Begin With Generosity
To emerge as a brand you need to build associations. Until you have the budget to associate with Taylor Swift. Or an underpriced market share to associate with Ryan Reynolds, be associated with generosity.
What is generosity?
Think about the most generous person you know. They help you move house. They support you through hard times. They surprise you on your birthday. They’re optimistic. They give without expectation.
Their behaviour correlates with their values, and you want to associate with them. More importantly, you want to be associated with them.
Now think about the opposite.
The friend who takes, takes, takes, never buys a round of drinks and turns up late. The friend who brings the least, but consumes the most. The friend that complains. The friend who always has an ulterior motive lurking beneath their presence.
Over time the same correlation of values happens, but in the opposite direction. Eventually, you don’t want to associate, or be associated with that friend anymore.
The same is true for brands.
Reputation is Everything
Branding has always been a lucrative opportunity for businesses to position themselves towards growth and away from commodification. (And do some good along the way).
Today, to start a business and reach an audience, the barrier has never been lower. To build a brand however, the competition has never been greater. Reach does not always rhyme with revenue—reputation does.
It doesn't matter whether you’re a low ticket commodity or a high value luxury experience—if your business model resembles: ‘How much xanthan gum can we sneak into the mayonnaise without anyone realising?’ your time is limited.
Conversely, if people are saying they can’t believe the value you’re providing for free, what they’ll also begin to think is, imagine if we were paying…
Faux Generosity
It’s important to note: ‘Bigger portions’ is not always an indicator of quality. Being generous with invaluable assets is not generosity, it’s spam. Being generous with disingenuous assets is not generosity, it’s a scam.
Generosity is not random acts of kindness to strangers. That’s charity. We’re talking about specific actions of value creation for an intended audience.
Hesitation to be generous is generally because of fear of competition. Be reassured. If their attention is on you, no one’s attention is on them (or at least not for very long). Knowledge of how does not bestow the experience required to do. By demonstrating generosity and competency for free, you begin to behave like a business worth paying for, and a brand worth believing in.
The Rules Have Changed
In today’s economic landscape, you will not be able to compete with ‘better, faster, cheaper’ alternatives. You will either commodify into irrelevance or balance on razor-thin margins until you slip. Your best shot is to be associated with ‘generous, forever and phenomenal’.
Perception is Everything
Generosity frames what you perceive as an opportunity or an obstacle. Informing not just the culture you build, but the communities you nurture. To be known for being generous is the best ROI for your resources.
For example, if you’ve devoted the last 10 years to mowing lawns, no doubt you know a thing or two about grass. There are 92 football stadiums in the UK, that’s 617,574m² of pitch to maintain.
That’s a lot of grass.
How many football stadiums have the potential to care about what you have to say? All of them. How many insights might you have to give away until people begin to perceive you as a prodigy and not a parrot? Enough.
Be generous with what you know and the right people, when they hear it, will listen.
Branding Just Got Personal
Branding is evolving. The age of faceless corporations and salient logos is not dead, just no longer relevant to the new era of brands currently being built.
The whales may always own the waters, but they can never discover new land.
The radical shift towards ‘personal branding’ and digital authenticity might just be a symptom of 8bn people trying to figure out who’s honest. Or it might be a feature of the new era of attention.
So how can we future proof a business worth buying from, to build a brand worth belonging to? Timestamp your values.
