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My Brand Building Philosophy

My Brand Building Philosophy

Here's everything I know about building "brand"

Cody Plofker
February 02, 2022

Ok, trying something a bit new. As you can see, I changed the design a bit. It's a work in process, but give me some feedback on it. I want the tone here to stay as conversational as possible, but I want to make this legit AF so thought making it look like a real newsletter would be nice.

Today's lets talk about brand building. (I think all my media buying and performance marketing friends just threw up a little). This is a topic that is pretty important, but anything you talk about brand it can get polarizing, partly because there is not a good definition of brand.

So first, let's try to give brand a working definition, as I think that's a very important starting point. Now, I'm not arrogant enough to think I can define what brand means. It's just so you and I are on the same page here.

When I think brand, I think that brand is what you're known for. There are two parts to that:

Known - That's where the "brand awareness" comes into play. You can be the most unique and polarizing person in the world, but if no one knows you it doesn't matter
For - When someone thinks about you, or tells their friends about you, what are the two things they say about you? That's your brand, whether personal or for a business.

The Benefits Of Being A Brand

Now let's talk about the benefits of having a brand, whether personal or for a DTC brand. One quick caveat here, I don't think you have to have a brand. I think you can do $100m without one, so before someone comes at me and says brand isn't everything, I agree it's not. I also think the brands that don't get performance marketing are living in a different decade, and need to get with it. But it's just the game I'm choosing to play, both personal and for Jones Road because there are so many benefits to it. A few of them are...

Organic traffic and lower blended CAC. Music to my ears.
Referrals/ word of mouth. Not only should people have very positive associations with you as a brand but its easier to tell people when they know exactly what to say because you've done so well branding yourself. If they can't tell a friend what you're all about in 30 seconds, you need to work on your brand.
Your performance marketing just performs better. It's funny. I come from a very direct response background. I used to be in love with sales letters, upsells, urgency, scarcity, you name it. In my mind, all of those tactics look to improve conversion and AOV by trying to increase demand and manufacture trust to overcome uncertainty objections. You know what works even better? Having a brand that people actually trust so you don't have to manufacture trust. We don't do nearly any of those direct response tactics, and our stuff converts like crazy because we're known for something and people trust us.

The Downsides Of Having A Brand

To be fair, I should also mention all the negatives with having a strong brand. It is an exhaustive list. They are ALL listed below:

Having too much money in the bank and not knowing what to do with it
Wanting to spend more on ads but not able to because you're out of inventory
Getting stage 5 clinger customers and followers who just won't leave you alone and can't stop raving about you

Now obviously I'm kidding. I'm sure there are some real downsides, but I think they're silly in comparison to all the upsides of having a brand.

The Only Thing More Important Than Brand

How To Build A Real Brand

Let's get into the fun stuff. Now that we know why brand is important and we have a working definition to go off of, let's build a brand, whether for you or your business. The first step is to create content, create a lot of content, and create a lot of good content. But what kind of content should you create? Brand pillar content.

What is brand pillar content? Brand pillar content is content that supports your brand pillars and brings customers and prospects either closer to you or farther from you with every interaction. Creating content can be overwhelming because we look at a brand's page or channel and see tactics. We see the hundreds of posts with different captions, styles, and angles. But what if there weren't hundreds of pieces of content, and really only 3-4 types? Instead of looking at the tactics, look at the principles. Most of your content should be surrounding 1 or 4 or 5 brand pillars.

Take what we've done on TikTok. Fortunately for me, Bobbi (my mom and founder of Jones Road) was building brand from before I was born. I've watched her Masterclass, read her book, and consumed as much as I could. No idea if this was on purpose or not (Maybe I should ask her), but as i understand it she's really known for:

Helping women embrace their natural beauty
Being authentic
Being nice
Her signature natural, no-makeup makeup look

Now every single piece of content we create and put out there should be surrounding one of those pillars, if not multiple. This way we're constantly bringing people closer to us and creating a deeper connection with the right people.

In a nutshell, I'd like Bobbi's brand strategy to be "Positively Polarizing. She's always positive and empowering, but she's not afraid to take powerful stances on controversial topics, like contouring or plastic surgery. Gary Vee is also positively polarizing. I guess you could say I'm trying to make her the Gary Vee of beauty.

Here's a few example of how we've done this:

Helping women embrace their natural beauty - This anti-nose contouring video that went viral was exactly that. Bobbi talked about why you don't need to be perfect, and everyone is beautiful. It got us some very nice earned media.
Being authentic - Bobbi is shooting these TikToks from her house, sometimes with no makeup on, being her friendly self. Authenticity is more of what you do than what you say. But people love when you show them the real you and let down your guard a bit. For some odd reason, people really love that.
Being nice - this is a funny brand pillar to me. I mean, you can literally make a brand out of being nice. Isn't that sad? Love him or hate him, this is a huge one of Gary Vee's brand pillars. He's always talking about positivity, and it's one thing he's known for. I truly think one of the reasons Bobbi has such a following is because of her nice she is. I've seen her go out of her way to always help people, and if she ever gets stopped she's never too busy or too important. People remember, and they tell their friends. Being nice is a superpower.
Her signature no-makeup makeup look - I'm a big fan of showing, not telling. Videos on IG and TikTok make this easy with her applying it, or UGC. But again, this ties into the first point.

I'm a big fan of subtly weaving brand pillars into educational content. Look at this vid that has racked up 3.7M views!

Let's break it down. I wrote the copy for this with these thoughts in mind:

It's a how to/ instructional video. We're teaching people how to look better without looking like they have tons of makeup on. That's 1 point for including #4. . I then got Bobbi to say "you're perfect as you are." That's 2 points for including #1. I think the video is pretty authentic. Bobbi is in her home office, and shot on an Iphone. It would be interesting to test it with some family photos behind her next one. But I'll round up and give it a 3rd point. I think she comes across as nice and friendly in the video, so there's a 4th point. 1 43 second video has the power to tell your whole brand story if you let it. This video is now CRUSHING it as a spark ad for us. Brand first performance marketing for the win.

The Next Step

Once you have an audience and are getting known for something, the next step is easy. Just ask your audience what they want! It's like a cheat code.

It's literally how we found success so quickly on TikTok. Luckily we had an audience form years of Bobbi's brand building. Our very first post was just asking our customers what they wanted to see and learn from Bobbi. I thought we'd get like 10 replies because she had 3k followers at the time. We got several hundred. I looked through the comments, and asked Bobbi to create video replies to the most common and polarizing ones. I can't say I expected it to go viral, but looking back at it our thought process was sound. It's an easy replaceable formula that works across industries. Here's how I'm using the same formula to grow my personal audience....

How I've Grown To Nearly 10k Followers In 6 Months

I've used this same formula to build my personal audience. It's actually been really fun and inspiring to build my audience while working on Bobbi's TikTok growth because without her saying anything to teach me, I'm learning from her years of brand building. Please don't say this to her, it would go to her head. I tweeted this the other day, which was the impetus to this post:

So the first step has been to provide massive value, and if you're reading this I really hope you think I do an ok job there. But let's elaborate on it. In keeping with everything above, you want to be known for something. You don't want to be the same as everyone else, that's for sure. It's been really fun to get to watch the positive responses while launching on TikTok to Bobbi's contnet, and seeing how the fruits of her labor are still paying off years later. So I'm trying to play the long game, and build a personal brand by being known for 1-3 things, be down to earth, very nice, and maintain a great reputation.

If my mom's brand strategy is to be "positively polarizing", mine is to be "IDGAF, but in a good way." I've kind of adopted a "Yes, Man" thing where I'm up for anything, willing to say yes to everything, and I truly don't care what anyone thinks about me, as long as I'm nice. So it's not IDGAF in a "FU" type way, it's "hey I'm very happy with where I'm at in life, I'm loving it, having fun and succeeding and I'm not gonna let my day get ruined by some critics." I personally think that you attract the kind of energy you put out, and I've been able to connect with some people multiple rungs above me for this reason.

(Side note: this is an awkward newsletter to write. I hate talking about myself)

Next is validating demand. It's so simple once you have an audience. You just have to be willing to put yourself out there, and be proven wrong.

I don't know how to link a twitter thread in here, but here are a few screenshots:

Now here was one where I thought I had a great idea, but the market didn't validate it:

I thought B would have crushed it. It would have cost me $52k minimum to do, and there was far less demand for it than the "free" one of option A. At first I got a bit defensive, because I thought I had an amazing, viral concept. But then I realized that was my natural knee jerk defense mechanism, and I realized I was wrong. It might have been the idea I was clinging to for some reason, but that doesn't mean it's the right one.

It's great when we get customers telling us we should do exactly what we want to do. But we have to remember that tossing an idea out there and finding out no one wants it is not a bad thing. It might feel like it' but it's literally the reason to survey and validate.

Now the final step is easy. Once you get there, you already know what to do. Just do it.