Wanna know who builds your brand? Here is a hint…it isn’t you.
Sure, you put the pieces together, lay the groundwork, get the right team together, hone your sales skills and products, you can solve problems for your imagined clients. But you still won’t be the one building your brand. Other people are in control of whether your brand grows. Some of these entities that have your future in their hands are amenable to you, some are not. Some are journalists and bloggers in your world, who’s job it is to cover, ad inifitum, the people, places, business and products that are considered newsworthy.
So how do you make yourself newsworthy early and often enough so that building your brand becomes a sustainable enterprise?
You make others do it for you.
Which is why building a team around your brand, particularly in the digital playground, is so crucial. Competition has changed dramatically. Businesses that used to be near each other physically would imagine their customer and believe that every other business was fighting over that ONE customer. So they tried really hard to get the attention of, and eventually dollars from, that ONE customer. They spent all their money and time and imagination in not only building their own business, but in denying business to their competitors.
That was limited thinking even then, but it is straight-up deadly now. Because what sellers and marketers are quickly realizing is that no matter your actual physical location, EVERY business is rubbing up against one another in the digital space. There is no breathing room anymore, because we are never that far away from a Tweet or FB status message, an email marketing coupon or well-produced promo video on YouTube. But instead of this being a liablility smart retailers are recognizing how LIBERATING this is.
The Gilt MANUAL
How is this liberating exactly?
Because if everyone is crowded around, you might as well acknowledge it and use that closeness to EVERYONE’s benefit. The smart retailer knows that building up those around them, even their direct or close competitors, will ultimately benefit and grow the entire community. This is an idea I’ve talked about before but hadn’t seen in action until I came across Gilt Man’s fantastic Manual presence. I say presence because it isn’t just a blog connected to the Gilt group of sites. It is WAY more. It is a visual and community-building digital feast. The editorials and blog posts are informative and fun. Gilt believes in its products and service, and even if I have my doubts about group buying programs, they are taking what they have and running with it. They do interviews with the designers whose clothes and wares they market and they often offer information related to “being a guy.”
But here is where things get interesting. The Gilt Manual tellingly has a great Twitter list called .
I started following the list to give it a try, and what I quickly found was how integrated all these seemingly competitive projects were. Fashion blogs reviewing pieces by designers that were then on sale on e-commerce sites, some with their own blogs. Some of the sites and brands you are likely to find on the Gilt Manual Twitter list are OAK, BlackBird, Selectism, Esquire Magazine, Opening Ceremony, The Scout Magazine and many more. In fact, I discovered through the list a few retailers and content providers that were literally perfect for what I am looking for, the kind of clothes and commentary, the kind of curation that I need.
For the most part these are all sites and brands I was familiar with and could even say had much in common with one another But it wasn’t until Gilt put them together for me did I realize just how communal these companies and digital presences were. Monitoring the list even for a short while I could tell which brands and businesses had put more thought and energy into their marketing (both inbound and outbound), their Twitter feeds and blogs, their websites’ functionality, even something as subtle as the voice behind the brand.
Something I couldn’t notice very easily before Gilt provided this valuable list was how communal these brands were. Many were tweeting at one another, showering praise whenever another brand scored some press attention as well as the occasional criticism. And there was this cacophony around the best “finds” of the day or week, whether it was a music track, a pair of sneakers or a particularly great interview or video from an admired designer.
It became quite clear that these brands were using one another to build up their entire world. They were making themselves more important by adding value, each in their own little ways, to the community at large. They were building a team out of what was previously their hardest competition.
And the one thing that rings clear after observing and thinking about all of this was that each brand became MORE important to me, not less. Why? Because I could quickly see what each brand was best at. And that is where the value lies.