The Bouquet Theory of Building a Brand From Zero | Ep 974

how to start or grow your own brand. So, if branding is the deliberate pairing of things, your thing plus what your ideal customer has through an outcome, and good branding is the deliberate pairing of your thing with something good. To start a brand, we have to know what we want to pair it with to track the ideal customers. So, here we've got Bud Light, you have see good outcome for the majority of the audience. And we want to understand that just as much as we should also understand which who avoid pairing our brand with to lose customers, like the Delmo Veda example. And so, here's how I like to think about assembling the pairings for brand. So, if you're a ground zero, 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 it in 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, experience, people, et cetera, on their own are not a brand. The 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 because a 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. And if we unravel it, the brand disappears. And so, the deliberate pairing of those things makes the bread. 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 tuck 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. But, distant and random pairings hurt a bread 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 their people associate their stuff with. Good branding happens on purpose. 'Cause like, what are we looking at with a bike, a single flower, some socks, and a burger? Not 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 wanna 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. In the beginning, our brand won't be strong, just like yours one. 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. But 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? 'Cause it's going to happen. One bad pairing can absolutely hurt a brand. So if I now give my, this lovely red rose, bouquet of 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, ooh, this bouquet sucks or this brand sucks or hey, that guy got a DUI and I thought he was this paramount 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 a relevance. So we don't try and eliminate the DUI, we don't try and eliminate the dead rose, it happened, there'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. They still bought. And so you need to decide what values people experience is et cetera 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 your 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. They've been the people you associate the product with. No one was all of that occurs prior to purchase. So you can't absolutely get someone to buy the thing. But how many experiences are people are going to have with the thing once they've purchased, is 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. 'Cause if I buy that amazing Nike T-shirt and there's a hole in the armpit when it comes in, I might say, if this is the first time ever bought a Nike product, this product sucks. Therefore, Nike sucks. And then I think the whole thing is a shame. And then I also start to hate LeBron for even recommending, right? So I start to transfer backwards. Now 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 doesn't have any holes in it, now is it the highest quality a possibility? Maybe not. But it's good enough that no one's gonna 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. Now I mean personally, it's a pro tip here. If I'm going to charge a premium price, I absolutely wanna 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 were going to buy prior to them buying it. So this is a quote from Warren, "Your premium brand had better be delivering something special or it's not gonna get the business." And the only tweet I'd have on this is it's not going to keep the business. You'll get the first purchase, you just won't get the ones after that. And so all these things are like, okay, got it. So brand is pairing, I get how the pairing makes me money, I have these big margins, I got more CTRs, more people buy, and as long as my thing doesn't suck, it ideally that it's good, people keep buying. Awesome. But how do I even measure that? So brand is three main metrics. One, which is influence, which is how likely it is to change someone's behavior. So if I show someone a brand and they react in any way, they recognize it and they do something about it, then we have influence. Second is direction, are they changing the way we wanted? Or are they running away? And third, how many people it changes for? That's it. So if I show a little 100 people and 100 people react versus two people react, the 100 person reacting, at least recognition, that is the reach. How many people it changes it for? So take into the hypothetical extreme, a small, weak, and neutral brand, very few people recognize and the people that do, don't care that much about it either way. And on the other polar extreme, you have a large, large, strong positive brand. So that would be lots of people recognize the brand, it changes the behavior when they see the brand and the behavior is generally towards. So they tried to, in accordance with what that brand is asking someone to do. And I wanna make this point, a lot of people have this misnomer that any strong brand is polar, that because lots of people love it, lots of people also have to hate it. Now I say this by percentage, not necessarily by absolute. If you have, if the whole United States knows who you are, you're going to have a percentage people that hate you, be just 'cause there's crazy people. And that's what we're talking about. I'm saying, is there a brand that can't have that kind of status that isn't polar? So I'll give a polar example first. So I have the silhouette of Donald Trump here, and he has a very strong brand. He has a big reach, lots of people recognize him, even just a silhouette alone, people recognize. He has strong influence as in, the percentage of people that when they see this have a reaction in either direction, positive or negative, but just that they react, shows that he has strong influence. And the third is the direction. Now for him, he is polar, meaning many people move towards him very strongly and many people move away from him, very strong one. And so many assume that all brands are that way. And that's just because there are many examples of that, but it doesn't mean it has to be that way. And so I'll give you a different example. So some brands manage to change many people's behavior towards them all at once. And so like Taylor Swift, sure, I'm sure she's got some crazies. Don't get me wrong. But the vast majority of people, Who's seedtailed or swift, recognize her. She changed their behavior and most of the time it's towards her. So she is a large, positive, strong brand. This is also personally why I think the idea of like seeking out controversy absolutely gets you recognized. But you don't have to make that trade. You can't absolutely just build a strong, positive brand. Whether Teresa has a strong, positive brand, a lot of people know her, influence a lot of behavior, did a lot of good stuff. Must be one like I hate Mother Teresa. Some people do, but most people don't. And the same thing goes with Apple. A lot of people like their products. I'm sure there are some tech eats that are like, "And so it's way better." They're like, "Peace is awesome." And that's great. That's good for them. But the vast majority of people who encounter the product like it, which is why they're one of the largest companies in the world. So all those examples that it gives you up to this point have assumed a large audience. And I do that because this is a prostitution and it makes more sense for me to work with you on stuff that you already know. But this concept carries independent of whether you have large reach and this is why it applies to you. So if you had a small audience with high influence, what would you have? Come on, mom and dad. They are high influence. As in most people when they see their parents, their behavior changes. They have low reach because for you, they're only your parents. They might have been any, I don't know if they're, they might be some other people's parents, not many people's parents, as you have low reach and it will be your behavior will towards for some and away for others. Meaning some people hate their parents and don't want to do anything they say and some people like their parents and do whatever they say. And there's a lot of people in between. And so that's how we measure if what we're doing to grow our brain is actually working. Are more people finding out about it? Are more people changing their behavior when they do it? And ideally, are they doing that towards the direction that we want them to go? So if I say, hey, everybody, go click here, go download this thing, go attend this event, go buy this product, whatever it is, if a lot of people do that, then we know that the brain is growing. And so we want, when we want to build our brand, we want to pair our stuff with the things the highest percentage of our audience like. And so whenever we pair anything with a brand, because especially if you're starting out, everything is new. And so every new pairing has risk. And so you risk losing a certain percentage of your audience who has a bad experience of the thing you pair. There's always that risk. There's always going to be some people who don't like something you do. If anyone see a small town band go hit it big, some of the old towners like, ah, they sold out, they did whatever. But what they did was they gambled the short term loss of that local audience, potentially, for a much broader, bigger audience. So they made a bet. They did lose people. They did gain people. They just gained more than they lost. And so to the same degree, when you make that bet as the local band, you risk gaining other people who have had a positive experience with this new thing. And ideally, we have more green than red. And so those news parings, the new pairings you make with a brand always lose audience, right? He sold out. I like the old stuff better. This also happens with content by the way. And so this person is the red bucket. Fantastic. And the new stuff might also cause people to say, no, this new stuff rocks. And that person is in the green bucket. And so whenever you try to grow and you make any new pairing, meaning you make new content, you make a new genre, you make a new song, you make a new anything, you make a bet that more people from our ideal audience will like the pairing than people who don't. TLDR that you'll net an increase in reach, influence, and positive direction. And so my ask for word here is don't let the five mean comments stop you from gaining the 500 new people who like the new thing. So let me finish the real life example to make this whole thing real for you. I want to associate myself with business value. So I associate myself with making people money and growing their businesses. So there's me, there's me making content, and then ideally money. And so the best way I can do this is make content for the small business undercuts to consume and books for them to read and use so that they then profit. The good thing. And then they associate that growth and profit with me. And so then they consume more of my stuff. They drink the next soda. They buy the next shirt. And so the next time they want it to happen again, they take the action or they have a higher likelihood of taking the desired action. And equally important, people who don't like business stuff won't like my stuff or they just prefer to watch other things. So you've got this married couple. They say we hate people who talk about money. They're probably not going to like my stuff. And that's okay. But people who like business have a business or trying to start one might want more. And this grows the bread because people consume the stuff and they say, hey, you got to check out her words of stuff. And then that person, they tell it to says right on. They check it out. They get that positive outcome. They make the pairing as well and the brand grows and ideally with my deal audience. And so to see this in action, if you use this information from today to make money, good branding has occurred. And so I said I was going to cover three things. What branding is? I do a good branding is. Why makes you money and how to start and grow yours? So hopefully you feel like I fulfilled those three things. [MUSIC]