When we think about building a brand, we always start with behavior. What do we actually want someone to do on the other side of this? And we've always tried to ground that in the reality of people's daily lives. After all, humans are the main characters in their own movies. And their movies are on infinite loops. There are many storylines competing for their attention in between a hundred thoughts about their own life. Something in the news, plans being made, an early morning run, making a great dinner, financial stress, family dynamics, their friends, yesterday's game, have I paid the rent, is my inspection due, how is my mother, and is it going to rain later? We think about what they're carrying with them every day, and what this tiny moment with my piece of communication could realistically impact and end up in their movie.

We can have detailed conversations with a lot of passionate and smart people, building process, briefs, and strategy, but the tools we have to shift behavior are relatively minuscule. People have powerful cognitive filters running in the background to keep the brain from overload. To get space in their prefrontal cortex (the most crowded and arguably valued spot in the modern world) isn't that easy. So you need something capable of breaking through. But you also have to be responsible and have a little reverence for their corner of the cognitive universe. You should not use the easy, crack-spiked, cortisol-shock, division-based marketing that started a long time ago trying to keep up with Ray J and the Kardashians.

Now, if you want to make a brand and marketing that matter, you need an idea. A strong idea based on real human soulful insight. Because ideas travel at the speed of light—and in a spare moment, they can do something surprisingly powerful to all of us—they can sometimes magically create space for a new way of thinking and acting: Got Milk, Just Do It, Think Different, Membership Has Its Privileges, Built Ford Tough.

There are many ways of going about doing this. Generally, we like to start with: What does our company or our brand really believe in? And what we mean by that is, what is the thing that we, as a company, are unwilling to sacrifice or that we are very willing to fight for? This can feel very much like an existential question, but it's one that very few businesses have ever really stopped and thought about seriously. The proof is that most brands out there are quite floppy, and the reason is they just don't believe in very much, or what they believe in is what their consumers believe in, and they try to placate their consumers to resonate. This is simply populism as a marketing strategy.

We keep coming back to something that we just cannot conceivably shake— a great brand is about creating and sustaining belief.

That's it. If you strip everything else away—campaigns, cultural moments, design systems, performance dashboards—what you're left with is belief. And belief is so very abstract. And so is brand building, because it is about getting people to believe in something.

We really do think great brand marketing is about creating belief.

We all want happy endings. We all want our heroes. You did not watch Rocky to see a man box; you watched it to see a man win against all the odds. The belief is: no matter what, keep on fighting.

Across time, geography, religion, and language, people look for something to align with. Something that gives shape to their choices.

The role of a great brand is to create that environment, that message, that idea, that signal that allows someone to internally nod and say, "That's what I'm about."

Of course, once you have that brand belief, you get to wrap it and put it in all the tone, voice, design, and cool and relevant creative ideas you can muster. And when you do all that well for a long period of time, that's when you really have something special and unique and arguably the most valuable thing in the business world—a brand, with meaning.

Then there's the product.

The product itself ideally is the physical manifestation of the brand's beliefs, its values, its passion, its commitment to the end consumer. The answer to the question "Why do you make the products you make?" is inherently proof and the justification of what you believe in.

Marketing that product is about function. It's about showing the utility. How it works. Why is it better? How is it made? What it costs. What problem it solves. It's proof. It's substance. It's the mechanics. It's value. And all this is filled with the passion and reverence that comes from a company with a strong unshakable belief system.

And so product marketing works exponentially better when brand marketing has already done its job and the belief of the brand is baked into the product itself. When belief exists, the functional story has space rented in the prefrontal cortex.

Brand creates belief and therefore space in the mind for the marketing to actually make an impact. Without that, you are just shouting, hoping that someone pays attention. They rarely do.

But when both are working together, you're not forcing persuasion. You're reinforcing something the audience already believes to be true.