Elon Musk built rockets and cars that people swore were impossible. Ask him how, and he’ll tell you he uses first principles thinking. Strip away assumptions. Rebuild from raw truth. Ignore how things have “always been done.”

There’s just one problem with that story.

The Man Who Actually Invented It

Musk didn’t invent the method of first principles thinking. Nobody alive did. Aristotle was reasoning from first principles 2,300 years ago.

What Richard Feynman invented, decades before Musk, is the test that tells you whether you’ve actually done it. And he used it in a far more dangerous way.

Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose work sits inside the laser, the microchip, and the phone in your pocket right now. But his real genius was simpler than any of that.

He refused to accept any idea he couldn’t explain in plain words, and that habit let him see what rooms full of experts kept missing.

It wasn’t a party trick. When NASA buried the Challenger disaster under layers of jargon and blame, Feynman walked onto live television, dropped a rubber seal into a glass of ice water, and showed the truth in about ten seconds. No slides. No acronyms. A piece of rubber in cold water, and the whole explanation was over.

That same discipline is the exact line between businesses people understand, and those people ignore.

Musk used first principles to solve engineering problems. Feynman used it to catch himself not understanding what he was sure he understood. His rule was simple: if you can’t explain something in plain terms, you don’t actually understand it.

But here is the part everyone miscopies.

Feynman’s rule was not “make complicated things simple.” That’s the bumper-sticker version. His real point cuts deeper: if you cannot make it simple, you probably haven’t found the fundamental truth yet.

Feynman would sit with a blank piece of paper and try to explain any concept as if the person listening had never heard of it. The moment he got stuck wasn’t a communication failure. It was evidence. Evidence that his understanding had a hole in it, and the hole had been hiding behind a fancy phrase the whole time.

The jargon was never the explanation. It was the mask over the gap.

This should terrify every founder reading this right now.

Your Jargon is a Trillion-dollar Confession

Sit in enough strategy meetings, and you’ll see the same decks over and over. Bold claims dressed up in words like synergy, ecosystem, best-in-class solution, and value proposition. The room nods. Everyone feels smart. Nobody asks a simple question.

Ask that same executive to explain their brand to a twelve-year-old. Watch the silence.

That silence isn’t a communication problem. It’s Feynman’s stuck point. It’s proof that underneath the deck, where the real idea was supposed to be, nothing but expensive sentences is standing in for one.

Complexity is where weak differentiation goes to hide.

When you cannot isolate the fundamental truth of your brand, you compensate with vocabulary. You pile on syllables, frameworks, and buzzwords, hoping nobody looks under the hood.

Naval Ravikant made the exact same observation about founders. Excessive terminology, he says, usually means you know the names of things but not their underlying relationships. Knowing a word is not the same as knowing what it connects to. And that is the difference between repeating something and understanding it.

Put it to the test.

Musk asks, “What is a rocket actually made of?”

Feynman asks, “What do we actually know?”

Naval asks, “Can you derive it from the fundamentals?”

The branding version is simpler and harder: “What is the one thing about this company that stays true after you strip away every adjective, claim, cliché, and category convention?”

That’s the real discipline. Not plain language for its own sake. First-principles differentiation.

I’ve been doing this for over four decades. The brands that got this right have generated more than $9.8 billion. The ones that didn’t lose an amount nobody will ever calculate, because you can’t invoice for the sale you never got.

The brands that won had one thing in common. I could explain every single one of them in a single sentence that a child could hand back to me.

Alex Hormozi, who has spent his career teaching founders to sell, lands the identical rule in marketing language: you will never be clever enough to replace being clear. People think the job is to be clever. The job is to be clear. Same principle, a different room, the same lesson. He spends an hour on it here, and it’s worth the hour.

The Twelve-year-old Test

KnowBe4, whose software trains employees not to fall for phishing: “Human error. Conquered.” I worked with Stu Sjouwerman creating the name KnowBe4 and their differentiator: Human error, Conquered. The company went on to a $4.6 billion valuation.

Menomonie, Wisconsin, a city that needed to differentiate itself from surrounding cities and destinations: “Right in the middle of everywhere.” Tourism rose 500% in a single year, with no increase in marketing spend.

A nutrition bar with five clean, pronounceable ingredients: “Delicious. Nutritious. Nothing suspicious.”

A gourmet jerky line: “Nature’s original protein bar.”

Not one comma of committee-approved word salad. Just an idea simple enough to survive contact with a child.

That’s your test. It isn’t complicated, which is the entire point.

Explain what makes your brand different. Out loud. To someone who has never heard of your company. The second you reach for a buzzword, you’ve found your stuck point. You’ve found the exact place where you don’t yet know what actually makes you different.

Most founders treat that moment as a writing problem. It isn’t. It’s an understanding problem, and you can’t hire your way past it. An agency will just dress the confusion in nicer fonts.

Never Learn for One

Here’s the discipline I teach, and it’s the one that fixes this.

Never learn for one. Always learn for two.

When you study something, don’t study it to know it. Study it so you can hand it to someone else and watch them pick it up, understand it, think with it, and successfully use it. If you can’t do that, you don’t have it yet. You have some jargon sitting there instead of a clearly understandable idea.

The moment you learn for two, your depth of understanding multiplies. You stop collecting terms and start seeing how the parts connect, because teaching won’t let you skip the connections.

I built my Brand Intervention masterclass on that principle. The 100 entrepreneurs I put through that 9-week program generated over $512 million in new business.

Feynman did it with a blank piece of paper. I do it with entrepreneurs and founders. Same rule.

And clarity is only half the job. A sentence a child understands can still belong to your competitor word for word. That’s a different test, and I just ran it on Honda.

Nobody Does This Alone

Musk didn’t do it alone. Feynman didn’t either.

The blank sheet of paper only works because somebody is on the other side of it. That’s the entire mechanism. You need a person who has never heard your explanation to show you where it falls apart. The lone genius is a story people tell afterward, and anyone selling it to you is lying.

It’s a role I’ve filled for my clients for decades.

Never learn for one. Always learn for two. That habit is the whole reason a second pair of eyes is worth anything: I’m not there to know your business, I’m there to hand it back to you in words you can use.

If you tried to say your sentence out loud and reached for a buzzword, you found it. Feynman’s stuck point. Yours.

That’s not a failure. It tells you the exact place where you don’t yet know what makes your company different, and no amount of rewriting gets you past it, because it was never a writing problem.

So here’s my invite: a free 30-minute Stuck Point Session.

I won’t workshop taglines with you. We go straight at the thing underneath the jargon: the truth about your business that a competitor couldn’t use if they tried. You’ll leave with it in plain words, short enough that a twelve-year-old could hand it back to you.

Then you’ll be able to hand it to your team. Which, as you now know, is the only proof you actually have it.

Why free? Think of it as a virtual “let’s grab a coffee.”

Because you’ve been explaining your business the same way for so long that you can no longer hear what’s missing from it. Thirty minutes with someone who has never heard it before fixes that faster than a year of internal meetings.

The fundamental truth about your company is already in there. Somebody just voted it down for being too simple.

Book your free Stuck Point Session → https://DavidBrierCalendar.as.me/IntroductorySession

The post The Trick Elon Musk Stole to Build a Trillion-Dollar Empire appeared first on Branding and Brand Strategy for Growing Companies.

The greatest threat to your brand isn’t AI. It’s competing on price.

Every founder I sit with asks how their business survives a machine that writes copy faster and builds funnels cheaper. Wrong villain. The thing killing your business is quiet, and it shows up as one symptom: customers choosing you on price.

The moment you discount to close a deal, your value is already dead. And the cause is a leak in your brand differentiation, one you can’t see because you’re standing inside the jar.

Sure, AI is fast and convenient. And though we can point at it, it does not have a soul, never had its heart broken, can’t tell the difference between something you sweated over for decades vs. something you came up with over lunch, or have the judgment based on this thing called “life experience.”

Why Do Founders Lose Their Differentiation?

Every week, I meet founders who have poured years and invested tons of money into building something genuinely good. They killed bad ideas. They sweated unglamorous details. The product has real substance.

Then, at the exact moment it matters most, you hand off the translation.

You hand it to an outside agency, a committee, or a junior trying to choose a prompt they saw on Instagram.

Here is a sentence I have never heard anyone say about a company they bought from: “I chose them because their homepage promised passionate excellence.”

Nobody buys because you are “a trusted partner in innovative solutions.” Yet almost every company describes itself in those exact words.

You did the hard half when you built the product. The other half is translating why it matters so a stranger feels it in five seconds. 

When you outsource that translation, your value goes into witness protection. You are left competing on price.

Marketing by Telepathy

Most founders practice marketing by telepathy. The hidden belief is: we did the hard work, surely customers can tell.

Effort does not radiate. It sits there, invisible, until someone translates it into words and design that land in the gut.

Without that translation, two things happen every time:

1. The founder feels unappreciated: “Why don’t they see how good this is?”
2. The buyer feels nothing: “Looks just like the other twelve vendors I saw today.”

One side overestimates the signal. The other never receives it.

I’ve included a sixty-second way to find out which side you’re on. It’s below.

The Leak That Is Everywhere

Most founders think brand lives in one place. The homepage headline. The pitch deck.

Clarity compounds. But it’s confusion that compounds faster. Way faster.

Differentiation is not a sentence. It is a system. Every touchpoint either amplifies what makes you distinct or quietly throws you into that ocean of sameness. 

The subject line. The proposal cover. The invoice. The onboarding email. How you answer “What do you do?” at a dinner party.

Individually, none feels dangerous. But they do not act individually. They compound.

Rewriting the homepage while the other nineteen touchpoints leak generic corporate filler is like patching one hole in a barrel with twenty leaks. The differentiation pours right back out.

You Already Did the Hard Part

You do not need to invent your differentiation. It is already built. It is trapped inside the product, in decisions you made when no one was watching.

When I sit with a founder, I do not ask for a feature list. I ask why they made their choices. Why this way and not that way? What they turned down.

Every single time, I find a trail. You solved the problem this way, not that way. You rejected a shortcut that would have made quick money but resulted in broken trust. You designed a pathway for someone your competitors ignored.

Those decisions are your company’s fingerprint. No template can duplicate them. You just stopped seeing them because you cannot smell your own air.

The 60-Second Diagnostic

Strip your name and logo off your homepage, pitch deck, or LinkedIn bio. Read the headline out loud.

If it could describe three competitors without changing a word, your differentiation is leaking. It is not missing. It is buried under safe, interchangeable words.

Safety is the most expensive purchase in business. You pay for it with the one currency you cannot earn back: being remembered.

Three Moves, in Order

Don’t write twenty better sentences. Find the one true thing behind them:

1. Name the lie your category believes. Dollar Shave Club named the lie that razors are expensive to make. Oatly named the lie that milk must come from a cow. The most valuable sentence you can write names your industry’s false assumption.
2. Name the thing you have that cannot be copied. It is not a feature. It is a stance. A belief your competitors do not share.
3. Say it in a sentence that a competitor cannot. If a rival could paste your line onto their website and it still works, keep digging.

Three Proofs

Same mechanism, three completely different worlds:

• 300% sales jump in six months. A building-tech company stopped expanding nationally and focused on one unfair advantage: New York City carbon legislation. The product never changed. The focus did. The result: increasing the national sales 300% in the NYC market alone.
• 239% growth in seven days. A curly-hair specialist had forty years of knowledge trapped in her head. We named a new category, “Smart Hair,” and built it around a distinct point of view instead of generic frizz control disrupting this $5.6 billion industry.
• $250,000 in under thirty minutes. A 68-year-old nonprofit thought it had an elevator pitch problem. It had an unspoken truth no one had named. We surfaced it. Largest fundraiser in its history.

I have never had to invent a story for a client. My job is to dig up the truth and refuse to let it leak.

The Proximity Trap

The three moves look simple on paper. But here is what nobody warns you about: proximity.

We are brilliant at solving other people’s problems. Why does that clarity disappear on our own?

Because you are too close. You cannot read the label from inside the jar.

Every AI tool can now spit out the safe sentence in two seconds. That is why the safe sentence is dead. It has zero value.

Your company needs the only sentence a machine cannot generate: the one that comes from a decision only you made.

Don’t believe me? Watch this video on “second chances.”

Skip This (If You Want to Sound Like Everyone Else in 6 Months)

If you ran that diagnostic and felt a knot in your stomach, you just heard the leak.

Here is my invite: a free 30-minute “Proximity Is Your Kryptonite” session.

I will not workshop slogans with you. I will dig up the un-copyable truth about your business and name it. You will leave with more clarity in thirty minutes than most founders get in a year of circling their own blind spots.

Why free? Think of it as a virtual “let’s grab a coffee.”

Because a half-hour of ruthless objectivity shows you what you cannot see from inside the jar: your own story, seen from the outside, for the first time.

Stop compounding against yourself. The thing that makes you different is already in there. Let’s dig it out.

Grab your free “Proximity Is Your Kryptonite” session → https://DavidBrierCalendar.as.me/IntroductorySession

The post AI Isn’t the Greatest Threat to Your Brand. This Is: appeared first on Branding and Brand Strategy for Growing Companies.

Apple’s iPhone Duo just made its own flagship iPhone obsolete. On purpose. And it is the most important business lesson of the decade, leveraging the Steve Jobs rule, hiding inside a product announcement.

Two days before you read this, Apple unveiled the iPhone Duo: the first foldable iPhone, and the most radical redesign of the device since it launched eighteen years ago. Apple’s new CEO put the stakes plainly: “The most transformational change to iPhone since the original.”

Read that sentence again. Apple spent two decades manufacturing and selling one of the single most transformative products in human history, the slab of glass that earned more money than most countries, and this week it chose to replace it.

Not because the iPhone was failing. Because it was winning. That is the part that sounds insane until you understand it.

This is not the first time Apple has done this. It is the rule.

Before the iPod finished shipping, Steve Jobs was already demanding the next two. He knew something that sounds reckless the first time you hear it:

“If anybody’s going to make our products obsolete, I want it to be us.”

He said it another way, too, and it is the cleaner version of the same idea: If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.

So Apple let the iPhone eat the iPod.

And now, two decades later, Apple is letting the foldable eat the iPhone. Same company. Same move. The only difference is that the thing being voluntarily killed this time is the product that did the killing last time. 

The iPhone Duo: It’s What Jobs Understood All Along

The world has been selling us a story that is almost entirely backward. It goes like this: work hard, build the thing, make the money, cross the finish line, and then rest. We see this in the movies all the time. The hero “makes it,” the credits roll over a life of ease, and we are supposed to call that the happy ending.

In business, we all love the illusion of vast wealth and unlimited freedom.

I can tell you from personal experience that the wealthiest (and most generous) entrepreneurs I know (and have as clients) embrace the walls, the unexpected speed bumps, and the obstacles for one reason: the bigger game you play, the more barriers you face, not less. 

Jobs refused to believe it, because he saw what the mythological hero story leaves out: There is no moment where the work is done. There is no state of arrival. Achievement is a state of continuous overcoming to new heights. Simply put, arrival is a new plateau.

It’s why the greatest entrepreneurs of our time all agree on one point: build fast, fail faster. It’s the express lane to rapidly learn what doesn’t work.

Success was never a myth. Success is real, and plenty of people get there. The myth was the finish line. The myth is the idea that challenges stop coming at some point. Bullshit.

The day challenges stop is the day we stop growing. Complacency sets in, and stagnation takes over.

The truth is the simpler, bitter pill: the challenges never stop. They only get bigger, especially if you are doing things right. And we should be running toward the fire, not cowering in fear of it.

And here is the part nobody says out loud: if you are standing still at the top, you are not safe. You are sliding, and the grade is just subtle enough and shallow enough that we cannot feel it yet. Until “all of a sudden,” we’re up to our necks in snake-infested waters.

The “Reality Distortion Field” Nobody Is Talking About

Jobs could bend reality toward the future he wanted to build. Most of us bend it toward the present we want to protect. That is the field that does the damage, and nobody names it.

The instinct that separates the people who compound from the ones who fade is simple: you start wishing the barriers away.

We want the wealth without its new problems, the brand without its criticism and competition, the relevance without the pressure to keep earning it. That wish feels like prudence. It is actually the one move that guarantees the loss.

Protection is not a neutral choice. Protection is decay with good manners. Defend what you have instead of replacing it, and you’ve let the future take it on its schedule, at its price.

The successful don’t wish for a future with no challenges. They own the next challenge and go looking for it before it finds them. Because the alternative isn’t a peaceful retirement. It’s a loss they don’t get to choose.

Jobs distorted reality to claim a future that didn’t exist yet. The rest of us distort it to wish a future away. That’s the whole difference.

Anything You Built Isn’t Finished. It Is The Next Hill.

Apple spent eighteen years building the most valuable product ever made, and this week it announced the device that replaces it. The iPhone is now the iPod — a masterpiece voluntarily sacrificed to the next thing. Five choices made that possible, and every one of them is a choice the rest of us can make:

• It chose the loss before the market forced it. Apple released the foldable while the slab iPhone still prints money, not in desperation.
• It never treated the iPhone as finished. The flagship was a plateau, so Apple built a new wall behind it.
• It ran toward the barrier on purpose. A foldable is an engineering nightmare, not a safe refresh. That was the point.
• It made the old thing obsolete itself. Nobody outside the company got to decide when the iPhone stopped being the future.
• It accepted that yesterday’s win is today’s warm-up. Same move that let the iPhone eat the iPod, one generation later.

That’s the rule in motion, not in theory. And it’s why the companies that refused to feel it are the ones you’ll remember in a minute.

Flipping the Script: The Steve Jobs Rule Explained

Three giants died from a blind spot the size of Texas.

Look at the cautionary tales from those who refused to feel it:

Kodak invented the digital camera, panicked about film margins, and buried the innovation until the digital camera erased them. Blockbuster laughed off streaming to protect retail late fees. Nokia owned the global phone market and clung to hardware buttons until the smartphone wave crushed them.

The difference was not who saw the future coming. Kodak literally built the thing that killed it. The difference was what each one did when the future arrived.

Jobs always chose any loss early, on his own terms. The rest pretended the inevitable loss was not there, and it arrived anyway, with interest.

Why This is Not Just a Nice Idea

Growth happens at the edge.

It is the physical mechanism of change.

Comfort is the state where your brain runs old programs. Nothing new gets encoded there.

Effort and discomfort are not the price of growth. They are the signal that tells your system to adapt.

The winners in life keep expanding the load they can carry, treating the next wall as the place where the leak stops.

The Next Wall Method

None of this matters if it stays philosophy. So here is the operating system. I call it The Next Wall Method: four moves that turn “the challenges never stop” from a warning into a schedule. You can run it in an afternoon and re-run it every quarter for the rest of your life.

One: Name the wall. Before you expand anything, write down the specific walls the bigger version will bring. More freedom comes with more barriers. More purpose comes with more barriers. If you cannot name the wall, you have not actually committed to the growth.

Two: Audit the warm-up. List everything that used to be a wall and is now just floor. The conversation you used to dread. The decision used to take you a month. The number that used to terrify you. This list is your proof of growth. If the list is short, that is a warning sign, not a comfort.

Three: Pick your load. Go back to the walls you named and sort them into two piles. The first pile is the load to train with. Keep it, schedule it, face it. This is what builds you. The second pile is friction: busywork and logistical noise that slows you down without making you stronger. Remove the friction aggressively, but do not mistake removing friction for removing the wall. The wall is the point.

Four: Re-rate at the new level. Every quarter, check two things: which walls have dropped to warm up since last time, and which new walls have arrived. This single habit is what keeps you expanding instead of coasting into contraction.

Putting The Next Wall Method to Work

Now it’s your turn.

Name it, audit it, load it, re-rate it. Apple runs a version of it every product cycle. The only question is whether you run it before the market runs it on you.

The choice is in front of you. Expansion or contraction. There is no third option, only a comfortable middle that is really contraction in a nicer chair.

The life you should actually be afraid of is not the one with hard problems. It is the one with no hard problems left worth solving. That is the real failure. Not that it got hard. That it stopped being worth it.

So here is the ask. This week, name your next wall. The one you have been dodging because it felt like a punishment instead of a promotion. Write it down, hit reply, and tell me what it is. It will probably be the most honest thing you have said about your future in a while. It will also be the proof that your future is still alive.

Because the finish line was never real. The leak does not stop on its own. The wall is the only place it does.

Need help nailing The Next Wall Method for your brand? Then schedule an UNcovery session(where I uncover what’s hiding in plain sight. The exact reason it’s not called a discovery session).

The post The Finish Line Is a Myth: The Steve Jobs Rule for Escaping the Trap of Success appeared first on Branding and Brand Strategy for Growing Companies.

Last Tuesday, I experimented and asked ChatGPT, “Who should handle my rebrand?” It gave me five names. None of them were the agencies that spent $50K on SEO. One was a two-person shop in Austin I’d never heard of.

That same week, a friend texted me about a coffee brand she’d stumbled on. She wasn’t looking for coffee. It just showed up in her feed, then in a conversation, then in her kitchen.

Two discoveries. Two completely different lanes. Most brands are invisible in both. (If you want another lens on brand discoverability, check out this article I wrote on How AI Is Reshaping Brand Discovery.)

Found vs. Fed. Which Is The Right Brand Discovery Strategy?

There are only two ways anyone finds you in 2026.

Found: They’re hunting. They have a problem, and they open ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google to solve it. Your job is to be the answer.

Fed: They’re minding their own business. Your brand shows up anyway. In their device feed. In a group chat. In a friend’s story. At a dinner conversation. Nobody searched. Nobody was in-market. But now they know your name.

Most brands optimize for “Found” and ignore “Fed” entirely. They want to rank. They don’t ask the harder question: Would anyone bring us up if they weren’t paid to?

The Problem With Found

Google is no longer a discovery engine. It’s a receipt. People discover you on TikTok, in a YouTube short, or inside a ChatGPT thread. Only after they know your name do they Google you.

And if you’re not showing up in AI citations, you’re invisible. AI platforms don’t rank by backlinks. They cite clarity, authority, and structure. A friend’s B2B SaaS company has been publishing for years. I searched their category in ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. Zero results. Not page two. Zero. Their competitors were there because their content answered questions directly, with no fluff. AI has no time for warm tofu.

The Problem With Fed

There are two feeds every human lives inside.

The device feed: Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn. The algorithm serves you content, and sometimes that content is a brand. Not because you searched for it. Because it earned the right to interrupt your scroll.

The human interaction feed: the conversation at dinner. The group chat. The thing your cousin won’t shut up about.

In both feeds, the same rule applies: you don’t get in by being optimized. You get in by being interesting. Like the fun HEINZ has, or doing something like the World Cup.

Liquid Death isn’t winning because of AI citations. They’re winning because when someone spots the can at a party, it starts a conversation. Patagonia doesn’t show up in your feed because they cracked the algorithm. They show up because they take stands that make people say, “Did you see what Patagonia just did?”

These brands enter rooms they weren’t invited to.

The Two Lanes Feed Each Other

Someone hears about you in a conversation. They don’t Google you. They ask ChatGPT. If you’re invisible there, the conversation dies. If you’re there, authoritative and clear, the conversation becomes a customer.

But the reverse is also true. You can be perfectly AI-optimized and still lose to a brand that’s culturally alive. When someone gets two recommendations, one from an AI and one from a friend, the friend wins every time. The AI is just the tiebreaker.

Which Is the Right Approach for You?

When discussing brand discovery strategies, I find most brands don’t need to win both lanes today. You need to win the one that matches how your customers actually move.

Choose Found if you sell something people search for when the problem is already urgent. You’re a lawyer. A therapist. An ERP platform. A rebranding agency. A plumber. Your customer doesn’t stumble into you at a party. They wake up with a problem, and they go hunting. Your job is to be the clearest, most citable answer when they ask. That means one question per page, direct answers, structured content the AI can grab, and showing up in the places those questions get asked: YouTube, Reddit, niche forums. Not just your own blog.

Choose Fed if you sell something people don’t know they need until it hits them sideways. You’re a new category. A DTC brand. A lifestyle product. A SaaS tool that replaces a spreadsheet nobody complains about. Your customer isn’t searching for you because they don’t know you exist. You have to enter their world uninvited. That means taking a real stand on something, making things worth forwarding, and being the brand someone brings up at dinner. Not “content.” A story. A moment. A move so specific that people want to be the one who showed it to someone else.

The brands that grow fastest pick one lane and own it. The brands that become impossible to compete with eventually own both.

The brands that win the next five years will do two things: answer the question so clearly the AI has no choice but to recommend them, and live so vividly in the culture that people bring them up before the AI ever gets asked.

Most brands are invisible in both lanes. You only need to win one to grow. Win both, and you become very hard to compete with.

Need help determining your best brand discovery strategy? Schedule an UNcovery session (where I uncover what’s hiding in plain sight. The exact reason it’s not called a discovery session).

The post Found or Fed: The Two Ways Anyone Discovers Your Brand (And Why You’re Failing at Both) appeared first on Branding and Brand Strategy for Growing Companies.

What if you could steal the playbook from a company that sells the world’s most “boring” product?

Not a tech company. Not a luxury brand. Not a category that lends itself to storytelling.

A $25 billion condiment company with a 150-year track record. And a recipe that hasn’t changed since Ulysses S. Grant was president.

And yet…

Heinz runs World Cup stunts. Patents three-setting lids. Builds fry boxes with integrated dipping compartments. Turns a Don Draper/Mad Men pitch into $55 million in earned media. They keep showing up in culture, in conversation, in the feed, acting like they just launched yesterday and have everything to prove.

For Ketchup. The same ketchup.

They’re having more fun than your entire industry. So I have one question.

If a 150-year-old condiment company with a product that never changes can keep customers entertained and competitors terrified, what the hell is your excuse?

This article is a diagnostic using four campaigns that any company can steal. Including yours. No matter your size, your industry, or whether you’re B2B or B2C.

The principles don’t care about what we sell. They care whether we’re willing to act like our product or service is the least interesting thing about our brand.

Here is… the Heinz Playbook.

Principle One: Run Toward the Fire

The World Cup. A controversial call. Fans are furious. Social media is a furnace.

What Most Brands Do

Legal tells them to say nothing.

PR tells them to release a statement.

Marketing tells them to wait it out.

Distance. Caution. The instinct to protect.

What Heinz Did

They created the Penalty Packet, a product for “food fouls.”

Not a press release. Not a clarification. Not a carefully worded tweet drafted by committee and approved by three layers of management. A physical object that handed the joke right back with a wink.

The critics became co-conspirators.

The outrage became free distribution.

The Move

Most brands hear public disdain and reach for distance.

Heinz didn’t try to control the narrative. They joined it. They took the energy and redirected it. They understood that the worst move in a world drowning in sameness is to take yourself seriously.

Your next crisis is probably your next campaign. You just haven’t figured out how to play with it yet.

Your diagnostic: What’s the conversation already happening in your industry that you’ve been too careful to join? What’s the tension your customers feel that you’ve been too polite to name?

That’s not a risk. That’s an opening.

Principle Two: Solve, Don’t Sell

The Problem

The ketchup packet was developed in 1955.

It took 71 years to revolutionize that mess.

Seventy percent of fry lovers have spilled ketchup on the go. Eighty percent have considered skipping condiments entirely. Anyone who has ever eaten fries in a car knows this problem intimately. The friction is real and it is universal.

What Most Brands Do

A clever campaign.

A social media stunt.

A promise to “do better.”

Words. Always words.

What Heinz Did

They built the Heinz Dipper.

A fry box with a built-in ketchup compartment. Patent-pending. Launching in eleven countries. From drive-thrus to stadiums.

They didn’t tell customers they understand the struggle. They eliminated it.

The Move

Acknowledgment is marketing. Elimination is differentiation.

Your customers have friction points. Most brands acknowledge them. Few brands actually solve them. Heinz could have spent millions convincing people they’re the brand that “gets it.” Instead, they spent it becoming the brand that fixes it.

Your diagnostic: What’s your customer’s biggest on-the-go frustration? Are you talking about it or solving it? Could you redesign something nobody asked you to redesign?

Sometimes the most powerful brand move isn’t changing your product. It’s changing everything around it.

Principle Three: Make the Container the Conversation

Ketchup used to be a yes-or-no question.

Heinz just made it multiple choice.

The Love Lid

A patented, three-setting cap: Like. Love. Crazy Love. Twist it, it clicks, and the pour changes. A two-part mechanism developed with Wieden+Kennedy London just to solve a problem we didn’t know we had.

Except they aren’t just solving a problem. They’re making a provocative play.

Instead of asking IF you want ketchup, they’re asking HOW MUCH you love it.

The Pattern

This is what I call Packaging as Product.

The lid gets shared. The ketchup doesn’t. Heinz turned the thing you throw away into the thing you post about. The click. The twist. The three settings. They didn’t just make it easier to pour. They made pouring feel like something.

Same ketchup. Different experience.

The Move

Most companies obsess over the product. Heinz obsesses over the experience of the product.

And the experience is where the conversation lives.

“Crazy Love” on a ketchup bottle is free marketing. It doesn’t take a massive budget. It takes one choice worth repeating.

Your diagnostic: What’s the part of your product experience that nobody talks about because it’s invisible? What if you made it visible? What if you engineered a ritual where there’s currently just a transaction?

The product didn’t change. The experience did. That’s the move.

Principle Four: Trust What You Leave Out

The Pitch

In 2013, Mad Men’s Don Draper pitched an idea to Heinz.

No ketchup bottle. Just food — a burger, fries, a steak — with three words: “Pass the Heinz.”

“You mean ‘Heinz Ketchup,'” said the client.

“No,” said Draper. “Just ‘Pass the Heinz.'”

Heinz rejected the pitch in the show. The fictional client couldn’t see it. Half an ad? That’s not an ad. That’s a mistake.

The Real Thing

In 2017, Heinz made it real.

No bottle. No logo. Just food and three words.

2.6 billion media impressions. $55 million in earned media.

The campaign the fictional client couldn’t stomach became one of the most successful brand executions in the company’s history.

The Move

Great branding isn’t about what you say. It’s about what you leave out.

The best campaigns don’t just sell products. They start conversations stirring the customer’s imagination.

Most brands can’t do this. They over-explain.

Heinz trusted simplicity. They let the audience complete the picture. And the result was not confusion. It was participation.

People didn’t just see the ad. They finished it.

Your diagnostic: What are you still showing that your audience already knows? What would happen if you removed it? What if the thing you’re afraid to leave out is the thing that’s been making your message invisible?

The Heinz Playbook

Four principles. Zero recipe changes. Every one of them transferable.

1. Run toward the fire. The conversation is already happening. Join it. Redirect it. Your next crisis is probably your next campaign.
2. Solve, don’t sell. Acknowledgment is marketing. Elimination is differentiation. Fix the thing your customers are quietly suffering through.
3. Make the container the conversation. The product doesn’t have to change. The experience can. Engineer a ritual. Turn the invisible into the shareable.
4. Trust what you leave out. The audience doesn’t need to be spoon-fed. They need to be invited in. Let them finish the picture.

These are not budget problems.

They are not “we’re not a consumer brand” problems.

They are not “our industry is different” problems.

They are courage problems. And courage is the one competitive advantage that costs nothing and scales infinitely.

B2B companies have friction points their customers have been suffering through for years. They have conversations happening in their industry that they’ve been too polite to join. They have packaging that does nothing but protect the product during shipping. They have messaging that explains everything and trusts nothing.

The principles don’t care what you sell. They care whether you’re willing to act like the product is the least interesting thing about your brand.

The Difference Nobody Sees

A $25 billion ketchup company just showed your entire industry how it’s done.

Heinz didn’t need a new recipe. They didn’t need a bigger budget. They didn’t need a category that was more interesting, more photogenic, more “brandable.” They needed the courage to treat their product as the starting point, not the destination. And they needed the fearlessness to act like a brand that had nothing to lose — even though they had everything to lose.

Here is the part that should keep you up tonight.

Every one of these four principles is available to you. The diagnostics are sitting on the table. The moves are mapped. The proof is public. And yet most companies will read this article, nod along, and do exactly nothing.

The real barrier isn’t budget.

The real barrier is that most companies are terrified of being seen trying.

And here is what that terror actually costs you.

A difference nobody can see is a difference nobody will pay for.

You can have the best product, the best team, the best methodology, the best results. If your difference sits quietly in a features list or a mission statement or a deck that only gets opened during the RFP process, it does not exist in the market. It is a private truth. And private truths do not build businesses.

The four principles are waiting.

The question isn’t whether they work. The question is whether you’ll use them.

The post The Heinz Playbook: How to Stay Relevant Without Reinventing Your Product appeared first on Branding and Brand Strategy for Growing Companies.

Most brands are invisible. And they have no idea why they’re invisible.

The numbers are brutal.

Bain & Company ran the study on more than 350 companies. 80% of brands believe they deliver a great customer experience.

Only 8% of customers agree.

Eight out of every hundred people you serve think you’re doing what you say you’re doing. And doing it really well.

That gap between 80 and 8? It has a name. Sameness.

Your brand thinks it’s saying something. Your market hears the same meal it’s been served twelve times today. Every competitor leans on the same five adjectives, the same three promises, the same scaffolding on repeat.

I call it The Wall of Beige. Every category has one. Most categories have several.

You can feel it in your pipeline. The leads trickle in. The prospects circle back and vanish. The proposal goes quiet right after a great meeting.

And it’s costing you money every single day you stay inside it.

There’s a rule that explains exactly why this happens. I call it The 66% Rule.

It shows you, with uncomfortable precision, how much of what you say to sound credible is the exact material making you invisible.

I’ve spent four decades running this math for clients. The results sit over $9 billion.

And this coming week, in Knoxville, Tennessee, I’m premiering the full keynote for the first time anywhere.

It has never been shown. Not once. Every law, every number, and every differentiator sits on that one stage.

This article is the appetizer. The meal is in the room.

You’re Promoting Your Category, Not Your Brand

Most founders think branding is a logo. A color palette. A tagline workshop that ends with a document nobody reads after Tuesday.

That’s why there are more than 25,000 books on branding. And until I published Brand Intervention, there was no agreed-upon definition inside any of them.

If you’ve ever sat in a conference room for three days doing a positioning exercise, you know the problem. Quadrants multiply like rabbits. A consultant at the whiteboard argues whether you’re “premium accessible” or “accessible premium.”

That is theater. It’s a labeling exercise wearing a strategy costume.

It produces brands that land in the exact same box as three competitors who paid a different consultant to draw the same chart.

Now pull up the homepages of the top five brands in your category. Strip the logos. Read the copy out loud.

The same five words appear in every category you can name, followed by the same three promises. A mirror maze designed by a committee, and amplified by AI.

Nobody tells you this part.

When you use your category’s words, you’re promoting your category. Not yours.

Every one of those marketing clichés sells the entire industry. None of them sells you. You might as well hand your competitor a referral every time you say “world-class.”

The Enemy Hiding in Plain Sight

Marketing clichés are the fastest way to disappear into the wall of beige.

There’s an order to this, and most brands run it backward.

Branding comes first and plants the seeds.

Marketing spreads the seeds.

Selling follows and harvests them.

Most people are out there swinging the harvest scythe before they’ve planted a single seed. They focus 100% on the sale, and the thrill of the close and dopamine rush of a sale with the signed contract. That’s why the harvest is thin. The sequence broke long before the talent ever got a chance to matter.

The breakthrough is simpler than the industry wants you to believe.

People buy differences, not similarities.

The brands that win are never the ones that tried hardest to be better. They’re the ones 100% committed to being different.

Different is better than better. Then you discover “better” is always different.

The truth has more fire, and it demands more of us and our audience.

I’ve watched it play out for four decades.

• A Midwest city needed to boost tourism. My rebrand produced a 500% increase in visitors. Same marketing budget.
• A chocolatier posted a 300% jump in 30 days. 
• A Napa Valley baked goods company ran a 900% increase in 24 months. 
• A tech company went from startup to a $4.6 billion unicorn in eight years. 
• A dog food company that once took three months to clear its revenue now does it every 30 days. 
• An online training company for musicians grew to two million customers worldwide. 
• A nonprofit raised $250,000 in the first 30 minutes after its unveiling.

None of those wins came from being louder. They came from being different enough that the market couldn’t look away.

All of it runs through the same rule.

The 66% Rule Changes What Customers Think

The 66% Rule is the math that shows you how much of your message is working against you. Which words are selling your competition? Which promises make you forgettable?

I’m not handing you the full formula here.

That’s the point.

The exact mechanism, the five laws, and the 23 differentiators nobody in your category will touch. Those come out of my mouth, live, on a stage in Knoxville next week.

What I’ll give you today is the warm-up. Enough to change how you see your own marketing before the curtain opens.

Stop Harvesting What You Never Planted

Your market made up its mind about you before you ever got in the room.

They decided during the pre-sale. The ad set the tone. The homepage sealed it. The word of mouth did the rest. By the time you’re shaking hands, most of the sale already happened in someone’s head.

The 66% Rule exposed that special place when your customer expects nothing, and you surprise them in the most unexpected way. It shows you where your effort actually moves the needle vs. where you’re just burning calories to feel busy.

I’m not handing you the formula I discuss in detail in this keynote. Hopefully, you’re there to take it all in and rewrite your future.

But I will hand you three moves that get you into the right neighborhood before Knoxville.

Move One. Kill the marketing clichés.

Grab a piece of paper. Write down every marketing cliché your industry overuses.

→ NextGen

→ Best

→ State of the art

→ Best practice

→ Customer-centric

→ World-class

→ Game-changer

→ AI-driven

Now circle the ones you’re using.

Whatever’s left uncircled is still yours.

Most founders circle almost all of them. And that’s the diagnosis, staring back at them in ink. You’re speaking the category’s language, and the category doesn’t need another speaker.

Move Two. Map your two sides.

Every brand has two sides: the known and the unknown.

The known is predictable. It’s what customers expect. It’s the usual. That side keeps customers coming back.

The unknown is unpredictable. It’s the thing they didn’t see coming. The genuine surprise. That side keeps customers from going away.

Make two lists.

Write down everything you do that a customer fully expects. That’s your known side.

Now write down everything you do that a customer genuinely did not see coming. That’s your unknown side.

For most brands, the second list has one item on it. Sometimes it’s blank.

When you run on known alone, you’re driving customers away with the very thing you thought was keeping them.

Move Three. Turn your 66% into your 110%

Look at your last thirty days. Where did the energy actually go: the pre-sale, the during-sale, or the post-sale?

Be honest. Most of it went to pre-sale and during-the-sale.

The rule exists to show you how much of your sales effort is focused on the transaction and not the experience. You’re sweating on a stage the audience already left. The effort goes somewhere nobody can see it.

Get your numbers in front of you. Then ask the question the rule answers: how much of what I’m doing is actually being heard?

That’s the warm-up. The real thing is different.

Next week in Knoxville, I’m walking through the entire system for the first time anywhere. All five laws, the full 66% math, the 23 differentiators your competition will never touch, and the known-versus-unknown framework broken down so you can run it Monday morning.

This keynote has never been delivered. There’s no YouTube version, no replay, and no deck floating around online.

You either see it in the room, or you read the summary from someone who did.

The summary never has the fire. It never has the exact moment where the math clicks and you see your own marketing for what it’s been doing. The summary is the recipe card. The keynote is the meal.

The noise is already absurd. One minute online means 350,000 tweets. 167 million TikTok videos watched. 185 million emails sent. 5.9 million Google searches.

The brands that get heard will finally stop sounding like everyone else in the room.

The rest will keep serving the same meal and wondering why nobody’s hungry.

I know which side of that line I’d rather be on.

See you in Knoxville.

The post The 66% Rule Behind $9 Billion In Revenue appeared first on Branding and Brand Strategy for Growing Companies.

“Everything in business is rapidly getting commoditized. Especially in sales.”

John Barrows said that when he had me on as a guest on his Make It Happen Mondays podcast.

After 25+ years inside Salesforce, LinkedIn, Google, Amazon, and Okta, John now works with CROs (Chief Revenue Officers) and VPs of Sales on one brutal point: rebuild your team or replace it. His podcast (250+ episodes and 1.2M+ downloads) and his work have been featured in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and INC.

John’s verdict on this point: Sales has nothing to do with what you sell. It has everything to do with how you sell.

Commoditized sales is a real problem. Same product. Same features. Same pricing. Same demo. Every team running the same playbook, asking the same questions, getting the same “we’ll circle back.”

Why does one salesperson get an entirely different outcome selling the same item and the same set of features compared to another salesperson who blows the deal?

Because one person asks a question, the other person never thought to ask. That’s how we stand out in sales. Not with a better pitch. Not with more choices. With a better question.

Unlocking Your Sales Genius: Watch The Full Interview

Before we go further, here’s the full conversation with John Barrows on Make It Happen Mondays. We cover brand, risk, AI, why most design is illiterate, and what happens when you stop showing your portfolio and start solving the real problem. (Some of you prefer to hit play rather than read more. I get it. Go ahead. For the rest of us, let’s dig into the single question that changes everything.)

Why Most Pitches Die Before They Start

Here’s how most sales conversations go.

You ask questions for 30 minutes. Good questions. Curious questions. The prospect talks. You listen. Two ears, one mouth. All the right ratios.

Then you pivot. You say, “Thank you very much for that. Now let me tell you about who we are, what we do, and why we’re better.”

And at the end, you hear a word. One word: “Digest.”

“Hey, you know what? I’m going to need a little time to digest what you just told me. Why don’t we circle back in a couple of weeks?”

John calls this the kiss of death. He’s right. When someone needs to “digest,” you failed. You dumped information on them. You didn’t help them see something new. You answered their question without ever asking the right one.

The prospect didn’t come to a new conclusion.

They came to the same conclusion they had before you walked in. Which was “I’ll think about it.”

The Sales Skill I Never Learned in Design School

I spent years showing my portfolio.

That’s what design school trains us for. Make the portfolio beautiful. Build a book that drops jaws. When you get in the room, let the work speak for itself.

So my meetings were 85% portfolio. Maybe 15% talking to the actual human being across the table. And those meetings didn’t close.

Over time, I got curious. I started asking more questions. I wanted to understand the problem. Their business frustration. The thing that kept them up at night.

My ratio flipped: 95% discussion. 5% showing work.

Those meetings closed deals. Built rapport. Shifted me from vendor to collaborator.

Here’s what nobody tells you in school. The person sitting across from you is a hell of a lot more important than your portfolio.

They don’t care about your brilliance. They don’t care about your awards. They only care about their problem.

And if you don’t understand their problem, and have the skill to reframe it back to them in a way they’ve never heard anyone articulate before, nothing else matters.

The 4-Word Question That Drives Sales Differentiation

Every so often in a meeting, I get what I call the “hands over the chest” moment. I love that moment.

The prospect leans back. Crosses their arms. And asks me something deep.

Something meaningful. Something they clearly pulled from a Simon Sinek video, a Seth Godin book, or a podcast they heard on the way to work.

I love this moment.

I’m smiling ear to ear. I let them finish. I don’t cut them off.

And in my head, I am thinking four words: “What should you ask?”

In other words, what should that prospect sitting before me really be asking me?

Then I say, “I understand why you’re asking that question. But the question you should really be asking is…”

Boom.

The room changes. The frame shifts. The prospect is no longer evaluating me against a checklist they brought into the room. They’re now thinking about something they hadn’t considered.

These are the sales questions that close deals. Not because they’re clever. Because they reframe the entire conversation before a single feature gets mentioned.

That is when the sale begins.

People Don’t Come To New Conclusions With Old Information

This is the law every closer has mastered.

Prospects do not come to new conclusions with old information. Ever.

Buyers do not come to new conclusions with the same tired categories. Your client does not come to a new decision using the same metrics they’ve been using for the last five years.

Each of us is in the business of disruption.

We are not in the business of sounding like our competitors. We are not in the business of stepping into the same sandbox and playing with the same toys. Anyone can say they’re the best, the fastest, the simplest. Every competitor in your category is already saying that.
When you walk in and add your voice to that chorus, you’re invisible.

If you want to stop sounding like your competitors in sales, it starts here. With the discipline to refuse the easy answer and reach for the better question instead.

It’s why I tell clients, different is better than better. That one fact is the secret that’s driven well over $9 billion in revenue for clients of every shape, size, industry, and location.

• Better gets compared.
• Better gets scrutinized.
• Better gets a spreadsheet plus a committee meeting concluding a “let’s circle back.”

Different is what gets noticed. Different makes the prospect stop and say, “Wait. Nobody else said that. Tell me more.”

The Netflix Principle

Netflix started with DVDs by mail.

Red envelopes. No late fees. That was their thing. And it worked.

But they weren’t married to it.

When streaming became possible, they didn’t dig their heels in. They didn’t say “No, we’re a DVD company.” They didn’t build a moat around red envelopes. They pivoted. Because they were married to the customer’s problem, not their solution.

Blockbuster had the opposite instinct. They were married to the store. The stale Twizzlers. The empty boxes. The late fees. The business model was the product.

One of those companies is worth $291 billion today. The other is a history lesson. And a punchline.

The same principle applies to every sales conversation you’ll ever have. If you’re married to your pitch, your demo, your features, your “we’ve been in business since” story, you’ve already lost.

You’re not solving their problem. You’re selling your solution. Those are not the same thing.

How To Stand Out In Sales: Deploy This Week

1. Flip your ratio

Stop leading with what you do. Start leading with what you need to understand.

My rule: 95% questions and discussion. 5% showing work.
→ Before your next meeting, write down 10 questions you’ve never asked a prospect before.
→ Make at least three of them about what frustrates them about their current situation, not what they need.
→ If you catch yourself pitching before the 30-minute mark, stop. You’re not ready.

Most people spend the first 10 minutes building rapport and the next 20 minutes waiting to pitch. That’s not curiosity. That’s a countdown.

2. Hunt for the wrong question

Every prospect walks in with a question they think is the right one.

It rarely is. It’s a question they heard someone else ask. It’s something they read. It’s the safe question. The one that makes them sound smart without exposing what they actually don’t know.

Your job: listen for it. When you hear it, don’t answer it. Reframe it.

→ “I understand why you’re asking about [X]. But based on what you’ve told me, the real question you should be asking is [Y].”

Then simply shut up and watch the lights turn on.

That moment of reframe is where trust is built. You just showed them a door they didn’t know existed.

3. Let silence do its job

When you drop the 4-word question, shut up.

Most people can’t handle silence. They fill it. They soften the question. They add a joke. They backpedal before the prospect has even processed what was asked.

Silence is a tool. Use it. The prospect needs time to realize their old question doesn’t work. Let them sit in that discomfort for a beat. The first person to speak after the reframe loses the frame.

4. Marry the problem, not the solution

Netflix didn’t fall in love with red envelopes.

They fell in love with “people want to watch what they want, when they want, without getting punished for having a life.” The DVD was a vehicle. The problem was the customer’s addiction to being entertained.

→ In your next call, don’t lead with what you do. Lead with the problem you help them manage in language that sounds nothing like your competitor.
→ If your prospect could describe your company the same way they’d describe your top competitor, you haven’t differentiated.
→ If your own team can’t articulate the problem you solve in one sentence without mentioning your product, fix that first.

5. Measure by new conclusions, not nods

Nods are cheap. “That’s interesting” is free, but it’s the “We’ll circle back” that costs you everything.

The only metric that matters: Did the prospect say something they’ve never said before?

If they didn’t, you didn’t earn the sale. You showed up. You asked some questions. You pitched. You were polite and professional and completely forgettable.

New conclusions are the only currency. If the prospect walks out thinking the same thing they walked in thinking, you added zero value. You were a placeholder. Another vendor in a long line of vendors who all sound the same.

Winning has only one metric: They left the conversation thinking differently than when they arrived.

Every sale that ever closed started with a moment where the buyer thought, “I hadn’t considered that.” That is where branding merges with selling.

That’s the 4-word question at work.

Join John and me when we meet face to face for the first time at Totality 2026 and blow the roof off sales and bust myths that hold businesses back. Here is a sneak peek at my presentation opening slide:

The post The 4-Word Question That Unlocks Every Sale appeared first on Branding and Brand Strategy for Growing Companies.

Apple said it best: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The round pegs in the square holes.”

They were talking about the people who change the world.

America was built by that caliber of people.

Rebels with no business plan. Zero venture capital. No proof of concept. Just an idea and the audacity to ask, “Why the hell not?”

Just look at what those crazy ones shipped.

The telephone. Zero users on day one. Nobody to call.

The light bulb. Thousands of failed filaments before one burned bright.

Powered flight. Two bicycle mechanics in a field, betting they could beat gravity.

The moving assembly line. The transistor. The skyscraper. Blue jeans. Coca-Cola. The fast-food assembly line. GPS. The graphical web browser. The iPhone. Even the first commercially released rock and roll (and jazz) recordings.

Every single one was a startup with terrible odds and no precedent.

Someone looked at the way things were and said, “Why the hell not?”

250 years later, most American brands have forgotten that DNA.

In place of that restless impulse to innovate, we find an ocean of the same AI-written copy. The same committee-approved language. The same beige anonymity stretched across every industry, from insurance to SaaS to financial services.

That’s not the spirit of the crazy ones. That’s surrender.

250 Years: Standing Up for an Idea

Voices of 250 invited me to record a message for America’s 250th birthday. The lineup includes Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorganChase, the presidents of the NYSE and NASDAQ, and many others.

They also invited a kid from Brooklyn with no pedigree, no business training, and no safety net.

Not because of who I knew. Because I’ve given businesses a voice that refused to be ignored.

They asked an entrepreneur from Holland with a dream (Stu Sjouwerman, one of my dearest friends and clients) and a force-of-nature client (Tom Cummins) to grab a mic and speak on what freedom means.

Daymond John is in there too. Fellow native New Yorker. Someone who knows a thing or two about building a brand from nothing.

To give you a short preview of what you’ll find on the Voicesof250 website, here are Daymond John’s, Stu Sjouwerman’s, Tom Cummins’, and my videos:

Daymond John

Stu Sjouwerman

Tom Cummins

David Brier

The Most American Thing a Brand Can Do

The Declaration of Independence was not a list of best practices.

It was not a positioning document that lived in a shared drive and got updated every three years. It was an act of consequence-be-damned courage. It named an enemy. Made a promise. Took a side.

250 years later, most brands do the opposite.

→ They operate like they need permission.
→ Permission to have a point of view.
→ Permission to be different.
→ Permission to be bold.

They wait for the competitor to move first. They wait for the focus group to validate the safe option. They wait for the committee to reach consensus.

Meanwhile, AI is accelerating the sameness. One AI-generated phrase pattern appeared 73 times in a single quarter’s corporate filings.

The brands didn’t decide to sound the same. They just stopped deciding.

America wasn’t built on replication. It was built on a voice that had never been heard before.

I’ve used this freedom to help clients generate over $9 billion in brand value. It’s created millionaires. And a few billionaires. This skill earned me a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship medallion (shown below). For a kid from Brooklyn who walked into rooms and asked the question nobody else would ask.

The medallion was not presented because I was the smartest person in the room. But because I was the one willing to sound different.

The CEOs I work with don’t call me because they need a new logo. They call me because they’ve burned so much cash on marketing their spouses think they have a coke habit. The problem is never the budget. The problem is they’re invisible. Indistinguishable. Buried in a wall of beige.

Freedom isn’t fireworks and hot dogs and a day off. Freedom is the right to defy the consensus. To be the round peg when every committee in your industry is voting for square holes.

America’s 250th birthday isn’t a branding opportunity. It’s a branding gut check.

Are you one of the crazy ones, or are you just renting someone else’s voice?

Visit Voicesof250.com and add your voice. The crazy ones don’t wait for an invitation.

The post Is America the Most Resilient Startup in History? appeared first on Branding and Brand Strategy for Growing Companies.

Every founder I talk to right now is saying the same thing.

“Our market is saturated.”

Which is an excuse masquerading as an explanation.

And nobody worth their weight can say that with a straight face.

I explain it here:

As I said, I hear this in: Health and wellness. SaaS. Professional services. DTC. B2B.

Same story. Same inflection. Same useless excuses:

“Too many players.” “Too much noise.” “We got here too late.”

And I get why they say it.

When your pipeline isn’t moving, and you’re staring at a category with hundreds of competitors, “saturation” feels like the only honest diagnosis.

Here’s the fact: It’s the most expensive lie you’re being sold.

By an industry that profits when you believe the game is already over. Agencies. Consultants. The same people who’ll sell you a “positioning workshop” next month and a “rebrand” the month after that. They need you confused. Confused clients keep paying.

The myth is “Your market is full.” Bullshit.

The truth: “Your messaging is identical.”

The myth is sold to us by people who profit from us making “comfortable iterations.” And disruption is anything but comfortable. And greatness is something you cannot sneak up on.

The truth has more fire, and demands more of us and our audience. And it puts us back in the fight with energy to burn.

Pull up the homepages of the top five brands in any category. Strip the logos. Read the copy out loud. You will see the same five adjectives, the same three promises, the same “We help X achieve Y” scaffolding on repeat. A mirror maze designed by a committee.

That is not saturation. That is a category where nobody had the guts to sound different.

And that is an opening the size of a freight elevator.

Is Your Market Actually Saturated?

When everything sounds the same, people stop listening. They scroll. They glaze. They move on. Can you blame them? You just served them the same meal they’ve eaten twelve times today.

I call this the Great Wall of Beige.

Every category has one. Most categories have many.

A thousand brands saying the same five things in the same three ways. A wall so thick no individual voice gets through. And behind that wall? Customers who are desperate for someone, anyone, to say something they haven’t heard before.

Meanwhile, the people selling us the myth are standing on the other side of that wall, cashing checks, telling us the answer is another round of “brand refinement.”

Here’s the line I want you to remember, because it’s the whole article in one sentence:

The market wasn’t saturated. The conversation was.

That’s it. That’s the diagnosis. Not “too many competitors.” Too many competitors saying the exact same thing.

The antidote is differentiation. The only known cure for blending in and then blaming the symptom. It’s the same principle behind what I call The 66% Rule.

Most of what your category says to sound “credible” is the exact material that makes you invisible. Forty-plus years of doing this work has taught me: the safest-sounding message is almost always the least effective one.

Why Do Liquid Death and Patagonia Win in “Saturated” Markets?

Water.

The most commoditized product on earth. Falls from the sky. Free. Dominated by giants with infinite distribution and century-old brand equity. If any market deserved to be called saturated, it’s bottled water. You’d have to be insane to enter it.

And then Liquid Death shows up.

They didn’t invent better water. Come on. Water is water. They invented a different story. Tallboy can. A name that sounds like a heavy metal band. Packaging that belongs at a punk show, not a yoga studio. They made drinking water feel like an act of defiance. Like you were flipping off every boring wellness brand on the shelf.

If markets were actually saturated, Liquid Death could never have existed. They would have been laughed out of the room. Instead, they built a billion-dollar brand selling the same thing that comes out of your kitchen faucet.

Water was not the opportunity. The opportunity was sounding like absolutely nobody else selling water.

They didn’t climb the wall of beige. They walked around it and built a freaking empire on the other side while everyone else was still arguing about electrolytes.

Now here’s the thing about this that goes deeper than the can.

The mind notices differences. Not similarities. The mind filters. And it prioritizes difference above everything else. Distinctiveness is not decoration. It’s one of the drivers of growth. When you’re different, you move to the front of the line. When you use cliches, you become beige. Instantly.

2007.

The smartphone market is “saturated.” BlackBerry owns it. Nokia owns it. Palm owns it. Hundreds of models. Everyone competing on the same things. Keyboards. Email speed. Enterprise security. The conversation is locked.

Apple walks in.

They refuse to compete on keyboards. They remove the keyboard entirely. While everyone else is fighting to build a better version of the same product, Apple changes what a phone can be. One device. One screen. No keyboard. The industry called it a toy. A fad. A phone without a keyboard? Good luck.

We all know how that ended.

Same market. Same moment in history. One brand that sounded like everyone else. One brand that refused to.

BlackBerry had the market share. The distribution. The carrier relationships. The loyal user base. Everything the textbook says you need to win. They had saturation on their side. And they lost.

Not because the market was saturated. Because the conversation was saturated. Apple changed the conversation while BlackBerry was still polishing its keyboard.

Then you’ve got the opposite end of the spectrum.

Patagonia.

Every outdoor clothing company says the same thing. “Our jackets are great.” “Our materials are innovative.” “We help you conquer the mountain.” Hero shot of someone on a summit. Logo in the corner. Next. Yawn.

Patagonia ran a full-page ad on Black Friday that said “Don’t Buy This Jacket.”

They told their own customers not to buy their product. The biggest shopping weekend of the year. The weekend when every other brand is screaming “SALE SALE SALE” like a teenager who just discovered their first bullhorn.

Same industry. Same product category. Completely different language.

The result was not a sales slump. It was the opposite. People bought the jacket because they wanted to belong to a brand that had the audacity to say “don’t buy this.” Who does that? Nobody. That’s the point.

Patagonia did not win by being better at the existing game. They won by refusing to play it altogether. They rewrote the rules and the market followed.

That’s what happens when you stop trying to be the best version of what already exists and start being the only version of something new.

What’s the Difference Between a Saturated Market and a Saturated Conversation?

Now here’s the math that should singe your eyebrows.

400,000 online fitness coaches in the United States. 150 million people actively trying to get in shape.

That’s not a saturated market. That’s 150 million people waiting for one voice that doesn’t sound like the other 399,000.

But the overwhelming majority of those coaches are saying the exact same thing. Same words. Same hooks. Same “I help busy professionals lose fat and build muscle” on a loop. It’s like they all downloaded the same PDF and changed the font.

Nobody is losing because the market ran out of room. They’re losing because they’re indistinguishable from the next hundred people selling the same offer in the same language. You could swap their Instagram bios and nobody would notice. You could swap their faces and nobody would care.

This is true across every category. SaaS. DTC. Professional services. B2B. The threat is not too many competitors. The threat is too many competitors who all sound identical.

And when you sound identical, you compete on price.

When you compete on price, you race to the bottom.

That is not a strategy. That is a funeral. With catering.

So why do smart people buy the lie?

Because there’s an entire industry that profits when we believe we don’t stand a chance. They sell the diagnosis so they can sell the cure. Same firm. Same retainer. Same hamster wheel. They don’t want us to realize the problem is our messaging. They want us to believe the problem is the market. Because we can’t fix the market. But we can keep paying them to try.

Saturation is not a market condition. It’s a story being sold to us so we stay confused, stay scared, and keep writing checks.

Believing the game is rigged is comfortable. It’s an out. It’s apathy parading around as analysis.

The window closed. Someone else got there first. Convenient excuse.

When we use “the market is saturated” excuse, the problem is out there. External. Unfixable. Not our fault. Poor us. Now we can go back to doing what we were already doing while someone invoices us for the “analysis.”

But the second we see through it?

Everything changes.

The real problem is not “out there.” The real problem is not “being sold to us.” The real problem is that we sound like everyone else.

And that is something we can solve tomorrow. NOT next quarter. NOT when the budget opens up. Tomorrow. No consultant required.

Here’s the ugly truth: Every category has a wall of beige. Same box mix. Same recipe. Same forgettable bite. A thousand brands crashing into the same invisible barrier, wondering why nobody stops to look.

And in the middle of that noise, the brand that sounds different does not compete. Instead, it commands attention.

When every competitor sounds the same, DIFFERENT is the voice we hear.

Stop worrying about the size of the market. Stop paying people to tell you it’s too late. Start worrying about whether anyone can tell you apart from the next person selling the same thing you sell.

Because, at the end of the day, if they can’t tell the difference, the market is NOT too full.

Your brand is just too quiet, serving the same dish as everyone else.

Now… turn up the freakin’ volume.

Need Help Turning Up the Volume?

If you’re reading this and recognizing your brand in any of these principles, I invite you to a conversation.

There is nothing that gives me the pleasure of helping an entrepreneur open their eyes to what’s possible. I invite you to secure a time and lock in your spot here.

The post Brand Positioning Is Dead. Here’s What Replaced It. appeared first on Branding and Brand Strategy for Growing Companies.

A man in a cowboy hat walks up to three Europeans at a bar in Texas for the World Cup 2026 games. He buys their beers without introducing himself. Then he walks over, shakes their hands with a grip that makes an impression, and asks where they’re from.

“Hold on,” he says. “Wait here. I’ve got something for you guys.”

He returns with a heavy-duty pin from the Amarillo Police Department. The Europeans are speechless. One of them is holding a phone. The video goes viral.

That video is just one of 41 that I compiled last weekend. All shot by Europeans who flew to America for World Cup 2026. All filmed on phones. All completely, blissfully, contagiously unscripted.

I dropped this on a Sunday night. By Monday night, over 100K had watched the video. By Friday morning, over 249K people had watched it with over 1,970 comments by Americans and foreigners who were brought to tears. Here it is:

Together, they just ran the most effective brand campaign America has seen in decades.

Zero budget. Zero creative brief. Zero agency. Zero approval chain. Zero brand guidelines. Zero strategy deck.

Forty-one human beings who arrived expecting rudeness and left overwhelmed by hospitality. They filmed themselves:

• Eating corn dogs for the first time.
• Discovering Buc-ee’s has 120 gas pumps.
• Trying pastrami at Katz’s and realizing a sandwich can feel like a Christmas present.
• Being bought beers by strangers who expected nothing in return.
• Being offered boat rides, restaurant recommendations, and the kind of warmth they had been told, their entire lives, did not exist here.

Nobody commissioned these videos. Nobody approved them. And they did what a billion dollars in tourism advertising could not do: they made America irresistible.

World Cup 2026 just handed every company on earth a free masterclass in brand presence. Most will miss it.

What No Budget Can Manufacture

Large companies do something predictable when they want attention. They hire an agency. The agency writes a brief. The brief gets approved by six people who have never met a customer. The creative comes back safe. Legal reviews it. Round two is slightly less safe. Round three ships.

The campaign looks like every other campaign in the category. Nobody films it. Nobody sends it to a friend. Nobody feels anything.

This is the Poor Brand playbook: measuring only the transaction while the Rich Brand knows love is the ultimate commerce. You cannot buy it with a bigger media budget.

What the 41 Europeans exposed is that presence cannot be manufactured. It can only be hosted. The people who made these videos go viral had three things in common:

• None of them had a brief.
• None of them had talking points.
• None of them had an engagement strategy.

They had something rarer: the kind of presence that makes someone pull out their phone, unprompted, and start filming.

That is the line every brand should be staring at. Would anyone, anywhere, unprompted, pull out their phone to capture what it feels like to experience you?

If the answer is no, you do not have a marketing problem. You have a presence problem. And presence problems are always people problems.

The Host Effect: World Cup 2026’s real branding lesson

Every brand is a host. Whether they act like one or not.

• A restaurant hosts diners.
• A software company hosts users.
• A bank hosts account holders.
• A hospital hosts patients.

The transaction is the table.
The experience is the meal.
And most brands are serving warm tofu on a tabletop.

What the Europeans filmed was not American marketing. It was American hosting. These were not paid ambassadors. They were everyday people who anticipated a guest’s experience three, four, five steps ahead. They incorporated the future. That is fanatical intention.

And when you deploy it, people do not just remember you. They film you. They become your unpaid, uncontrollable marketing department.

This is the Host Effect. And you cannot install it with a training manual. The Host Effect is a culture. It is the strategic decision to treat every person who encounters your brand as a guest. Before the transaction, during it, and after it.

The after is where the filming happens. The after is where captive clients reveal themselves and leave the moment a better option appears.

Rich Brand Poor Brand is built on this premise: people are irreplaceable assets. Inside, they define the culture. Outside, they define the customer experience. The cowboy did not need a brand guideline to buy those beers. He needed a culture that made generosity the default. That is the part no agency can manufacture. It comes from who you hire, who you elevate, and what you reward when nobody is watching.

How to Build a Brand People Film

Stop scripting. Start designing for surprise.

Most brands operate entirely in the known. The menu. The features list. The SLA. The known gets you considered. It does not get you filmed.

The unknown is where loyalty lives:

• The gesture that had no business case.
• The handwritten note.
• The follow-up call three months after the project ended, not to upsell, but to ask how it went.

Those moments cost almost nothing. They are the only things anyone ever talks about.

Meeting expectations is a failure. One thousand percent. The brands people film incorporated a future the customer did not see coming:

• The surprise ingredient in the burger.
• The iPhone box opens with an engineered resistance.
• The hotel that remembers you, serves sparkling water, and has it waiting without being asked.

Rich Brand knows the difference between predictable and remarkable. Poor Brand confuses the two and bills you for both.

Kill the approval chain that kills emotion.

Every brand has one. Legal. Brand police. The VP who needs to “see it in context.” The committee that turns a sharp idea into a rounded recommendation. Every layer between instinct and execution is a layer between your customer and the feeling worth filming.

The 41 Europeans did not have an approval chain. That is the mechanism. Raw, unrehearsed enthusiasm cannot survive a committee. It gets sanded into something defensible. Defensible is the enemy of memorable.

Committee-driven consensus produces positioning that is defensible but rarely bold. And bold is the only thing that breaks through a wall of beige.

Host. Do not broadcast.

Broadcasting is the brand talking at the audience. “Here is our value proposition.” Nobody pulls out their phone for a value proposition.

Hosting anticipates the guest. It creates conditions for something unexpected to happen. Hospitality is the original viral mechanic. It predates algorithms by about 10,000 years and still works better because it cannot be faked. You either host or you do not. The customer knows the difference instantly.

Rich Brand gives. Poor Brand takes. Nobody films a taker.

Ask the question that reveals everything: Would our customers film us?

Not NPS scores. Not campaign test results. Would anyone, anywhere, pull out their phone to capture what it feels like to interact with your brand?

If the answer is no, the experience you are creating is not worth remembering. If it is not worth remembering, it is not worth sharing. And if it is not worth sharing, you are paying for every impression, every quarter, forever.

That is not a brand. That is a ransom note you keep paying.

The cowboy did not buy those beers because someone told him to. He bought them because he was the kind of person who buys a stranger’s beer. That is a hiring decision, not a marketing decision.

The Goliath Trap

FIFA spent millions on World Cup 2026 branding. Sponsorships. Broadcast packages. Official everything. None of it went viral the way these 41 videos did. None of it made anyone feel what the cowboy made those Europeans feel.

Goliaths are cumbersome. They are nowhere near as nimble as you. That is your superpower. But only if you use it.

You cannot buy presence. You can only build it. And building it requires the decision most companies are too afraid to make: to be unmistakably, unapologetically different. Not better. Different.

Better is invisible. Different is the voice we hear.

World Cup 2026 will end. The stadiums will empty. The videos will fade from the feed. But the lesson will not. The brands that win the next decade will be those whose people act like hosts rather than employees. The ones whose customers film them without being asked.

The question every CEO should ask on Monday morning is not “How is our campaign performing?”

It should be, “When was the last time someone pulled out their phone to capture us?”

If you do not know the answer, you already know the answer. And you have a people problem, not a marketing problem. Fix that first.

Don’t know where to start?

This is why I am scheduling 1-on-1 Brand Escalation Assessments™ 

Takes 15 minutes. Results instant. Zero obligation.

Schedule your 30-minute clarity call → ​here.​

The post Zero Budget, Zero Brief, Zero Agency: The Campaign That Won the World Cup appeared first on Branding and Brand Strategy for Growing Companies.

We 3X’d a company’s revenue by saying, “No” to the multitasking myth. Not in an easy market like New York City, which is, right now, the most electric city on earth.

And with 2026 being forever known as the year the Knicks made sports history, the city walks different. Chest out, volume up. That energy isn’t a mood. It’s a renewable resource. And one company is showing NYC how to tap into this energy source better than anyone else.

The playbook is counterintuitive: Find a market that’s working. Triple the revenue. Then, and this is the part most strategists are constitutionally incapable of, refuse to take the playbook anywhere else.

That’s not modesty. That branding jiu-jitsu. And the exact opposite of the Multitasking Myth.

The Multitasking Myth Everyone Still Believes

Alex Hormozi has been open about his early failures. Every time he widened his focus into new offers, new markets, new everything, revenue collapsed. He calls multitasking the most expensive lesson of his career. The instinct to spread, to diversify, to “capture more opportunity” nearly broke him.

He’s not alone. The business world runs on a quiet assumption: growth means expansion. More markets. More products. More everything.

That assumption is the Multitasking Myth. And it has a name for what it actually produces: the Dilution Trap.

Every time you add a new market, a new product, a new geography, you subtract focus from the thing that’s already working. You don’t gain momentum. You fracture it.

Below, I explain what happened when we refused to fall into that tempting instinct.

The Setup: Giants Everywhere

CEO Fabio Zaniboni created BubblyNet to provide unparalleled wireless building automation technology. Smart building control, energy monitoring, compliance systems.

The competitors? Siemens. Honeywell. Johnson Controls. Schneider Electric. Companies with vast resources and acquisition-based Frankenstein solutions that claim to do everything, everywhere, for everyone.

Going head-to-head against them on breadth would be suicide. They own “wide.”

But there was a door they’d left open. A door that would welcome custom-bagged coffee and New York hot dogs delivered after a presentation to cement that connection.

It just required walking away from everywhere else to walk through it.

The Crack in the Door: New York City

Over 70% of NYC’s buildings (roughly 50,000) are over 25,000 square feet, making them subject to Local Law 97, one of the most aggressive carbon-reduction regulations in the world.

• 40% energy reduction by 2030.
• 80% by 2050.
• Or face penalties that make non-compliance a non-option.

That’s a market with volume. But volume alone isn’t enough.

A City of Firsts

NYC also carries a 140-year legacy of architectural and technological firsts:

• The first subway
• The first metal-cage skyscraper
• The tallest building in the world, and
• The co-working revolution, to name a few.

It’s a city with a history and an ego. A mythology. A swagger you either match or get laughed out of the room. This was the convergence: enough volume to eat, enough ego to tap.

How to navigate this rich landscape and ignore the temptation to “go wide”?

The Move: Become the Only Company That Exists for This Market

We didn’t position BubblyNet as “a building automation company that also serves NYC.” We launched ReinventNYC, a brand that exists exclusively for one of the world’s greatest cities.

The logo uses the actual fonts from the NYC subway mosaic tiles. The tone is street-smart, zero-B.S., built from the inside out, not translated from outside.

The brand doesn’t say “we can help with compliance.”

It says: So, what’s the next first in New York City’s legacy?

And it answers: fully integrated, wireless building control. They’re not buying a system. They’re buying their place in a 140-year streak.

In one sweep, we stopped competing with Siemens and Honeywell. They’re generalists. We became the specialist synonymous with the biggest metropolis in the world.

The Result: 3X NYC Revenue in Under a Year

NYC alone now generates 3x what the entire United States did nine months ago.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

The Surprising Outcome: The Brand Reshaped Company Culture

The most valuable result wasn’t external. It was internal, using the principles I cover in Rich Brand Poor Brand.

To credibly claim “New York player” status, BubblyNet had to actually become one. That meant more travel. Local training. Resource reallocation. Dropping lower-priority territories to double down on NYC.

Engineers now race to answer NYC client emails. Employees know clients by name. One team member asked to arrive a day early just to experience the city. The company covers extra hotel nights as a reward, because deeper affinity drives better results.

The brand wasn’t a mirror. It was a magnet. It pulled the company toward what it sought to be.

This is a Rich Brand principle in action: the brand is built in here, but comes to life out there.

Four Signals to Escape “The Dilution Trap”

When Fabio and I worked together, it became clear that four conditions made everything else possible.

When you find a market where these four conditions lock into place, the smartest move isn’t to replicate the playbook elsewhere. It’s to triple down. Quadruple down. Refuse to spread.

1. Volume that counts. Enough real, accessible demand to justify ignoring everything else. NYC has 50,000+ buildings subject to LL97 (Local Law 97), which accounts for approximately 70% of NYC’s buildings. With those numbers, we haven’t found the ceiling yet. At 3X, we’re just getting started.

2. Isolate a definite swagger. The market already carries a mythology and ego you can identify and amplify. You don’t manufacture a brand from scratch. You find the swagger that’s already there and build around it. NYC’s 140-year legacy of firsts isn’t something you invent. You spot it, isolate it, and let your customers see themselves in it.

3. A disruption that forces the hand. Compliance deadlines make the old way untenable. Without LL97, building owners have no reason to act. With it, they have no choice. The disruption is the market-maker.

4. Internal fluency. The brand must think from inside the market’s mentality. New Yorkers don’t like surprises and bullshit. They can sniff whether you’re genuine. The subway tile font. The street-smart directness. You’re either comfortable in your own skin, or you’re cosplaying, and they’ll know.

When all four signals fire, spreading is leakage. Depth is leverage.

In NYC building automation, roughly 100 names cover everyone who matters. Five major GCs. Five or six electrical contractors. Five distributors. A handful of engineering firms. In a community that tight, depth compounds and breadth evaporates.

What This Means for You

The standard playbook says: win here, then expand there. Capture one market, then replicate the model in the next geography.

That’s not wrong. But it’s not always right.

Before you expand, ask yourself: have you actually found the ceiling? Or are you leaving a market you’ve barely penetrated because expanding feels like what you’re supposed to do?

3X is child’s play if the ceiling hasn’t been found.

The Multitasking Myth tells you more is better.
The Dilution Trap is what you actually pay for believing it.

Too close to your brand to navigate this?

This is why I am scheduling 1-on-1 Brand Escalation Assessments™ 

Takes 15 minutes. Results instant. Zero obligation.

Schedule your 30-minute clarity call → ​here.​

The post The Multitasking Myth: How Refusing to Scale 3Xed This Company’s NYC Revenue appeared first on Branding and Brand Strategy for Growing Companies.

I already published “The 12 Best Billboard Ads of All Time.”

Then McDonald’s showed up with cowboy fringe made of French fries, making my whole article on billboards feel instantly incomplete.

One image. Three seconds. No logo. No slogan. Just leather strips that, if you look close enough, are golden fries hanging from a Western jacket.

Big Macs hidden in belt buckles. The brand’s signature red and yellow are woven into Calgary Stampede fashion so seamlessly that you can’t tell where the clothing ends and the campaign begins.

All of a sudden, I had a problem. Essentially, a drive-thru nightmare.

Do I break my own rules and add a 13th? Start a new “Hall of Fame” series? Delete one of the originals to make room?

Because leaving it out would make the whole collection one French fry short of a Happy Meal.

So I did the only sensible thing: I started a new collection. And I stocked it with the best new examples I came across. Campaigns that prove the same thing the originals proved, and then some.

What Makes a Billboard Ad the Best of All Time?

The lesson inside every great billboard isn’t really about billboards.

It’s about the fundamental skill of communicating an idea so fast, so clearly, and so memorably that people stop even when they don’t want to.

And today’s highway isn’t on the road; it’s on our phones, devices, and attention spans so divided that it would challenge the greatest math student.

It is this skill that works on a highway at 70 mph.
It’s also what works on Instagram, in a subject line, on your homepage,
in your pitch deck, and in a 30-second elevator conversation.

Here are 9 more campaigns that prove you don’t need a bigger budget. You need a bigger idea.

The One Rule All These Ads Follow

Before we get into the examples, notice what they all have in common.

Not one of them explains the benefit. They all demonstrate it — visually, physically, spatially. The medium becomes the message. The environment becomes part of the ad. The concept isn’t something you read. It’s something you experience.

That’s the game.

1. McDonald’s “Happy Stampeding”: Giddy Up

The Setup: Every year, Calgary hosts the Stampede — one of the world’s largest rodeos and a festival that takes Western culture seriously. McDonald’s, instead of slapping their logo on a sponsor banner and calling it a day, created something that stopped people cold.

A billboard so close-cropped on Western clothing that it takes a moment to see it: the yellow leather fringe hanging from a cowboy jacket isn’t fringe at all. It’s French fries. The red suede is the familiar red of every McDonald’s tray liner. Diamond stitching hides the Golden Arches. Belt buckles conceal Big Macs.

“Happy Stampeding.” Logo. Nothing else.

The Strategy: Hide the brand inside the culture.

This is stealth branding at its highest form. McDonald’s didn’t sponsor the Stampede. They became the Stampede. They dissolved their product so completely into the local cultural aesthetic that the ad feels like it belongs there, like it grew organically out of Western tradition.

And the discovery moment, the second you recognize fries in the fringe, is pure dopamine. You feel clever. You want to show someone. That’s the architecture of a shareable moment: make the audience feel like they foundsomething rather than being shown something.

The takeaway: What would your marketing look like if you stopped showing up as a brand and started showing up as part of the culture your audience already loves? The most powerful advertising doesn’t interrupt the experience. It is the experience.

2. BBC World: “See Both Sides of the Story”

The Setup: BBC World launched in America and needed a single idea to communicate what sets them apart from every other news outlet: that they show both sides of a story.

So they put their ad on a corner billboard.

The same photograph wraps around both faces of the structure. On one side: riot police charging forward. On the other side: the protesters they’re charging at. Same image. Different perspective. Literally.

The Strategy: Make your format do the talking.

Most advertisers treat the corner of a billboard as dead space: the awkward 90-degree fold you design around. BBC World made it the entire concept.

This is called medium-as-metaphor. Instead of saying “we show both sides,” they built a physical structure that forces you to walk around it to understand the story.

The takeaway: Before you write a single word of copy, ask yourself: is there something about the format, the location, or the physical context of your message that could do the heavy lifting? A corner isn’t a problem. It might be your entire campaign.

3. Oreo: Don’t Stare at it Too Long

The Setup: When a solar eclipse made headlines, Oreo did what great brands do: they moved fast.

A simple digital billboard. Dark blue sky. An Oreo cookie positioned exactly where the sun would be, surrounded by a perfect glowing corona of light with a single headline: #OREOECLIPSE

That’s it. That’s the whole ad.

The Strategy: Newsjacking done right.

Oreo didn’t manufacture a moment. They borrowed one. When a world event captures billions of eyeballs and the cultural conversation shifts, there’s a window (often measured in hours) where a brand can insert itself if the idea is fast, obvious, unexpected, and genuinely clever.

Notice what Oreo didn’t do: they didn’t explain it. No “Oreo. Perfect for eclipse day.” No coupon. No logo overkill. Just the image, the hashtag, and the shared cultural moment.

The takeaway: Every major cultural moment is a potential ad placement for someone. The question isn’t can we participate? The question is what’s our one visual that makes this moment ours in under three seconds? 

Speed matters more than production value. A clever idea executed quickly will demolish and outperform a polished idea executed too late.

4. The Economist: Make AI Worried You’re Going to Take Its Job

The Setup: AI is everywhere. Job displacement anxiety is everywhere. Think pieces about “the future of work” are definitely everywhere.

The Economist looked at all that noise and did something almost no brand had the nerve to do: flipped the script entirely.

Red billboard. Classic serif font. Nine words:

“Make AI worried you’re going to take its job.”

No image. No graph. No URL. Just a provocation so perfectly constructed it stops you cold — and makes you feel, for a moment, like the smartest person on the street.

The Strategy: Turn your audience’s anxiety into their superpower.

Every brand in 2024 was tripping over itself to celebrate or warn against AI. The Economist did neither. They handed the power back to the reader.

The campaign runs as a series — each line equally surgical: “Fake it ’til you make it to the newsagent.” “Do you have an unprompted opinion?” You can feel the craft. A secondary line seals it: “Read The Economist to supercharge your human intelligence.” Not a tool. The antidote to the machine.

This echoes The Economist‘s brand: one devastating sentence that rewards viewer attention and presupposes intelligence.

The takeaway: When everyone in your category is talking about the same thing, the brand that reframes the conversation wins. Don’t react to the current discussion. Redirect it. Give your audience a role where they’re the hero, not the victim.

5. KFC Hot & Spicy: The Chicken Explosion

The Setup: The Colonel broke into a sweat on this one. No fire. No flames. No peppers. No heat meter. Just a towering mountain of KFC fried chicken photographed like a volcanic eruption with silhouetted human figures at its base, arms raised, as if worshipping a lava god. The horizon glows orange behind them.

The words, “Hot & Spicy” plus the KFC logo. Done.

The Strategy: Scale the product to mythic proportions.

When your product has a dramatic quality (spicy, fast, powerful, rich), the temptation is to describe it. “Fiery flavor!” “Extra hot!” “Not for the faint of heart!”

Predictable BS.

KFC skipped the adjectives entirely and instead built a visual metaphor so oversized you feel the heat before you process what you’re looking at. Who can look away from something massive and elemental? Nobody with a pulse. KFC hijacked this instinct and pointed it at chicken.

The takeaway: If your product has a feeling associated with it, find an image that triggers that feeling before you have time to be skeptical. That’s the zone you want to live in.

6. Colorado State Patrol: Putting the Brakes on Expectations

The Setup: A highway billboard. A red sedan crumpled under the rear of a semi-truck. “Tailgating isn’t worth it.” Standard safety message except for one enormous detail: the billboard itself appears physically crushed and torn at the top, vinyl peeling away as if the truck just drove through it.

The billboard looks like it got rear-ended.

The Strategy: Demonstrate the consequence, don’t describe it.

Most safety campaigns rely on statistics and guilt. Colorado State Patrol found something more powerful: visceral proof. They didn’t tell you what happens when you tailgate a semi. They built a billboard that physically shows it happening — to itself.

The takeaway: Whatever consequence you’re trying to communicate — financial loss, physical risk, missed opportunity — ask yourself if there’s a way to make the audience feel it rather than just hear it. Felt beats heard every single time.

7. Kit Kat: The Billboard That Took a Break

The Setup: A red billboard. Large white type. “Have a br…” And then… nothing. The right half is unfinished. Brown corkboard backing. A ladder leaning against the side. Whoever was putting this up clearly stopped halfway through (evidently, taking their own Kit Kat break).

You don’t need to see the rest of the tagline. You already know it.

The Strategy: Let the audience finish the thought.

“Have a break, have a Kit Kat” has been their tagline since 1958, so deeply embedded in culture that the brand could stop the sentence at “have a br…” and millions would complete it automatically. And feel clever for doing so.

That moment of completion is the secret weapon. When your audience finishes your thought, they become participants rather than viewers. Participation creates ownership. Ownership creates memory.

The takeaway: If your brand has a signature phrase your audience already knows, don’t show them the whole thing. Let them complete it. The gap between what’s there and what’s missing is where engagement happens.

8. Road Safety: The Slingshot Billboard

The Setup: A billboard along a highway. “The back seat’s no safer. Belt up.” Behind the board, a massive black Y-shaped slingshot structure has been erected — two thick red elastic bands stretch from the slingshot, through the billboard, and connect to a figure flying through the air from the back seat of a car.

The physics of not wearing a seatbelt, demonstrated at full scale on a public road.

The Strategy: Build the product demo into the medium.

Instead of putting a prop next to the billboard, the agency made the billboard a functioning (simulated) product demo. The audience doesn’t need to imagine what happens when you’re unbelted in a rear-end collision. It’s right there. Oversized. Unavoidable. And — crucially — slightly absurd, which makes it shareable.

Great safety advertising walks a knife’s edge. Too grim and people look away. Too playful and people don’t take it seriously. The slingshot lands perfectly in the middle: alarming enough to change behavior, whimsical enough to get photographed and spread.

The takeaway: What would your ad look like if you physically built the proof? Even on a small budget, three-dimensional execution almost always outperforms flat copy.

9. FedEx: Speed Without a Single Word About Speed

The Setup: A photograph. A FedEx delivery truck in motion, blur streaking off the edges, the pavement underneath a smear of grey. “Always First.” Logo.

That’s the whole ad.

The Strategy: Show the attribute, never name it.

FedEx didn’t write “Fast.” They didn’t write “Same-day delivery.” They photographed a truck going so fast it can barely be contained by the frame.

This is the billboard equivalent of showing up to a job interview with a portfolio instead of a résumé. Prove it beats claim it in every medium, every time. The motion blur does infinitely more work than the word “fast” ever could; it activates the feeling in the viewer rather than asking them to accept a claim.

The takeaway: Whatever your primary differentiator is, speed, quality, safety, or luxury, find the image that makes someone feel it without reading about it. If you need words to explain your visual, find a different visual.

The Invisible Thread That Connects Great Billboard Ads

Read back through these nine campaigns, and you’ll find the same principle at work in every single one:

The best billboard ads don’t just communicate an idea. They engineer an experience.

McDonald’s hides fries in cowboy fringe. BBC World forces you to physically walk around a structure. Oreo hijacks a celestial event. McDonald’s turns a logo into a compass. KFC scales chicken into a natural disaster. Colorado State Patrol crashes a billboard into itself. Kit Kat leaves a gap you can’t help but fill. The road safety campaign launches a person into the sky. FedEx makes you feel the velocity.

None of them explain. All of them demonstrate.

That’s the shift. From messaging to experience. From claims to proof. From telling to making-feel.

And here’s the thing: this isn’t a billboard skill. This is a communication skill.

Your next email campaign, your next sales page, your next pitch deck, your next product launch — every one of those is a billboard. You have six seconds (or six words, or one scroll-stop moment) to connect before the audience moves on.

The brands winning at every level are the ones that stopped describing and started demonstrating.

The One Question Every Brand Needs to Ask

Before you write your next message, regardless of the channel, ask yourself this:

If I could only show this and say not a single word, what image or structure would convey the idea instantly?

Find that image (or, in the case of The Economist, the words that paint a picture) first.

Then, if you still feel the need to add words, keep it to six.

The car is not going to slow down for your explanation.

Want help translating this thinking into your own marketing? Schedule a discovery call.

Or grab the #1 bestseller that brings these principles to life for your whole team.

The post McDonald’s Just Made My Last Article Obsolete. 9 More Billboard Ads That Will Change How You Think About Branding. appeared first on Branding and Brand Strategy for Growing Companies.

Harrison Ford’s lifetime achievement speech was a masterclass in uniting ideas, values, and people.

Indiana Jones just got a lifetime achievement award. Han Solo. The guy who made a whip and a blaster iconic. Forty-plus films, six decades, $9 billion at the box office.

And you know what he talked about?

Ideas. Empathy. Imagination.

“We share the privilege of working in the world of ideas, of empathy, of imagination.”

That’s not the speech anyone expected. The action hero didn’t talk about action. He delivered an accidental masterclass in what brand building actually is. Not the mechanics of it. The soul of it.

But before he said any of that, he said this: “I found a calling, a life in storytelling.”

A life in storytelling. And that’s where this gets interesting for anyone who builds brands.

Because branding, at its bones, is storytelling. Not logos. Not taglines. Not color palettes. Those are just the props. The real thing is the story you tell, and whether anyone feels something when they hear it.

“I’ve Had Incredible Collaborators at Every Step of the Way”

Ford made movies. That was the artifact. But the act, the thing he described, when accepting his award, was gathering people around an idea and making them feel something together.

“The stories we tell have a unique capacity to create moments of emotional connection. They bring us together.”

This is the line most brands never cross. They obsess over the artifact. The logo. The tagline. The color palette. The Instagram grid. They treat branding as decoration and wonder why nobody cares.

Ford didn’t become Harrison Ford because he showed up with a good headshot. He became Harrison Ford because he found collaborators who shared a singular belief: stories can bring people together.

Not divide them.
Not sell them something.
But bring them together in a dark theater and take them somewhere.

That is a choice. And it’s the same choice every brand makes, whether they realize it or not.

What You Do With the Thing

“Sometimes we make entertainment. Sometimes we make art. Sometimes we’re lucky: we make them both at the same time. And if we’re really fortunate, we also get to make a living doing it.”

The thing itself, the food, the money, the words, the art, the brand, is neutral. It doesn’t decide. You do.

Consider the range:

• Food can mean Sunday dinners where you argue about politics and pass the potatoes anyway. Or it can mean velvet ropes and secret menus designed to remind us we’re not in the club.
• Money can mean Patagonia giving away $10 million in Black Friday sales to environmental causes. Or it can mean the quiet signal of a watch, a car, a zip code that says “you don’t belong here.”
• Art can mean Ford spending 40 years making movies where strangers in a theater gasped at the same moment, laughed at the same line, flinched at the same explosion. “Sometimes we make entertainment,” he said. “Sometimes we make art. Sometimes we’re lucky we make them both at the same time.” Or art can mean elitism. Gatekeeping. Work that preens instead of opens.

And once you see that, you can’t unsee it.

Every brand falls into one of two camps: those using their platform to bring people in, and those using it to keep people out.

Nobody Builds a Legacy Alone

Ford said something that hit harder than any award: “I’ve had incredible collaborators at every step of the way.”

Every step. Not “a few good people along the way.” Every step.

“In my third year of college, I was a little lost. I was failing at school. I felt isolated and alone. And then I found the company of people putting on plays, storytellers, people I once thought were misfits and geeks turned out to be my people.”

The best work any of us has ever done happened because someone in the room saw something we didn’t. A writer. A designer. A strategist who pushed back and made the thing sharper. A client who refused to settle for “good enough.”

And then Ford said something most acceptance speeches never touch: “Success in this business brings a certain freedom that comes with responsibility to support each other, to lift others up when we can, to keep the door open for the next kid, the next lost boy who’s looking for a place to belong.”

That’s not an acceptance speech. That’s a doctrine.

The Four Ingredients of Brand Building

More than 40 films. Over $9 billion at the global box office. Han Solo. Indiana Jones. Bladerunner. Witness. Air Force One.

Six decades as a cultural constant. Grandparents and grandchildren who each had their own Harrison Ford moment, in their own dark theater, despite being decades apart.

But none of that explains the speech. The speech was about what he did with the opportunity. Not the scale of it. The direction he pointed it.

Here’s the takeaway for anyone building a brand that actually matters. The ingredients are the same four Ford named:

The brands that change lives don’t have bigger budgets. They have better stories. And they tell them with people who make those stories better than they’d ever be alone.

The artifact is the movie. The act is the gathering.

And the act is the only part that matters.

The post Harrison Ford’s Lifetime Achievement Speech Was a Masterclass in Brand Building appeared first on Branding and Brand Strategy for Growing Companies.