In my last post, I concluded with this: “all businesses, including yours, exist solely to build a brand.”

Whenever I write or say this, it provokes a response, and this time was no exception. “How can you say building a brand is the sole purpose of my company?”, the responses go. “What about earning a profit/delivering value to shareholders/creating a great product/acquiring customers/et cetera?”

My answer is that all of those things are important, but they all depend on a strong brand, and so building a brand is more fundamental to the purpose of business.

The difficulty, perhaps, is that we often talk about brand without actually using the word “brand”. Consider this quote from Peter Drucker:

The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.

Once you understand that your brand is how a person feels about you (I’m going to stop saying “you/your company/your product”), you see that Mr. Drucker is really talking about brand.

How do you create a customer? You establish a emotional connection between you and them that’s positive and prompts them to use your services (and hopefully give you money for the opportunity). And how do you keep a customer? You nurture and grow the emotional connection between you and the customer to make it enduring.

Everything else we do in our businesses either contributes to this (creating a great product that meets your customer’s need builds a positive emotional connection with them), or is derivative to it (with passionate customers and a good business model, you’ll earn a profit and deliver value to your shareholders).

By definition, to create and keep a customer, you must create and grow a brand. Ergo, the purpose of business is to create and grow a brand. Q.E.D.

It’s a cautionary tale that’s so familiar it spawned an archetype: the brilliant engineer who invents game-changing technology that never succeeds in the marketplace because (as every good product manager knows) a technology is not enough. Technology is but one thing needed to build something bigger — a product. The archetypical engineer has a blind spot that hides from her this larger truth. Enter product managers, gifted with insight into the holy product, who swoop in to save the day. (Having been a product manager myself, I can poke fun.)

Now, while there is some truth to this story, fortunately the understanding that a technology is but one part of a successful product has become widespread (including, it must be said, by lots of those “stereotypical” engineers). But ironically, there’s yet another blind spot that affects those most convinced they see the full picture. In this new blind spot looms something bigger than product. What looms there is brand.

Just as the stereotypical engineer focuses too much on technology and fails to appreciate product, the stereotypical product manager focuses too much on product and fails to appreciate brand. Yes, technology is not enough and is but one thing needed to build a product. But just as true is that a product is not enough. Product is but one thing needed to build something bigger — a brand.

Successful teams and companies understand this and orient all of their activities towards creating this greater asset. They understand this fundamental truth: all businesses, including yours, exist solely to build a brand.

I’m a big fan of simplicity in design. Given the human propensity to complicate and do more, simplicity remains vastly underrated despite its obvious appeal and value. One of my favorite articulations of this in the context of product design comes from Brian Christensen: “Most people need less done well, not more done poorly.”

But recently I’ve been thinking a lot about simplicity in the context of brand design. Specifically, I’m pondering John Gall’s famous comment on systems design, sometimes called Gall’s Law, which states:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

I’ve come to believe a similar “law” is at play with creating great brands. I’d state it like this: A strong and complex brand that works is invariably found to have evolved from a strong and simple brand that worked.

By “simple brand” I don’t mean something akin to Al Ries’ “Law of the Word” where FedEx = Overnight delivery, Kleenex = tissue, etc. I think that’s overly simplistic, and is one of the rigid ways of thinking that lead people astray from a real understanding of brand.

Powerful brands are rich and complex things, and the best of them are organic and alive. But any rich and complex emotional connection must start with, and be grounded in, a simple emotional connection. That’s what I mean by a “simple brand”.

Think of the relationships in your life. If you’re married, think of how you came to love your husband or wife. That relationship didn’t appear fully formed with all the richness and complexity that comes with years of shared experiences. Rather, it started with something simple. Maybe you noticed her hands, or her eyes, or the way she laughed. And from that initial connection, a richer relationship developed.

I’ve taken away two key insights from my pondering:

• First, take care to not overdefine your brand at the start. Don’t limit yourself to one word, but neither indulge the temptation to have 12 “core values”. Focus on your core, and articulate that in a simple way others can connect to.
• But second, don’t make the mistake of limiting yourself to that initial brand definition. Allow your brand to grow and develop as your customers develop a more rich and complex connection to it.

Grounding your brand in a simple core, but allowing your brand to change and grow, is the path to creating something powerful and enduring.

It’s one thing to understand that a brand is how people feel about a thing, but it’s another thing to fully grasp the implications of that and fit it into one’s worldview. One thread I’ve been pulling on for a long time is to find the perfect metaphor for brand. It’s been a fun but frustrating mental exercise.

To fully capture the concept of brand, we must represent not just the thing, but how people feel about it. It’s the reaction to the action, the context to the text, the ground to the figure. Yet those comparisons are imperfect, since a brand exists in some sense independently of its stimulus.

I’ve cycled through a lot of metaphors — echolocation, chemical reactions, the electromagnetic spectrum, holograms, dark matter — and it’s been fun to think about, but I haven’t nailed it yet. I’ll keep trying.

But suffice it to say this: to fully understand brand, you need to see not just what’s there, but the effect it has on the world around it. And when that clicks, you’ll look at everything a bit differently. You’ll see there’s McDonald’s, and there’s how you feel about McDonald’s; there’s the trusty Honda you drive to work each day, and there’s how you feel about your Honda; there’s your family, and there’s how you feel about your family.

Once you have the ability to see the world that way, you have the power to influence it. And that’s when the fun begins.

I’ll confess to a deep cynical streak about certain things. One of those things is business writing, especially writing about marketing and brand. Most of this “content” seems designed by its “contributors” to do nothing more than create “engagement” for the web behemoths publishing it to attract eyeballs to pay the bills. What’s worse, this word spew often serves to confuse more than illuminate.

A prime example of this is kind of writing is writing about brand. With rare exceptions like Marty Neumeier’s books, most brand writing consists of some a combination of anecdotes about ranchers, cattle, Nike sneakers, and Tide laundry detergent, with some version of the phrase “your brand is what your customers say it is” thrown in for good measure. It’s not that this writing is wrong, per se, just that it ends up obfuscating what I believe is actually a simple (even primal) concept.

Here’s how I define brand: a brand is how a person feels about a thing. Defined this way, a few things become clear.

• First, we all instinctively understand brand, because all of us (with the possible exception of one Dr. Sacks’ patients) feel about things.
• Second, almost everything has a brand. Barack Obama has a brand; golden retrievers have a brand; the park bench has a brand; your grandmother has a brand; 7th grade has a brand; because you feel something about all of those things (although in the case of some things like the park bench, it may amount to little or nothing).
• Third, every thing has as many brands as there are people to feel something about it. My brand for golden retrievers is not exactly the same as your brand (although in all likelihood there’s a lot of similarity between our two golden retriever brands, unless you’re some kind of monster).

Now, saying that brand is a simple concept and that we all understand it instinctively, is not to say that we all are conscious of it and its effects on the world around us. But that can be gained with a change your perspective and the courage to take the red pill.

The Universe is one of those things that begs the use of the phrase “mind blown” without irony or hyperbole. 91 billion light-years in diameter (that we can observe, the totality is likely much larger), 13.8 billion years old (give or take), filled with perhaps as many as 10 trillion galaxies, each with 100 billion or so stars. (That’s 100 octillion stars in total, but who’s counting?)

The Universe is so vast and filled with stuff that we have a hard time looking at nothing. If we point our most powerful telescopes at the parts of the sky that seem absolutely empty, after enough time we find that, in fact, that part of the sky isn’t empty at all, but is as filled with galaxies as the parts that shine brightly with stars.

But of all the unfathomable facts about the Universe, perhaps this is the most mind blowing (see?) of all: by our best estimates, everything we can see and observe — all the matter — accounts for only 15% of the total. The other 85% is something that neither emits nor absorbs light or any other electromagnetic radiation and we can’t directly detect in any way. The vast majority of the matter in the Universe is not matter at all, it’s dark matter.

Dark matter makes up the vast majority of our Universe, and yet we can’t see it at all; we can only infer its existence from its effect on what we can see. And that, dear reader wondering why you’re reading about the Universe on a site dedicated to brand strategy, brings us to brand.

There is so much sturm and drang in the business and tech worlds, and all of it focused on what we can see and directly observe. Very little attention is paid to that which we can’t see, but which has a profound (even dominant) influence on everything around us. Product, sales, customer support, growth hacking, et al — these are the matter of the business world. But brand…brand is the dark matter. More on this in the days to come.