Wow, what's up everybody? Once again, it's Brand Man, Sean, and today we're going to discuss the truth about branding. Touching on topics like why it's hard for artists to gain fans from live performances and showcases, what most people have wrong about branding, and lastly, the power of branding and how strong brands can cause people to lie to themselves. And they kind of like it. So let's hop into this with two quick clips. Let me introduce you my track, Papote, piece by piece. First, the melody. Okay. Alright, if you don't know the first person that was performing, his name was Stramai. If you've probably seen the video I've done on him, and he's basically a big deal. I'm talking a devil, platinum artist, and he's performing extremely popular songs at the time period where those songs were literally lighting up the charts. Now the second person is Joshua Bell. He's essentially a classical music superstar. I'm talking about, but he doesn't really lead a house for less than $75,000. Not only that, but he was playing on a strata various violin. Now one of my best friends is a classical violinist, and strata various violins are not cheap. Starting the thousands of dollars, the most expensive strata various violin was sold for $16 million. This alone kind of speaks to a lot of newer artists who were just doing showcases and live performances, have a hard time gaining fans from their performances alone. Even these huge performers could barely get people's attention. And this is what I call a branding problem. See, marketing is about creating awareness, and people are aware of them because they're walking by, they see them actually making music. But they aren't aware of who they are. See, even if the people didn't necessarily like that type of music, like you didn't like classical music, if these people knew who these people were, they would at least stop for a little bit. There's a lot of times people will accept a subpar or trash performance from people that they already know and like. They go to their concert versus actually buying into a becoming a fan of somebody that they don't know just from a random performance. Branding leads to a reputation that precedes you, and people actually rely on branding as a shortcut to how they process information. People have to be told that something is worse their time. They have to be told that is valuable. It's not that some things don't happen naturally, but in this world where so many things are coming at us, people are always trying to figure out how to decide what they spend their time on. They say pay attention because you're paying in time when you give your attention to something that we all know the time is the most valuable asset, right? So no matter what trash or quality, people do not get paid what they're worth. They're either underpaid or overpaid underrated or overrated. Now, if you're overpaid and overrated, congratulations. That means your brand is doing its job because brand is the reason that people overpay for things. Now, the problem a lot of people have, especially creatives when they're trying to create a brand, is they think that branding is all about aesthetic and visual type things, the logo, the name, things like that. That's really only a small piece of the pie. So what exactly is a brand? A brand is the perception and expectations that people associate with the person or entity. And to translate that into something a little bit more practical and understanding the difference between marketing and branding. Marketing is about creating awareness and branding is about creating value. What do you mean by that, brand man? If there were two cars and both of them look exactly the same, one was a Toyota and one was a BMW, which one would you choose? BMW, you don't need a second to think. Most people will choose the BMW and this example is so perfect because they both look the same. Once again, brand is not necessarily all about visual, but people have a set of expectations of what it means to have a BMW. BMW's represent quality, engineering and luxury, especially in comparison to a Toyota. And this is what I mean by creating value in one of the best ways to create value is to communicate values and attract people who value your values. This is one of the reasons that Chancellor Rapper fights off accusations that he's not independent. So, be it merely not because being an independent rapper really even matters that much is just because of the fact that he's made it so ingrained as a part of his values and marketed that as a part of his brand, that bringing that value into question is a direct attack at his brand. It's like if everybody found out that Toyota's were being built in the exact same factory by the exact same people of as BMW with the exact same parts and engineers and all that stuff behind it, BMW's will be at risk at losing a lot of value. Even still, BMW's branding has been set so deeply into people's psychology at this point that their actions will still likely show preference towards BMW regardless of if it was made in the same way as Toyota or not. Perfect example, have you ever seen those blind drink tests where people are drinking Pepsi or Coca-Cola and they don't know which one and we all know Coca-Cola is like number one by far. But when they do the blind drink test, there have been instances where people will be like, oh no, I like the Pepsi, but they won't know if Pepsi will just say that one. Number two, you would think that that type of experience would make a person say, oh snap, I've been missing out on life, I'm just starting drinking Pepsi for now on, but you could take that same person, never tell them that they chose Pepsi before and then put two sodas in front of them and say that this one's Coca-Cola, that one's Pepsi and then they would choose the Coke. That's because of the branding. I'm not even going super deep into why, but let's just say that Coca-Cola has communicated the worth of their brand very well over time and don't get me wrong. There's people who have brand bias towards Pepsi and they will have the same kind of illogical results that's based on the brand versus where they how much they actually liked the soda. It was like the one pair of Jordans that I had with and I was a kid. Jordans are not the best basketball shoes, but when I got them and I played in the game, I really felt like I was going to fly. That right there is 100% brand. I know it sucks with people, but it's not 100% a quality conversation. And everybody likes to think that they're all about quality, but most people are usually only about quality in the areas that they choose to be experts at, but there's too much stuff out in the world to be completely into know about every single product and experience. That's why going back to those two clips of the artists I played at the beginning. It was all about branding. People were aware of them, but they didn't know that these people were worth paying attention to. Once again, marketing is about creating awareness and branding is about creating value and you can communicate your values to create value. And once you have these values, people have a set of expectations when it comes to what the experience of your brand is like. And that's it for now. So you guys let me know what you think in the comments below and like this video. 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