What do your customers expect when they engage with your brand?

What do they imagine happening to them if they buy from you?

Will they imagine that you will rip them off? Will they feel like your promise wont come true?

The closer we can get to understanding these expectations and imaginations, the more we can resolve them and put them into alignment with our brand.

We can’t tell the future. All we can do is use the information we have at hand to make the best decision.

And that’s what your customer has to do, every single time you market to them.

In marketing you can choose to be in a race and pass people on the same path as you, or you can choose to make your own path.

One is based on comparison – the “wining” or “losing” finite mindset of scarcity.

The other is based on possibility – the infinite mindset of abundance.

You don’t buy a mattress you hire it.

You don’t buy a mattress for the sake of buying it. You buy it to help you do something.

It maybe better sleep. It maybe for better recovery from your athletic training. Maybe you hire your bed for sleep measurement.

Maybe you hire it for your sleep disorder.

The point is, no one ever bought a mattress – they hired it to do something for them in particular.

Every piece of marketing that enters the world is born with a set of edges to it.

While the marketing idea born with the potential to reach and influence people – it is defined by it’s edges.

If something is for everyone and every single thing, it by definition had no edges. It is flat, dull and generic.

Brands and people we look up to have edges. They have edges because they believe in something.

Edges can be based on belief. It can be based on where you are going or who you are serving.

But most of the time the edges are defined by what you don’t do rather then what you do.

What are your edges? What won’t you do to create them?

There is a balance that must be struck when trying to fit into a persons mind.

On one side is the known. It’s the part of your brand that are familiar to me. Things I have seen before and concepts that I understand.

On the other side is the unknown. It’s the unique style that your brand brings. It’s the voice. The value. The true nature and value proposition of it.

If you are to far on the familiar side – you are generic and you are practically a commodity. I will only buy from you based on convenience and or price.

If you are to far on the unknown side – I don’t know where you fit and it scares me. If it’s so new, I won’t know what to do so I end up not taking action.

Somewhere in the middle, based on where your brand is in space and time – is what allows the brand to fit into the customers mind.

You can’t make your customers overthink happiness but that is what in fact brands do all the time.

They introduce redundancies. Clutter. Friction. Data. Noise.

People use all of these different tactics, points and systems to making a customer happy.

They overthink what happiness is for a customer and block it from happening.

The brand really has one objective – to make the customer happy in someway. So happy that they tell their friends. So happy that they start a movement. So happy that they buy a product.

When a persons happiness is overthought, it’s hard for it to ever truly happen until the tension is released.

Brands aren’t formed through uninspired, stock filled “mood boards”.

They are built through the day to day actions that your brand takes.

And each day your brand has a fundamental decision and question to ask itself:

Will we steal attention today or will we give attention today?

There is a lot of focus on brand storytelling and on “purpose brands” but not enough on Brand Style.

Brand Style is not the way a brand looks or even feels. It’s not really about the product or even the problem you are solving – it goes deeper then that.

The Brand Style is the unmistakable qualities of your brand. It’s the parts that people can see and feel with a blindfold on.

It’s these brand elements of true distinction that come from this authenticity and transparency. It’s this certain way of being in the world that no one else can copy because it is coming from the true heart of a company.

Humans buy from other humans. As soon as you understand that, you realize that the more human you make your own company – the more luck you will have with influencing them with your brand.

It’s the selfishness of the business owner or the marketer the prolongs the customer journey at an unnecessarily level.

In other words they take something that should be two steps for the customer – and make it 5 -10 steps.

They do this because it’s what they want but not the customer.

The customer is already going through their own life. Their own journey – full of countless steps that cause them both pain and joy.

When you come into their world, you have to make it simple for them to enter your world.

That starts with being inviting and empathetic.