What makes a brand truly stand out in today’s crowded marketplace? How can you make your product or service irresistible to consumers?
Steven Bartlett’s brand expertise shines through in his book The Diary of a CEO, where he shares insights about creating a compelling brand image. His approach combines psychological understanding with practical marketing strategies to help businesses capture attention and drive success.
Keep reading to discover Steven Bartlett’s brand-building techniques that can transform your business’s market presence.
Steven Bartlett on Brand Image
According to Steven Bartlett, brand image matters when it comes to your business’s success. He asserts that even the most well-run business will fail if consumers aren’t excited about its offerings. Here are his tips for crafting a brand image that attracts attention and makes your product or service irresistible.
Tip #1: Create Value Through Presentation
Bartlett argues that the way you package and present your product or service can make a world of difference in how valuable consumers believe it is. People typically don’t evaluate anything in a purely logical way—they use irrational mental shortcuts to determine how much they want something. This means that, often, small tweaks in presentation or design are enough to transform your brand image. For instance, a high-end vodka brand might exclusively sell its liquor in small bottles to make each drop seem more precious.
Present your product or service in a way that perfectly matches the idea of what a high-quality version should look like, and avoid adding anything that would detract from this narrative, even if it would technically make the product or service more valuable. For example, a high-end earbud brand might have discovered a way to make music sound crystal clear using extremely small, convenient earbuds. However, they choose to build their earbuds much larger because consumers assume that larger earbuds have better sound quality.
| Tailor Your Presentation to Your Target Audience’s Worldview Bartlett recommends modeling your product or service after the idea of “high quality,” but some argue that different groups have different ideas of “high quality.” In All Marketers Are Liars, Seth Godin contends that marketers find the most success when they align the presentation of their products or services with the worldview of their target audience. By “worldview,” Godin means the beliefs, values, and biases that define a particular group. By appealing to a specific worldview, marketers can surround their product or service with a story that resonates with their customers and validates their beliefs. This approach helps marketers capture the attention of their target audience and communicate in a language they expect from the products and services they buy. For example, a financial planning firm might target young internet-obsessed investors by calling their services “wealth hacking.” This phrasing affirms their target audience’s beliefs that investing strategy should be approachable, innovative, and cool. |
Tip #2: Stand Out From the Crowd
According to Bartlett, truly successful marketing does more than present a product or service as valuable—it’s so unusual and striking that it demands attention. People naturally get used to—and subconsciously ignore—the types of brands and marketing messages that they’ve repeatedly encountered in the past. This means that you need to find unique, attention-grabbing ways to advertise and present your brand.
Furthermore, Bartlett insists that the most engaging and shareable marketing messages are unusual in a way that’s impractical and ridiculous. Most companies rarely waste their marketing budgets on goofy messages, publicity stunts, or silly product features—so if you do, you’ll stand out. Ridiculous investments like this will make media outlets and consumers excited to talk about your brand online, giving you free word-of-mouth advertising.
For example, a car wash might enact a policy in which they’ll wash your car for free if you bring in a photo of you with a celebrity. They create a huge wall to display all these photos with a large banner that reads, “Friends of celebrities wash their cars here.” This memorable rule gets people talking about the car wash and reinforces the brand message that it’s a high-end, celebrity-worthy service.
Although unusual brands attract attention, your marketing shouldn’t be so unusual that it’s inconceivable. Generally, people prefer to engage with somewhat recognizable concepts, so your goal is to find the sweet spot between familiarity and novelty. Trends in marketing are always coming and going, so you need to be constantly ahead of the curve: Create marketing campaigns that are fresh yet understandable, and drop them before they become so commonplace that consumers ignore them.
| Build Familiarity, and Then Push for Sales In Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, Gary Vaynerchuk explains a social media-based marketing strategy helps brands strike a balance between familiarity and novelty. He recommends that branded social media accounts make two kinds of posts: “jabs” and “right hooks.” Jabs are pieces of content designed to build relationships with potential customers. They’re often entertaining, thought-provoking, or emotionally resonant—but crucially, they don’t directly push for a sale. On the other hand, right hooks are posts with clear calls to action, designed to convert interest in a brand into sales. For example, over the course of a week, a designer sneaker company on Instagram might post a series of retro pictures of the shoes major basketball stars were wearing at memorable games (jab). Then, they post a picture of their featured shoes for sale and offer a discount code for 20% off a customer’s first pair (right hook). As in boxing, the effectiveness of a right hook knockout depends on the jabs that came before it. By consistently providing branded content that people find valuable or entertaining (jabs), you slowly get people familiar with your brand. This way, you leverage the human bias toward familiarity to make people more likely to buy something when you make a special offer (the right hook). Since they’re not obligated to directly push for a sale, jabs can be more unusual than the average advertisement, making them more effective at cutting through the noise and grabbing attention. For instance, the Wendy’s account on X (formerly Twitter) replied to a user who asked “What’s the best thing to get at McDonald’s?” by simply saying “A refund”—entertaining users while making the Wendy’s brand more endearing. Although they’re not as high-profile as the ridiculous publicity stunts that Bartlett describes, jabs are similar in that they lack obvious business utility, making them more appealing in an environment where consumers are increasingly wary of advertising. |
