all over the place, and you know it.”
He hears my words, processes them, takes a big, begrudging gulp, and agrees; but only before telling me that he simply can’t choose. And every week, he decides on a new genre all over again.
This was me for a few months when I first started writing. When I first began creating content, I lacerated my soul over which genre I wanted to pick. There are so many good ones, from non-fiction, philosophy, sexuality, poetry, you name it. As a bibliophile, I’m in love with all of these things.
Writers, business owners, and artists all go through this same process. We try to genre-fy ourselves and make ourselves into an image. This is the Golden Calf of the content creation and business worlds.
It’s our desire for security in a sea of uncertainty. It’s the quiet lie we tell ourselves that it’s the path to riches.
We convince ourselves that if we can just pick a damn genre, mastering it like the others who came before us, and repeat the same process to death, over and over again, we’ll make the big bucks.
Onward to Lambos.
This, my friends, is a lie.
Are You Building a Brand or Trying to Fit in With a Genre?
But even trying to genre-fy yourself is the wrong path. Because when we do that, we just try to copy what other successful people are doing. And we don’t actually add any new value to the equation.
The idea that mastering a genre will take us to new heights of success is like building a liferaft with a hole in it. And why is that? Because there’s a gazillion failed artists in every single genre.
There’s a slew of bad poets, but Tennyson always delivers. There’s an army of unemployed heavy metal guitarists, but Slayer has toured the world and sold millions of records. There’s a near-infinity of bands who mastered their genres and went nowhere, but everyone who isn’t living under a rock knows the name (and costumes) of Slipknot.
Because those people built a brand, not a genre.
So what actually is a brand?
A brand isn’t the same thing as a genre and a genre isn’t the same thing as a brand.
Genres are images, themes, motifs, things that string together a wide variety of more precise things into a big tent. Reading Alexander Pope and Allen Ginsberg will quickly show you that while, yes, they’re both technically poetry, they’re very different brands, writers who wrote centuries apart.
And aren’t Tupac and Migos technically both hip-hop artists? Yes, they are. But when you listen to their music, you get entirely different sets of feelings from them.
Brands are more pinpointed, more nuanced, more accurate descriptions of our feelings than genres are. And that’s where the magic lies.
Genres are ways we categorize style. Brands are reflections of the feelings we get when we enjoy a certain piece of media or the products of a certain company.
Think about it this way, there are hamburgers, and then there’s McDonald’s (or In-and-Out if you’re from the West Coast). There’s coffee and then there’s Starbucks.
If you’re trying to establish yourself as a restaurant, would you really want to make just hamburgers all day? Nothing special, just burgers? Of course not.
So if you’re wondering what kind of brand to create, stop and ask yourself, what kind of feelings do you want your consumers to feel when they encounter you out in the big wide world?
A brand is an intangible thing, it’s a feeling more than anything physical you can point to and say, “That’s it.”
So create those intangible feelings first. Then worry about the content and genres later.
Ask yourself, do you want your readers to feel relaxed or on the edge of their seats? Do you want your readers to be informed with actionable takeaways, or confused like a psychological thriller that just ended and left you dangling on the edge of your own sanity?
Developing Your Signature
I once saw an interview by the band The Crystal Method and they were asked, at the height of their career, what advice they had for aspiring musicians out there.
They said, paraphrasing here:
“We get a lot of people who come to us with their mixtapes and mix CDs, they tell us they’ve got their Trance song, their Breakbeat song, their Drum and Bass song, and a song from pretty much every genre imaginable. But we never tried to do that with our music. We didn’t want to be known as just another Trance act or just another Breakbeat act, we wanted to be known as The Crystal Method.”
And they’re onto something.
Stop and think about every time you’ve wandered into a store and overheard The Rolling Stones or Guns and Roses on the radio. Did you stop and think, “That’s rock and roll,” or, “That’s eighties heavy metal?” Nope. You instantly knew who they were by their signature sound.
That signature is what gives a brand its familiarity. Humans, being particularly well-tuned to interpreting art as a social medium, interpret this as feelings.
If you hand a child a guitar or a piano, you probably wouldn’t expect to get Mozart within the first few years (unless the child was actually Mozart). No, a child is going to bang and smash those instruments in various ways. It’s going to shatter all of the conventional norms.
A child is experimenting, it’s learning what the different notes do, and they might even use the instruments in ways that they weren’t even intended to be used in the first place.
You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet in life. Developing a signature style requires this process. You have to experiment a little bit and try new things in order to find that magical thing that works just for you and your brand.
As Picasso once said, “Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist.”
Most of all, the important thing is to not focus on style as much as the feelings you want people to take away from your brand. That stuff is hard to pin down but it’s what people can’t get enough of.
