Peter Winick explains that a brand is a promise you keep consistently. He uses Apple, Starbucks, and BMW as examples, then introduces brand levers: three to six core elements that stay constant but can shift in intensity. Owning your levers helps you decide what work to take on and how to show up.
Peter Winick here from Thought Leadership Leverage, and today I wanted to talk to you about your brand. First off, let's define and let's agree on what a brand is. A brand is basically a promise that you're making to your clients, customers, and future clients, and you need to be consistent with that. So, for example, you know, some of the great brands that we tend to think of— things like Apple, things like Starbucks, things like BMW— those are great brands, and if I asked several people to describe the attributes of Starbucks or Apple or BMW, I'd probably get a few of the same words coming through again and again, and it would probably be really surprising to have certain words come in that I wouldn't expect for each of those. So when you're crafting your brand and when you're coming up with this, what I like to do is think of the kind of elements of your brand as levers, and each of those levers can be moved up a little bit and they can be moved down a little bit situationally, but the levers don't change. So core components of your brand are these levers, and there's typically 3, 4, 5, maybe 6, usually not more than that, and you need to own them. You need to be able to use that as a tool to filter through things that you're gonna do with your brand in terms of the way you represent yourself, the way you represent your content in the marketplace, the promises that your content makes to a potential user or consumer of the content, and you need to have integrity around your brand. So it helps you choose things to do, and it helps you say no to things that you shouldn't do. It helps you do things in a certain way that's consistent yet unique. And I think it's a good idea to take a step back and understand that when you're building a brand, you control the elements, you control the levers, and you need to have clarity around that branding process. And you need to have consistency when deploying yourself and your work in the marketplace relative to your brand. Thank you. Thank you.
