Brand Is Feeling

You can have a brand at the onset of a project. You can come up with a name and even some assets. It’s a good first step.

But, brand is emergent.

So whatever you came up with, so long as you’re open to it changing (i.e. your original idea being wrong), your attention has to shift to capturing that “new” idea of brand.

Jordi Hays said it better than most in his appearance on Jackson Dahl’s Dialectic podcast. He was there with his TBPN business partner, John Coogan. Jordi says,

“A great brand is the culmination of what you made a group of people feel over time.”

Their live-show, TBPN, got described by the New York Times as, “Sports Center for LinkedIn.”

You can’t confuse the branding, as in the description of what they’re doing, with why it’s resonating though.

They didn’t engineer a show concept like Sports Center covering the types of thought-leader-ish topics people share on LinkedIn.*

Jordi and John, instead, focused on the feeling of live news, that they both have always loved, and making it for the 200,000 people they imagine to be in the tech industry, to harness an internal feeling they both have, at some form of scale.

They say they want to do it forever too.

Because, why not?

If the goal is to build a highly respected brand, the underlying truth is - you are trying to build a relatable and reliable emotional experience with your product.

Seeing how much fun they’re having with it? It’s infectious. Hearing them explain how the main point of the show is giving them time to hang out, it’s the best bromance plot ever.

You can have all the ideas in the world, but in the end, it’s going to be how you make people feel.

If they feel good, you’ve cracked your brand.

Notice the feelings.

*and not just because they kind of did that for Twitter/X, but, hey.