Why invest in brand? Because growth dies in a stagnant pond. 🎣 Refill it or get left behind.

The way I've always talked about it was through fishing, which is weird because I'm not a huge fisherman, but I've ran with this for years now. Where most teams, when they think about growth or, like, performance, you're fishing within a pond and you're hitting those fish with messaging, advertisements, whatever, and one of two things is going to happen. Either you catch the fish or the fish learn to avoid what you're trying to do one way or the other. That pond hasn't changed in terms of what's in there. And so you need to refill that pond. And that's where a lot of the brand plays come in, where what you're trying to do is constantly pump new fish into that pond so that those growth strategies and those performance strategies can be effective. When you talk about it through that standpoint, you talk about this all the time, where it's like, you're not necessarily doing, like, direct attribution with UTMs or whatever, but you know who's coming in through the pod, you know who's coming in through the newsletter, you know who's coming in through LinkedIn. And it's kind of the same thing where it's like, when you can showcase how you're then refilling that pond with a billboard, with a podcast, with whatever might be a YouTube show, people will start to understand and you'll be able to correlate. But if you go into that conversation just like, oh, you know what? No one knows who we are and we need to invest half a million dollars in getting whatever program off the ground, you're just going to get laughed at.