You’re posting every day.

Your product photography is beautiful.

Your website gets traffic. But it feels like you’re fighting to get sales.

Nothing is compounding, so you pay for ads, but customers don’t return.

And then your engagement starts to get flat. 

It’s like a never ending cycle with very little reward. 

You start discounting your products just to get some revenue flowing.

Your product isn’t terrible and it absolutely deserves to be compensated for all the hard work you put into. 

But your entire marketing plan is hard selling people to buy something from you, babe. No connection. No reason to buy from you vs. the other brand selling the exact same thing, but likely a little cheaper. 

Ima hold your hand when I say this, but, your brand is forgettable. It's not rooted in anything.

In today’s world, people don’t just buy products. People buy identity. Within that identity are stories, emotions, values, and aesthetics that make us all feel like we belong to something. People resonate with communities and the product is merely a symbol of who they are or how they see themselves. 

If you’re in the business of making money, you don't need to start a brand. If your sole mission is just to make money, there’s so many other thing you can do, and running a sustainable business is not one. 

If you’re in the business of sustaining an ecosystem of beliefs, communication, aesthetic quality, and authentic experiences, you just need to learn how to plant and nurture a brand. This is what sustains, and keeps revenue flowing.   

Values are our beliefs, moral principles, political stances, religious and spiritual affiliations.  

Experiences are our memories, achievements and challenges. 

Our social affiliations are how we connect to one another and how we fulfill our inherent need to belong. It’s our community. 

When your product reflects what your ideal customer values, experiences or feels connected to, this is how you create loyalty. Because they’re not being loyal to the product itself, but to who they believe themselves to be. Your product is a tangible representation of that. You’re not persuading them, you’re helping them recognize what they already see and feel. 

We can all agree that Nike is (at the top of their game) a pretty cool brand. But we weren’t loyalists over a checkmark. The Nike swoosh symbolizes ambition, discipline, and athletic achievement. 

Everyone wants to have breakfast at Tiffany’s. But not for its distinct shade of robin egg’s blue. Tiffany Blue represents refinement and timeless luxury. 

The visual identity isn’t the story. It’s shorthand for a story people already believe.

A story about how to win, or the day in the life of an aspiring socialite is going to resonate more deeply and stay ingrained within our human minds. 

Identity creates the brand’s personality. 

The visual elements reinforce it. 

Editorial content strategy keeps the story alive. 

And that’s what sticks. 

Brand strategy is like a tree and every part of the tree works together to eventually bear fruit. So let’s break it down. 

Brand Core

The brand core is the soil. The foundation your brand will grow in.  Within the foundation are four pillars: brand purpose, vision, mission and values.  

Roots can only settle in fertile soil. If you plant a tree in rocky soil, your roots will struggle to maintain nutrients and moisture. They thrive better in clear surfaces. So just like fertile soil make sure your purpose, mission, vision and values are clear of rocks. 

Brand Messaging

The roots of your brand is your messaging. It’s the space you own in a saturated market and defines who you serve, what makes you different and the specific problem you solve. It’s the lifeline where essential nutrients are absorbed. Brand messaging is the personality, voice, tone, and value proposition that keeps everything grounded, and what your brand is anchored in.  

Brand messaging translates your mission, vision and values and positioning into actual communication and connects your audience to your unique value through key talking points. 

Brand Identity

With fertile soil, and anchored roots, your tree is ready to sprout from the ground and the trunk can now form. The trunk of the tree connects your roots to the canopy, the network of branches, leaves or fruit. The trunk represents your brand identity. If brand messaging is the personality, then the brand identity is presentation. It functions as the outer layer of your brand messaging like tree bark. It expresses visual tone and emotion through logo ,typography, color palette, and images.  

Brand Application 

Nurtured by healthy soil, anchored by healthy roots, and supported by a strong trunk your tree is ready to branch off, and bear fruit. The brand application of your tree is the actual marketing, service, or product you provide. The harvest will be determined by how you nurture the ecosystem, and a bountiful harvest can feed the masses for a long period of time. 

When we start thinking about branding like ecosystems instead of isolated marketing assets we create more compelling narratives. The most successful brand ecosystems are editorial, not commercial. They’re not solely hard selling. They’re informing, educating, or entertaining to tell a story. So what does that actually look like in practice? 

Merit Beauty is on a mission to create products that simplify beauty and deliver clean, effortless essentials that fit into your life. Their vision is to reimagine luxury beauty for the modern consumer by making it holistic, accessible and essential. They value safety, transparency, intentionality, responsibility, and accessibility.

On the surface, we see Merit beauty as just the clean, minimalist make-up brand. Clean beauty is not necessarily an innovative idea in the $626 billion beauty market. There are so many brands that claim clean beauty. But their unique mission, vision, and values creates a certain level of depth and that is what their loyal followers consume. 

Merit beauty serves the time-poor but style conscious consumer. They push an “impossible to mess up” ethos that resists high gloss fleeting make-up trends making everyday make-up application accessible to all skill levels. In other words, they are the anti-multi step make-up routine brand. They own low-lift everyday make-up in the clean beauty space. 

Merit beauty gets their message of simplified beauty across through three pillars: Minimalist “no make-up” make-up, clean and cruelty free, and the streamlined routine. Any talking point across any of their media channels will communicate any and all three of these pillars.   

From their website to their media channels, their messaging clearly reflects their identity of simplified beauty. Simplified product descriptions, product names and captions that aren’t very wordy. Clean, minimalist and simplified images, and packaging. They speak and present in a way that aligns with the values and standards of their mission and vision.  

Products create transactions. And editorial brand strategy is what sustains and sets you apart from everyone else. 

In a crowded market, attention is easy to buy. Loyalty isn’t. Loyalty is earned when customers recognize themselves in your brand long before they ever recognize your product. That’s the purpose of a strong brand strategy and that’s why the brands that endure don’t just sell products, they cultivate ecosystems people want to belong to.

If your brand isn’t struggling because your product isn’t good, but because people don’t know who you are and what you’re about, I created a free Brand Audit Playbook so you can plant your tree and rep what you sow.

Download it below.