I just spoke at the MLM Startup Conference in Las Vegas as a guest of Jeff Babener and Mike Sheffield. Always exciting to be in a room full of entrepreneurs on the journey to create their dream companies.
I don’t like standing in front of a PowerPoint—it breaks the connection with the audience. So I didn’t. Instead we had a conversation about branding. Fascinating to hear how many divergent meanings people gave to this word, from “logo” to “perceptions” to “popularity” to “everything you express about your company.” None of them wrong, but none quite satisfying for me. I confessed to this audience that I keep evolving my own understanding of the term.
My definition-du-jour: “The brand is an instantaneous response to your name.”
When I look at brands and their audiences, I’m intrigued by the speed of response. I believe the decision to buy or not buy is mostly driven by gut instinct. It is formed in a flash, before all the pros and cons are weighed by the rational mind. I call this “the brand moment”. If that is correct, branding becomes the art of influencing a split-second “Yes” or “No”. At the Las Vegas seminar, I tested this idea with a simple scoring game (“Jot down a rating between 1 and 5”) while I read out a list of famous brand names. Then we played a version of the same game as our participants gave brief synopses of their own business concepts. Fun stuff, lots of laughter. And I hope a little learning.