Gratuitous sorcery and incantations from actual Wizards.

In many ways, the following tweet can be seen to represent solid advertising advice:

Note though, that this advice is more innovative and entrepreneurial in nature. The tweet is telling you how to introduce a new product or service to the market.

And her advice is to focus on WIIFM — What’s In It For Me — where “Me” means the prospective customer base.

Here’s how my new product or service will make YOUR life better.

In her opinion, this is a better messaging than “Here’s why I’m doing what I’m doing.”

The contrasting advice can be seen in the imagery for this fantastic ad for agency, Crispin & Porter:

One sign is undoubtedly more persuasive than the other. But why?

The right-hand sign certainly doesn’t rely on WIIFM for its appeal.

Instead, it relies on bonding.

Because, yes, people DO care about other humans that they’re able to connect with on a human level.

And you’d be well advised to bake that appeal into your advertising as well.

Reconciling This Advice for Maximum Effectiveness

The way to get the best of both worlds is to indeed appeal to customers’ self interest while also providing them with your emotional compulsions for making that offer.

Because a compelling offer made by a company or person you don’t quite trust is an offer that you’ll pretty much never consider, let alone take.

You, as the buyer, need to understand “what’s in it for them, the business owner.”

You also need to know “why can I trust you.”

And the better the offer, the more these other factors come into play.

This is what makes telling your origin story so powerful, as it establishes the WHY behind the WHAT.

“I’m making this amazing offer because it’s a manifestation of my core values and mission.”

The more your offer reinforces your core identity, and the more your identity and offer matches with the customer’s identity, the more powerful the response.

Adding a Third Leg to Your Advertising Stool

While an ad campaign with both reason-why and bonding appeals is enough to generate massive response, it’s not the best you can do.

You can also add in differentiation through brand codes.

Bonding is about your inner identity.

Differentiation is about your outer, sensible identity — looking and sounding distinctively different from the competition, so that anyone seeing or hearing your ads instantly recognizes them as uniquely your ads.

This is mainly done through the intelligent and persistent use of Brand Codes:

• Brandable Chunks
• Ear-wormy sonic cues
• Logos
• Distinct and recognizable characters and mascots
• Music
• Packaging, uniforms, truck wraps, etc.

And you can visualize the three major factors of advertising success like this:

What’s In YOUR Ad Campaign?

So what about your advertising?

Do you make use of WIIFM appeals and Bonding and Brand Codes?

If not, you’re missing out on one or two key factors and undermining the effectiveness of your efforts.

Want to change that?

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“When I’m looking for something, I just Google it.”

That’s a phrase that seems obvious because it matches our personal experiences.

With 8.5 billion Google searches each day, yours are at least 4 or 5 of them.

But it wasn’t the first thing you did.

Extra awesome info in the video – don’t miss it!

In his book “How Customers Think,” Dr. Gerald Zaltman of Harvard says 95% of purchase decisions are made subconsciously. That odd quirk of our brains means that we’ve already decided… before we decided.

If that’s tough to understand, think of this: You’re on a family trip. Kids are exhausted. Spouse is barking orders.

As you drive past restaurants, your options are:

• Findley’s Restaurant
• Blotto’s Burgers
• Applebee’s
• Tiny’s Taco Truck

Those other places are likely fine, and Applebee’s is nothing special. But you’re exhausted, stressed, and you don’t have the energy to make decisions. 8 times out of 10, you’re picking Applebee’s.

You recognize the name, you know what to expect, and your risk is low.

Brains want to make decisions quickly. The more processing power your brain uses, the less effective it can be doing other things.

The business that comes to mind first, is the one that tends to get chosen disproportionately more often.

And, yes, it happens in search, too. In their study The Secret Life of Search, analysts at Red C Marketing found “most Google searches…resulted in a familiar, trusted, credible brand being chosen for the first click. […] It’s clear that raising awareness and trust in your brand is an essential part of getting clicks.”

The percentage wasn’t insignificant. A full 82% chose the brand they were familiar with as the first choice. This is consistent regardless of the business category.

You can empty your bank account and give it all to Google, and the click is still going to the known brand 8 out of 10 times.

Brands like SoFi, AirBNB, 4Imprint, Doordash, and Booking.com are ones you’ve seen advertised all over. The thing they all have in common is that they don’t exist outside the internet. They are online companies for an online world accessed only online. Yet the ads you see are not on Google. They’re someplace else.

These brands, smartly, are getting into your brain before you need them.

This is the world you want to own. The part of the brain that is filing information away for a future day, ready to jump into action when the need arises.

This is the real “first” thing you do. Google? It’s still in the top 10…but it will never be number one.

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Rolex has just over 30% of the luxury watch market share — with sales greater than the next five biggest players combined.

And, if anything, that underestimates Rolex’s dominance.

For watches costing over $10K, Rolex and Patek Philippe have a combined market share of 70%.

All while Rolex intentionally limits production of its watches!

Ask a non-watch enthusiast to name a luxury brand and Rolex will likely top the list.

They are, without a doubt, the most powerful and influential watch company in the world.

So… it’s natural to ask: why and how that came to be?

Really, it goes back to the founder, Hans Wilsdorf, and his ability to craft a powerful brand identity by choosing what NOT to focus on.

See, Wilsdorf was a massive Anglophile. It’s why he named his second watch brand Tudor.

Also, Wilsdorf personally identified as a merchant and not a horologist or watchmaker.

So his conception of a watch was decidedly Anglo-Saxon, as opposed to continental.

Meaning he saw a wristwatch as a TOOL, not an object d’art.

And if you see a watch as a tool, here’s what you DON’T focus on:

• Decorated movements
• Display case backs (for showing off decorated movements)
• Refined dress watch proportions and thinness
• Grand Complications
• Precious metals (Rolex makes watches in gold and platinum, but it’s not their mainstay)

Horologists or watchmakers would naturally focus on this stuff. But an anglophile merchant like Wilsdorf wouldn’t and indeed didn’t.

And this is a radical departure for a luxury watch, as most of the other established brands obsessively focus on these very qualities, precisely because they see what they create as refined cultural artifacts — like a Rembrandt you can wear on your wrist.

But if you see a watch as a tool, what you DO focus on is:

• Accuracy
• Rugged reliability
• Water Proofing
• The non-fussiness of automatic winding
• Durable, all-metal bracelets instead of fancy leather straps.
• “Professional” watch models aimed at explorers, pilots, and divers

Just think about Rolex’s most iconic watch models — the Datejust, Day-Date, GMT, Submariner, Explorer, Daytona, etc — and you’ll see that they fit this bill perfectly

This is why every model Rolex, even if it’s solid gold and gem-encrusted, is 100 meters water resistant with a screw-down crown, shock-proof, and chronometer-certified.

In contrast, it wasn’t until the 70s that Rolex’s luxury watchmaking counterparts started making steel, water-proof sports watches with bracelets, e.g., A&P’s Royal Oak, Patek’s Nautilus, and Vacheron’s Overseas.

So if you want to know why Rolex became THE luxury watch to own in the U.S. and UK, it’s because Rolex’s conception of a watch perfectly matched the consumer’s conception of what an expensive watch should be.

Go figure that a watch brand built around Anglo-Saxon sensibilities would become a best-seller in Anglo-Saxon countries.

Just understand that a lot of high-end watch snobs consider Rolex as entry-level, precisely because Rolex doesn’t do the things that true luxury buyers want.

If you’re in the market for a highly decorated, grand complication, Rolex ain’t gonna be your bag, baby.

So one lesson here is in Choosing Whom to Loose.

More specifically….

Who are you NOT for? Who do you NOT want as a customer?

You can’t be all things to all people.

But you CAN be the best choice for your target market.

Who are those people, and what makes you their best choice?

If you can answer these questions clearly and powerfully, you are well on your way to having a strong brand.

Focus as intently on what you WON’T do, as what you will.

You will be more easily defined by what you stand against than by what you stand for.

And choosing what you don’t do will put a fine point on that.

For example, when they started, McDonald’s ONLY sold hamburgers and fries in a world where most casual restaurants sold a bit of everything.

Similarly, Dominos only did delivery pizza and Subway only sold sub sandwiches.

In another category, Dell sells every conceivable model of computer and monitor, customizable in almost any way you want for almost any use-case, while Apple sells a handful of models, with limited variations, mostly geared towards “creatives.”

Which of those two is more successful? Which is the bigger brand?

Ensure The Values Embraced by Your Business Resonate with Your Audience

You may be a diamond snob who would never think of buying a created diamond. Or maybe you shudder to think of selling a stone with less than Grade D color and IF clarity.

But do your customers think that way? Do they care about those things the way you do?

Suppose your customers would gladly get a bigger, created stone with an F color and VS2 clarity.

In other words, understand that just like watch snobs are a minority of the luxury watch market, diamond snobs are a minority of the diamond market.

And matching your company values to the market values will allow you to grab a much greater market share than trying to “educate the customer” or chasing after the snobby elite.

As my mentor likes to say, “If you sell to the classes, you will live with the masses. But if you sell to the masses, you will live with the classes.”

Run Powerful Advertising

Not only did Rolex have powerfully resonant brand attributes, it also had powerful advertising campaigns that brilliantly communicating its essential brand appeals.

Indeed, Hans Wilsdorf himself believed that: “only great marketing is needed to make a company successful.”

As an example, take a look at the three Rolex ads in the header of this post.

Or take a gander at the ad to the right.

Everything in these ads is about rugged male accomplishment, as well as the rugged reliability of a Rolex watch.

And these ads are incredibly representative of the kind of campaigns that Rolex ran very aggressively during the heyday of print magazines.

Oh, and remember how Rolex and Patek shared 70% of the market for watches costing over $10K?

Would it surprise you to learn that Patek ALSO ran powerful ads, albeit ones communicating a very different brand value?

Note both how different the style of watch is from the Rolex as well as the different emotional appeal of the ad from the Rolex ad above.

So the brands that continuously ran powerful campaigns are the ones that ended up with the lion’s share of their markets. There’s definitely a lesson there.

Dominate Your Market Like Rolex

Now, you may be asking yourself how I know that these specific factors are primarily responsible for Rolex’s success.

And the answer to that lies in the decidedly NON-luxury watch market.

If you look at quartz digital watches, the two most popular brands and model lines are Casio G-Shocks and the Timex Ironman.

Why?

Because they focus on the same masculine brand attributes Rolex did:

— Rugged (and indeed Shockproof) reliability

— Waterproof cases

— Durable rubber straps

— Models aimed specifically at manly endeavors

It’s the same reason denim jeans became the standard uniform of the American male.

Now, I’m not saying YOU should focus on those same attributes.

But I am saying you should focus on those attributes that will resonate strongly with your intended audience.

And that part of communicating those attributes to your customers will involve a sharp delineation of what you stand against and what you won’t do.

If you do that, and you advertise your brand powerfully, you can come to dominate your market like Rolex.

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Branding is not a logo. It’s not your tagline. It’s not even your color palette. Your brand is a representation of all of your intentional actions and behaviors. The ideals that inspire the hearts of your buyers and hires. The sacrifices you’re willing to make for their care and your attention to fulfilling their needs. Your brand shows them who you are, what you believe, and why they matter to you. Only then will you have a brand that will matter to them. 

But in the cacophony of modern-day stimulation, how do you ensure your brand voice is heard above the noise? The answer lies in crafting a holistic brand strategy—one built for 2025 and beyond.

Let’s dig into the delicious marrow of what makes a brand thrive. Not survive—thrive. The tactics have changed, and so must your strategy.

The Foundation: Start With Why

Simon Sinek’s golden circle is more than a clever framework; it’s the roots of your brand. Your “why” isn’t just a mission statement you slap on a wall. It’s the beacon that guides your decisions, attracts your tribe, and inspires loyalty.

People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. Apple didn’t win the hearts of millions because of superior technology—they won because they stood for challenging the status quo. Start with why, and everything else—your products, services, and campaigns—will fall into place like celestial dominoes.

The Hero’s Journey: Make Your Customer the Star

Every great brand tells a story, but the secret sauce is that it’s not about you. You are not the hero—your customer is. Your role is to be their wizard, the Yoda to their Luke, the Gandalf to their Frodo.

Frame your messaging around your customer’s challenges, desires, and transformation. They’re navigating a journey—your job is to equip them with the tools and insights they need to succeed. Brands that master this become indispensable.

Take Nike, for example. Their message isn’t “Look at our amazing shoes.” It’s “You are capable of greatness.” They speak to the athlete within every person, and in doing so, they build an emotional bridge that no competitor can tear down.

Simplicity Is Sophistication

In 2025, complexity is the enemy of clarity. If your brand strategy is a tangled mess of buzzwords, jargon, and diluted messages, you’re lost. The brands that win are the ones that can distill their essence into a single, unmistakable truth.

• Volvo: safety. 
• Starbucks: community. 
• Disney: magic. 

Each of these brands owns a singular idea in the minds of their customers. This isn’t by accident. It’s the result of disciplined focus and ruthless prioritization. Define your one thing and commit to it with unwavering resolve.

Embrace Disruption

Disruption isn’t just a Silicon Valley buzzword; it’s a branding necessity. The old ways of doing things are like yesterday’s newspapers—irrelevant and discarded. In a world that’s constantly changing, brands must either adapt or fade into obscurity.

But here’s the twist: Disruption doesn’t mean being recklessly innovative. It means being bold, calculated, and willing to challenge traditional conventions. Think of Patagonia’s bold stance on sustainability or Tesla’s audacious mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy. These brands didn’t disrupt for the sake of disruption; they did so with purpose. 

What do you stand for? What injustice do you stand against?

The Digital Renaissance: Master the Mediums

2025 is a landscape dominated by digital interactions. Social media, SEO, email marketing, and AI-driven customer insights are no longer optional—they reinforce mainstream branding. But here’s the catch: You can’t master them all. Instead, you must master the ones where your audience hangs out most.

Figure out where your customers hang out. Are they scrolling through Instagram, diving deep into Reddit threads, or binging YouTube? Meet them there with shareable content that doesn’t inform but entertains and delights.

Consistency Is King

A fractured brand is a forgettable brand. Your message, tone, visuals, and values must sing in harmony across every touchpoint. If your website speaks one language and your social media another, you’ve created a discord that alienates your audience.

Consistency builds trust. Trust builds loyalty. And loyalty? That’s the holy grail of branding.

But consistency means something else, too. Repetition. There’s no promise that consistently posting will get in front of your desired audience consistently. You need to invest in high impression strategies, online and offline, if you ever hope to get past the short-term memory and take up residence in the long-term chemical memory. 

The alternative is spending outrageous amounts of money chasing the today customer who has no positive impression of you over your competition. 

Data Is Your Compass, Not Your Captain

We live in a world awash with data. Clicks, conversions, bounce rates, and heat maps can illuminate the path forward. But beware—data should guide your decisions, not dictate them.

The heart of your brand is not found in spreadsheets. It’s found in the empathy you show for your customers, the risks you’re willing to take, and the stories you tell. Use data as a tool, but never let it overshadow the human element of your brand.

To run your business by spreadsheet is to have a business with no soul. Count your pennies because you’ll never achieve the wealth that comes with a beloved brand. 

Invest in Culture

Your brand isn’t just what you project outwardly; it’s what you cultivate internally. A strong company culture is the backbone of every successful brand strategy. Your employees are your primary brand ambassadors—if they don’t believe in your mission, no one else will.

Southwest Airlines didn’t build its reputation on cheap flights alone. They built it on a culture of fun, respect, and love. That culture shines through in every customer interaction, turning flyers into lifelong fans.

The Long Game: Endurance Is a Virtue

Branding isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon. Building a winning strategy takes time, commitment, and resilience. There will be uncontrollable setbacks, frustrations, and moments of doubt. But the brands that endure are the ones that stay the course.

Amazon didn’t become a juggernaut overnight. They started with books, then built an empire one calculated step at a time. Their secret? Relentless focus on their customers and an unyielding belief in their vision.

The Last Word

A winning brand strategy isn’t about chasing trends or outspending your competitors. It’s about clarity of purpose, emotional resonance, and unwavering consistency. It’s about crafting a narrative that invites your customers into a story they can’t resist being a part of.

In 2025, the brands that will thrive are the ones that understand this fundamental truth: You don’t build a brand for yourself—you build it for them. Make it meaningful. Make it unforgettable. And most importantly, make it matter.

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If you're looking for a brand refresh, jumpstart of out of this world launch into 2025, you still have time, contact us to see your possibilities.

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It’s 4:23 in the morning and I’m sweating up a frenzy on the stairstepper. It’s all about the serotonin. I’ve got a thing for it.

Overloaded from sensory input from the eight different plasma televisions in my field of vision here at Planet Fitness, I’m feeling a bit like Ozymandias.

Ozymandias, you say?  As in the character depicted in the 290-year old poem of the same name from Percy Bysshe Shelley (he of “look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair”)?

While that would be apt and applicable, I’m not in the mood to piss and moan about all that’s wrong in the world. Not today anyway. We’ll get back to solving all the world’s woes tomorrow.

The Ozymandias I’m referring to today is the retired superhero from The Watchmen graphic novel (and eventual motion picture), the brainiac who must retreat to his Mission Control-like lair stocked with a wall of TVs he uses to process the rhythm of the world intuitively in order to attempt to save it.

It’s not that I have a superhero complex, although I do have The Watchmen on the brain. And in re-reading it this weekend for the umpteenth time, I was struck by the powerful metaphor the character has to offer anyone in business, the creative arts, or anyone looking for a neat parlor trick.

Side note: my alternate title for this post was “Something To Think About When You Watch The Watchmen)”.

In The Watchmen, the Ozymandias character feels the pulse of the universe and then lets intuition take over to parse out the answer to the day’s most difficult problems. It’s a powerful technique that one can use to “riff” on difficult problems, and it may just make you better at “The Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon.”

See, if you want to think outside the box, really, the easiest way is to just relax and allow your right brain to tap into a well-spring of idea flow.  Six televisions tuned to different channels will nurture this mindset. I’m a big fan of coupling this with sustaining a heart rate of 150+ bpm. Some people use drugs and alcohol for a similar effect, which may explain why so many writers are alcoholics.

The goal here is to abandon linear thought and just let your right brain take over. If you resist the urge to regress to the logical left brain and tendencies of linear thought, your brain can achieve this Zen-like stasis. At some point you’ll have that “Aha!” moment…what some would call a moment of clarity…and it’s all the result of the right brain’s penchant for pattern recognition.

The really neat thing is that it will feel entirely accidental, but there’s nothing accidental about this technique. We have those lightbulb moments when we tap into the power of metaphor, what neuroscientists would call symbolic thought, which is the most powerful type of thought.

What I call “scatterbrain synesthesia” is a powerful tool to use in the quest for creativity.  You’re more likely to gravitate toward this technique if you lean more toward the intuitive spectrum of thinking. But even the more logical and methodical among us can use this.  In fact, I believe they are especially good candidates to grow through this technique, because they are less inclined to go there inside of their natural preferences.

Wikipedia defines synesthesia as “a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.”

The guardians of the world rarely engage in this style of “riffing.”  However, employing this strategy can yield powerful results in myriad ways. In the world of entrepreneurship, it works very well if you are looking to forge an innovation model in your industry, or what we call “business topology” in the Wizard Of Ads vernacular.

And speaking of Wizard Of Ads, this is exactly what my business partner Roy H. Williams uses for such dramatic effect in the rabbit hole of his weekly Monday Morning Memo.

Bouncing from one idea to the next like a renegade pinball… letting the right brain go on a fishing expedition… eventually, you’ll come to the intersection of the hoodoo and the mojo. That’s the plan anyway.

Sometimes it feels like a convoluted mess. A fool’s errand, seemingly. Diarrhea of the mind.  Not unlike this chapter, perhaps, which I am hopefully using to demonstrate the idea of which I speak.

And that’s the whole point. If you don’t make and take the time to give your right brain a serious, sweaty workout, then you’re really only using half of your brain. Or more accurately, you’re only using one of your two brains.

People trust numbers. They trust them even when those numbers might not tell them the whole story. If something looks better numerically — higher ratings, bigger discounts, or more followers — people assume it’s the better choice, even if that’s not always true.

You can influence choices by showing numbers to make your products and services seem better. Here are three ways:

1. People Pick What Looks Better in Numbers

• Restaurants – A burger joint with a 4.8-star rating attracts more customers than one with 4.5 stars, even if the lower-rated place has better food.
• Colleges – A university ranked #15 in the country seems better than one ranked #20, even if the lower-ranked school has better programs for specific majors.
• Fitness Apps – A workout app with “10,000 downloads” looks more trustworthy than one that says “loved by thousands,” even if both are equally good.

2. People Pick What “Feels” Cheap or Expensive

• Subscription Service – “Only $1.99 per day” sounds cheaper than “$59 per month,” even though they cost the same.
• Car Lease – “$99 per week” feels more affordable than “$5,148 per year,” even though it’s the same price.
• Furniture Sales: “Save $400 today!” sounds like a better deal than “Get 10% off,” even though both discounts are identical.

3. People Use Numbers To Compare Themselves to Others

• Job Hunting – A LinkedIn post that says “500 people applied for this job” might discourage people from applying.
• Social Media – A TikTok with 2 million likes feels more important than one with 100,000 likes, even if the smaller one has better content.
• Gaming – A leaderboard showing “Top 1% of players” makes people more competitive than if it just said “Elite Player.”

You should show numbers highlighting its strengths whenever you want to sell something. If something is causing harm (like social media comparison), removing numbers might help.

Numbers change how we make decisions, and we help people make decisions.

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