What Does "Brand" Mean Anyway?

Chubbies has one of the strongest men's brands out there. However, for the better part of a decade, I had no idea what brand meant.

Once I found out what it meant, and how to quantify it, our business fundamentally changed for the better in the form of material profit generation.

Here's what I learned and what you can do to get your company thinking about brand from the business performance perspective.

*what I learned*

brand ≠ logo, font, color scheme

brand = the revenue you have when you turn off ads, new product launches, and promotions.

it generally manifests in owned and organic new customer acquisition.

when that's growing, the brand is strengthening.

things like logo, font, color schemes, taglines, jingles, etc, are great tactics to help drive changes in the ways people think about your brand.

this is brandING

however, the output of branding is your brand.

the problem with focusing only on brandING is that you can't measure it. and because of that, you can't invest in it. and, most importantly, you can't connect it to profits.

not saying branding is not important.

it is.

however, it is not the most important thing.

the most important thing for a consumer brand is to strengthen their brand so that, over time, the % of new customer revenue coming through owned and organic channels (from all sales channels) increases over time.

very simply, it boils down to building and strengthening your free money machine.

this is more important than your return on ad spend, your customer acquisition cost, or your marketing efficiency ratio.

as an example: Coke can turn off ads, new product launches and promotions and they'll still have a massive business.

on the other end of the spectrum, the dropshipper who just started selling whatever is trending on Tiktok turns off ads and they have zero dollars coming in the door.

one business can be handed to future generations and will generate predictable profits for long periods of time. the other will likely go out of business (nothing against dropshippers. just a different game.)

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*what can you do about it as you prep for 2024*

Make sure everyone in the company knows the answers to the following 3 questions:

1) What is the % of new customer revenue coming through owned and organic channels?

2) is it higher than same time last year?

3) what are we doing to increase that percentage?

when the answer to 2 is yes, keep going.

if no, it is so important to get everyone together to get an understanding of why and what we're going to do about it.

unlike vanity metrics like revenue or return on ad spend, the metrics around your owned and organic new customer acquisition engine are core fundamentals of business performance that should be maniacally tracked, thought about, talked about, brainstormed about improving, etc.

we're here to build and strengthen the free money machine; not to get good at buying transactions.

let's gooooo
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Thanks for reading. If this post was helpful, here are 4 things you can do right now to 

• Get more strategic + tactical nuggets on brand building, 

• Tactics on connecting brand building to financial impact, 

• And specific things you can do to build strong emotional connections with your audience: 

1) Subscribe to the Brand Builders podcast on YouTube or Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. 
2) Apply to join our brand builders slack community (suuuuper small group exclusively for brand founders and operators), 
3) Follow Tom and Preston on Linkedin for regular posts on this stuff
4) And heck, share this with someone