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3 1 The best definitions of branding and advertising you’ll find “We struggle to talk about ourselves.” It’s a lament we hear a lot. And it’s exactly the kind of problem branding should solve. “Surprisingly few com- panies make their brand easy to understand,” Jeremy Miller writes in the book Sticky Branding. “They struggle to explain their business clearly.”2 Too often the discipline broadly defined as branding deepens rather than resolves this challenge. A president at a large independent branding firm once mused aloud to us about the meaning of a brand promise. “I wish someone would clarify what a brand promise is,” he said. “I still get confused about how it’s different from a brand position.” It was like hearing the emperor wish his tailors had made him real clothes. The truth is that a lot of the things that pass for branding are thickening agents meant to make businesses feel they’ve paid for some- thing substantial. As Rodney Dangerfield’s character Thornton Mellon said in Back to School (1986) when taking the measure of a paper his “Tall & Fat” store employees had written for him, “It’s too light. Feels like a C. Bulk it up and add some multi-colored graphs.” All of us are prone to falling into the same trap. We’re afraid to do the equivalent of handing in a short term paper, to describe ourselves or our companies in a way that is clear. A lot of branding and advertising firms do what Tim Ferriss has called in his podcast (The Tim Ferriss Show) with Derek Sivers “complicating in order to profit.”3 Making things complicated is what many experts do, whether in academia, government, or business. We’re all led to believe that mastering complex systems requires a compli- cated means of expressing our mastery. The truth, however, is that it’s hard work to take a complex subject and communicate it simply. A book like this on branding must first clarify what branding is, and what it is not. The word branding is often wielded in conference rooms to intimi- date people into silence. As if to say, “Don’t disturb the big brains in the labo- ratory. This is important stuff you’ll never completely understand.” People are reluctant to ask basic questions because they’ve been led to believe that other experts in the room perfectly understand branding already. Branding is, in fact, very simple. Branding is what you stand for—and what people experience from your products and services. It’s not what you claim to be. It’s what you are. Branding establishes core purpose. Advertis- ing takes purpose and assembles it into a compelling story.