This is part 5 of a 13 part series identifying who Wildstory is, what the intricacies of branding are, and how this can all benefit you.
Video Transcript
Keith Roberts 0:05
Tell me, how do you define a brand, branding, brand strategy and brandstorytelling?
Marc Gutman 0:11
That's a great question. And it's a super confusing kind of discipline and, you know, brand and branding. It's a relatively young discipline and, and it's really hot right now. And I'll talk about why it's really hot, but it's evolving. And so there's a lot of confusion around these words. And for me, you know, the definition of a brand is not your logo. It's not your corporate identity, it's not your product. It's not even a promise, a lot of people say a brand is a promise. And it's certainly not all the impressions that you make across your company, or brand.
But really, the definition that I like to go by is that it's, it's a gut feeling that someone has about your products or services. And it's a gut feeling, because we are crazy, emotional, intuitive creatures as humans, right, like, we are not logical, we like to think that we're logical, but we're not we're emotional. And it becomes a gut feeling. Because also, as business owners, we have this misconception that we control the brand. And we don't, our customers control the brand, it's created by the customers. And so it's created and owned by the customers, not the company, not our brand, teams, not agency, not an agency. Like that's a crazy concept to me to think about.
Even when I like I sit in this every day. And I think about, like what is a brand, the idea that we we work on brands that we don't really control it, we do our best to create a brand we do our best to influence what a brand is, but we don't actually control or own it. And in the truest sense, and why brands even exist is because people use brands to simplify buying choices, you know, like we're living in this crazy world. And I'll talk about that a little later, where we just have infinite choice. And so we don't know how to categorize all that information. And brands really exist to help us simplify buying choices. And kind of back to the idea of like a brand isn't what you say it is, but what the outward outside world say it is like one of my favorite quotes of all time is from Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world. So I, I take him as a an authority on this topic. And he's super customer-centric.
He's all about customers. He you know, I really value his outlook on things and and he says that a brand is simply it's what people say about you, and you're not in the room. And if you think about that for a second, that's a super, super easy definition, whether that's a personal brand, right? What are people saying about you? And I, Keith, when we're not in the room? Or what are they saying about our company, and that's, and that's really when people are speaking their truth, you know, you know, people will tell you that they love your company, or love what you're doing or that they need you. But really, it's about like when you're not around and what they're saying about you.
That's the true testament of your brand. And so branding is an extension of that. And branding is simply a process that is designed to create a business strategy that outmaneuver your competition, say that again. But branding, to me is a process that is designed to create a business strategy that outmaneuver your competition, and then brand storytelling, you know, you ladder up to that, that becomes the ongoing telling of your brand. That's most often the telling of the story of your customer. So you know, and when we tell that story of our customer that should be told with them as the hero of the story, like sticking in one of the you know, we have 10 wild story brand principles have become a wild story a brand, but one of them makes them your customer, the hero of the story. And so when we think about how do we make the customer the hero of their own life story when using our products and services? So like, how do I make Keith the hero?
You know, like, how do I like in the story of his own life when he's out there telling his friends? You know, if you're my target customer, that's what I'm really thinking about. And then brand storytelling just becomes this communication tool and methodology of how do we continue to tell that story over and over again, with consistency, but variety? So that's an interesting concept, right? Like, how are we consistent, but have variety, both internally, to our employees? So we can build a strong culture? How do we tell that story to our stakeholders and our investors, so they believe in our mission and help us getting to where we want to go to achieve our vision, and then obviously, externally to our existing customers, and enter enroll, right?
Because I really believe the purpose of what we're trying to do with all this with brand, the branding, brand storytelling, it's not so much to sell people. I mean, at the end day, yes, we want people to buy our products. That's what we need them to do. But the effective way to do that for the long term and to have people buying from us again and again, is to enroll them in our brand, and enroll them in our community. And that's how you can do that through brand storytelling.
Keith Roberts 5:02
Very cool man. I've never looked at branding like chess before, but the way that you explained it is out moving your competition and sort of looking seven moves ahead. It's a really interesting analogy. I like that. A lot.
