Top 5 Laws to Strengthen Your Brand

Good morning, everyone. This is Sandy Wagy with MSW Interactive Designs. And today we're going to talk about the top five laws to strengthen your brand. Now, what makes a brand really unforgettable, A lot of people think it's the logos or your colors or something deeper. But in this video, I'm going to break down five powerful laws from the book the 22 immutable laws of Branding by Al Reese and Laura Reese. Now, this book, copyright in 2002 I believe so it's an older book, but it's been updated to even include laws for the Internet. We're not actually going to talk about that today though, because the five laws that I picked are classic and they're basically free, which is important for a lot of my audience because I deal with a lot of small business owners. And so they're looking for effective ways to really grow brand, grow their businesses. And if that's you, stick around because the top five laws I'm going to talk about today will hit home. And again, like I said, they are free. So first of all, let's look at what is a brand, because we need to be on the same page about that. It's not your logo. In fact, I wish I could remember who said it and who asked the question. I'm going to put this down for right now, but do you know what the color of the G is in the Google logo? I bet you don't. Neither do I, actually. I would have to go look. So a lot of people, and especially in the like when we're talking websites, because I own a marketing agency, they're like, I want my logo bigger. Thing is, people don't care about your logo. They care about the problem that you can solve for them. And so the logo is not your brand. The logo is a representation of your business, but it is not important to the consumer. Now, when I was writing out sort of the script for this particular video, I used chat GPT and I said, give me some definitions of brand around the Internet. And I of all of them, I actually like Alex Hormozi's best, which is not surprising at all. He's a brilliant guy and you can find several videos where he references. Brand is nothing but something that changes the behavior of an audience. And that makes a whole lot of sense to me, more so than what people say about you when you're not in the room. I've heard that one over and over again. Really, a brand is just to change people's behavior and the behavior you want to change. Is to get them to come toward you and buy from you. So the five laws that I want to talk about today, out of the 22, the first one is the law of expansion. The law of expansion is on. It actually starts the book. It's on page three, and it opens with the power of a brand is inversely proportional to its scope. So what does that mean? Actually, it means the more you broaden your brand, the weaker it actually becomes. So it's related to the second law that we're going to talk about, which is the law of contraction, and that says that the brand becomes stronger when you narrow its focus. In other words, we want to look at actually narrowing what we do. Now, in the mastermind I was in with Donald Miller, author of Storybrand and several other books, he would constantly emphasize, what one thing do you want to be known for? What do you want to own, in other words? And so like in my business for web design, do I want to be known for SEO? Do I want to be known for leads? What do I want to be known for? What's the controlling idea of what I offer? It's the one thing that people know in the marketplace that they need to come to me for that thing. I'm the best at it. It's clear. So that is what the law of expansion, number one, and the law of contraction mean. And they work together. So we really want to work on honing what is that one thing and the power of the brand. So the law and contraction, that's actually on page nine of this amazing book. The power brand comes from what it doesn't do as much as what it does do. So my question is, what are you adding into your service offering and into your messaging, number one in your service offering that's not profitable at all for your business and is possibly confusing the message to the marketplace, because when the mind is confused, it stops. It doesn't take action. So clarity and focus around one thing is going to be super important. So what is that one thing for you? And if you think about how you talk about your business, what are you saying? What are you throwing into the mix that really is not relevant, not profitable, and confuses the message for people listening to it? Because we often overspeak, right? We overspeak about what we do. How do you concise things down into that one one liner? So from the book actually Building a Story brand, Donald Miller talks about writing your one liner. And I have some exercises and resources on the MSW interactivedesigns.com website that can help you really hone down that one liner. But thinking of the laws of branding from this incredible book, law of expansion, law of contractions. As old as this book is, these are classic techniques and strategies that just work. So number one, law of expansion, the more you broaden your brand, the weaker it becomes. Number two, the law of contraction, which is the brand becomes stronger when you narrow its focus. The third one is the law of publicity. The law of publicity is on page 13 and it says the birth of a brand is achieved with publicity, not advertising. Now we all know that you need to advertise because people need to know you exist in order to do business with you. So yeah, we do need to advertise. But the law of publicity says a brand is built with publicity, not just advertising. And think of as an example Tesla. Elon Musk likes to brag about he doesn't advertise Tesla. He gets people talking about Tesla. That sounds cool. And I know sometimes it's not relatable because he's a billionaire and people know about Tesla. But how does that relate to your small business when it comes to publicity? What things are you doing in your marketplace that could get people talking about you? What events are you showing up to? Are you out there? Are you putting your brand out there? Are you aligning strategically with other people in your marketplace that help people talk about you? What about your review strategy? Reviews are also publicity. This book was written in 2002, but we're in 2025 now and we all know that reviews are important and I consider reviews to be part of publicity. So what are you doing to get people talking about your brand? What could you do? Even in terms of social media, what are you putting out there? What are you offering? What value are you bringing to the space? Space? This is publicity. Social media, you posting stuff is free. Now a lot of people will be like, yeah, social media is not effective because it's too noisy. You know what though, the thing is, it's very effective when you bring value first. So you're going to be interested in others and others success and you're going to bring that to the marketplace instead of trying to be interesting. I hope that makes sense. So number three, the law of publicity, Number four is the law of fellowship. Now the law of fellowship is actually the 11th law in the book. So we're jumping forward. Says here, in order to build the category, the brand should welcome other brands. So we tend to be afraid of competition, but competition is actually good. It can be good for a lot of reasons. Number one, Competition is a great way to refer people who aren't your ideal clients and get them away from you. So I often send people who are not a good fit for my business, not my ideal client, to my competitors. I have good relationships with several competitors and I send them to them. So not every person is a good fit for your business. Because as a business owner and a person who's adept in marketing your business, surely you've idealed your ideal client. If you haven't, I have an ideal client Persona template on my website@mswinteractivedesigns.com go download it. It will help you walk through the steps of identifying your ideal client. But we want to make sure that we've done that and then we can refer to our competitors when our ideal client comes knocking on our door. It's not a good fit for us. We don't want to take those people. But the law of fellowship in terms of competition also includes the idea that competition actually helps us really hone, hone our skills, innovate and improve our own businesses. Now, I don't pay a lot of attention to my competition. Some people will say, you don't have competition, meaning I don't mean me personally, but you as a business owner don't have competition if you've really defined what makes you uniquely you and you own the space. Yeah, but I disagree with that. We do have competition, but it does help us hone exactly what we're doing but and helps us define our space in the market. So welcome competition. Fellowship is a good thing. I am an abundance person. There is plenty of business to go around. Rather than thinking in terms of limiting beliefs and limited market space. The fifth one is the law of consistency. Now, I'm going to harp on this all the time, upside down, stand in my head. You have to be more consistent than you are being. And I say you and I mean me at the same time. The law of consistency. A brand is not built overnight. This is what it says in the book here. Success is measured in decades, not years. This could not be more true. My company is 26 years old. I consider my company to be successful for a lot of reasons. We are in this digital space. I started in 1999. A lot of companies, companies. I started as a freelancer, solopreneur. Now I have a team. But it's a struggle, right? The decades of experience matter. And a lot of people when it comes to marketing and advertising and building their brand, thinks it happens overnight. If you build it, they will come. It's just not true. And I would add it's not built in months either. It says decades, not years, and even not months. Okay? This takes time and it takes consistency. Now the nice thing is that we've got social media, We've got so many ways that we never had before that we can show up, offer value, build content, and we can push things out to our ideal client. The audience that resonates with us, the audience that we want to target, the audience that we want to work with on a daily basis. Multiple times a day is better. I think I heard a YouTube video and Alex said they put out like 400 pieces of content a week. So people are like, oh, he's so successful. He built his brand over. No, like they work their asses off with AI now, even time is not a limiting factor anymore. You can produce so much incredible content that will help your ideal client solve the problems that they need solved. And you can offer it for free. And what happens is when you offer that content for free, then they come back to you to help with implement. So you give the solutions away and then they pay for implementation if they need help. And most people do, actually, because time is a constraint in most businesses lives, most people's lives. So the five laws that I love because they're free and they are timeless come from the 22 immutable laws of branding, expansion, contraction, publicity, fellowship and consistency. So keep an eye out for my next video. Get this book. It's really fantastic. It is not dated. It's been updated to include the Internet online stuff. So Sandy Waggett signing off for today. I hope this video was helpful again, expansion, contraction, publicity, fellowship and consistency. See you on the next video. Like and subscribe. If this was helpful.