The Question of Branding

The Branding Question

How many crazy hats would a mad hatter have to wear before everyone starts to call him the Mad Hatter?

In JSS 3, I let my hair down for the first time and got me some actual, real life friends. Williams, Friday, John, Kingsley, Temitope and so on. We were the troublemakers of the class, the ones who shamelessly fought with girls because they looked at us funny. We were the rogues who always failed the Math teacher’s questions and knelt down for two class periods, facing the blackboard and crying.

And we had nicknames.

Friday was short, so we called him the Transformer. I forget everyone else’s silly sobriquet, but mine was Justifier.

God, did I try to make it stick. I thought it had a nice ring to it. My name is Justin, right, so why not the Justifier for a nickname? It’s like how Arsene Wenger coaches Arsenal. I even drew costume mock-ups for when I’d (eventually) make it big as a superhero.

I tried to make that name stick. It never did. Transformer did, though. SMH. But people preferred to call me big head.

(I was called ‘big head’ before it became sexy.)

Jesus Christ was called many things, but what He really wanted to be called was the Son of Man.

‘Isn’t that the carpenter’s son?’

‘Isn’t that Jesus of Nazareth?’

‘Isn’t that the rabbi?’

‘Isn’t that the guy who keeps making it difficult for the National Bureau of Statistics to come up with an accurate figure for the ratio of dead people to living people in Israel?’

To which the Christ saith unto them:

‘Just call me Son of Man. Thanks.’

Imagine for a minute that you are a maverick grain of sand in a long stretch of desert. There are a million million billion trillion gazillion grains of sand, and all of them are essentially like you. You don’t like that. It totally makes you sick to your little sand-stomach.

So you…go against the grain.

But the thing is, you are the grain. The grain is you. Which means that even when you attempt to be unique, if the grain is all you know, there isn’t much you can introduce to the general…pool….of sandiness.

And this is where it can get tricky for a lot of people: when you attempt to be unique, it does not mean you should change every aspect of your character, or your design, or your working process. It is almost impossible to. You are gregarious by nature (even you, Hermit Herman) and this means that the attributes of the rest of the human race resides within you.

Creating a brand is all about differentiating yourself from the horde, being a unique, audible note in the noise. The most efficient way to do so is to pick the single defining element of your uniqueness and unanimously proclaim it through all your media.

Wherever you go, in whatever medium you are mentioned, ensure that your core brand message is the same.

Clearly define it, unify the message across your communication networks and be consistent. Craft, broadcast, repeat.

You can make subtle tweaks to your message and keep pushing your unique value proposition. Apple does it in its communication, but it is its product that is its biggest brand ambassador. That feeling you felt when you first touched an iPhone? That is the result of forethought, a pre-consideration for the brand message. We want people to think of us like this, we want to evoke this feeling. Now let us make everything remotely associated with us scream exactly that.

It is tough work in the beginning, but the good news is that when your brand message takes flight, you’ll find people who will continue to re-broadcast that message and amplify your coverage. For free.

The Son of Man knew that.

I am TheVunderkind on Twitter.

If you’re interested in joining the digital marketing community I talked about here, sign up by clicking the image below: