: I once gave a 25-minute talk at a networking event — not to sell anything, just to give away the most useful thing I could think of on the topic I knew best. I gave handouts. I ran slightly over time because there were too many questions. I walked away with eight business cards from people who specifically asked to stay in touch. Three of them became clients. One of those clients referred two more. The whole thing cost me an evening and a printed sheet of paper. That was the moment I stopped thinking about advertising and started thinking about showing up and being useful.
A man in a nice neighbourhood runs a family contracting business.
Plumbing, carpentry, electrics. Good solid work, been doing it for years, his father did it before him. He's not cutting corners. He's not hard to reach. He shows up when he says he will.
Last year he spent £7,000 on advertising. Yellow Pages. Coupons through the door. A promotional campaign in the local paper. He came away with essentially nothing. Not a fraction of £7,000 in new business. Nothing.
Now here's the thing. He was up against a name in the neighbourhood that had been there for twenty years. Twenty years of people calling, getting the job done, telling their neighbour, passing on the number. That name didn't need advertising anymore. That name had something advertising can't buy: a relationship with the community.
That's where brand actually lives. Not in the ad. In the experience people have had, and in the stories they tell each other about it.
You cannot shortcut that with spend. But you can build it faster than most people think — if you go about it the right way.
There Are Only Two Ways People Discover a Brand
Strip away everything else and you're left with two mechanisms: direct experience, and word of mouth.
Direct experience is the McDonald's chip. The same chip everywhere in the world, and the moment it hits your tongue the brand registers. No ad required. The experience does the work. When the experience is good, the association is good. When it's not, no amount of advertising will save it.
Word of mouth is when someone whose judgment you trust tells you about someone whose judgment you can now borrow. It is faster and more powerful than any paid medium because it arrives pre-endorsed. You don't have to convince the person — someone they already believe has already done that for you.
Everything else — the Yellow Pages, the newspaper insert, the social media campaign — is either a path to one of those two things, or it's waste. Advertising can generate an initial click. It can get someone to try the chip. What it cannot do is be the chip. The chip has to be the chip.
If your product or service is outstanding and your clients are having genuine experiences of that, the brand will build. If it isn't, no logo and no budget will save it long-term. And if it is outstanding but nobody is having the experience yet, the only question worth asking is: how do I get more people in front of the real thing?
The Commercial Nobody Remembered
There was a Super Bowl ad that became briefly famous for being watchable — two women in a catfight in the mud, increasingly dramatic, ending on an implied kiss. People talked about it for days.
Ask someone now what company it was for. They won't know. Most of them didn't know at the time. The ad had got attention, held it, and then failed to land on anything. The mud and the women hadn't been interacting with any product. They were just there.
This is the most common mistake people make when they understand that attention is the first step. They confuse getting attention with building a brand. They're not the same thing. Attention is the door. It has to open into something.
Whatever gets people looking at you has to connect to you — to what you do, who you are, what they'll get if they pay attention further. A striking picture, a bold headline, a surprising fact: these things work when they pull someone toward you specifically. They fail when they're just striking in the abstract.
The principle: everything you use to get attention must interact with you. Not sit next to you. Interact with you. Otherwise you've built an audience for the mud.
The Four-Step Brand Process
Here is the actual sequence, and it doesn't start with advertising.
Step one: get their attention. You have to do something that stands out in the specific environment where your potential clients are. Not everywhere. In their world. What do they read? Where do they gather? Who do they already pay attention to? That's where you need to be visible, and you need to be doing something that distinguishes you from the people around you.
Step two: hold their attention. This is where most people fall short. Getting attention is one moment. Holding it requires substance — something they can't get elsewhere, delivered in a way that keeps them coming back. The free article that is actually useful. The talk that runs over time because the questions won't stop. The conversation that delivers more than they expected before you've asked them for anything.
Step three: make a bold promise. At some point you have to commit to what you're offering to do. Not a modest, hedged version. The genuine best-case version of what working with you looks like. This is the bit that requires nerve. But if you've built enough trust first, it lands very differently than the same words spoken cold.
Step four: overdeliver on that promise. Promise ten. Give twelve. Promise a day. Deliver a morning. Every time you exceed the expectation you've set, you generate a story that person will tell somebody else. That story is the brand. All of it — the logo, the website, the bio — is just packaging around that story.
Get Paid to Advertise
The smartest thing Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen did when they were starting out — before Chicken Soup for the Soul was a publishing phenomenon — was to make themselves available constantly: radio interviews, book signings in small shops to four or five people, talks at libraries and schools, adult education classes.
They got paid to be in front of people who needed what they had. Instead of spending money to reach people, they were being paid — sometimes just a small amount, sometimes a percentage of ticket fees — to stand in front of a room that had self-selected to hear about the exact thing they were selling.
Most towns and cities have an adult education or community learning programme. These programmes are always looking for someone interesting who will talk about something useful. You propose a class on whatever you know best, whatever your professional expertise is. They charge people £20-£30 to attend. You split the fee with the facility, and you get in front of a room of people who have already decided they want to know about this topic.
You give them everything. You don't hold back the best material to try to sell them something later. You give them the 10 most important things they should know before doing whatever you do professionally , and you give it freely, clearly, with handouts they can take home. At the end, people who want to go further know where to find you.
It's not the only path. Radio stations want interview guests who have something interesting to say and won't pitch their product every thirty seconds. Community groups, business networks, professional associations, charities, have meetings every week and are always looking for speakers. Show up with value and leave without a sales pitch, and people remember you as the generous expert, which is precisely what a personal brand is.
The Niche That Owns You
Here's the trap most people fall into when they start trying to build their brand. They try to appeal to everyone who might conceivably need their service, which means they differentiate themselves from no one.
The goal is to be the obvious choice for a specific kind of person with a specific kind of problem. Not the second option. Not one of several. The first name that comes to mind.
The real estate agent who sells luxury properties to clients relocating internationally is not competing with every other agent in the city. The family law solicitor who specialises in international custody disputes is not competing with every other family solicitor. The narrower the definition, the more owned the category ,and the more likely that when someone who exactly matches that description is looking, your name comes up.
Pick your niche by asking: where do I have the most depth? Where could I give a two-hour talk without notes? Where has my work produced the most dramatic results? Then go there completely. You can always serve other clients too, but your brand points at one thing.
The Brand Is the Behaviour
Character is not a soft concept in brand-building. It's the whole game, long-term.
Every time Paul McCartney walked onto a stage and gave two and a half hours of everything he had, he was making a deposit into a brand account that has compounded for sixty years. Every time Elvis fulfilled the promise, the energy, the performance, the moment, the brand got stronger. Not because someone designed a logo. Because the experience matched the expectation, every time.
When it doesn't match, when the promise made in the marketing isn't delivered in the room, the brand corrodes. And the people who notice are the ones most likely to tell others. A disappointing experience travels faster than a good one.
You are what you actually do over a long period of time. Not what your website says. Not the title on your business card. What people experience when they interact with you, and what they tell someone else about it afterwards.
Build the experience first. Build it so that it's genuinely excellent. Then find ways to get more people in front of it. That's the sequence. In that order.
More next time,
Jonny