Brittany is the Senior Director of Marketing for Apple Growth Partners, an award-winning accounting and business advisory firm.

One of the best competitive advantages a company can have is to fully understand and embrace their brand. Not just their products or services, but their actual brand. What are you known for among the sea of your competitors? What will make your product or service memorable, so that it results in word-of-mouth rave reviews? How does your brand attract the best talent in the current state of fierce workforce competition?

Once a company has these answers, it’s the leaders’ responsibility to incorporate the brand into every decision they make going forward.

And for our non-marketers, just for clarification: Your brand is different than your marketing plan.

Your brand is who you are. Your marketing plan is how you reach your target audience with your message.

One of the worst branding mistakes a company can make is either purposely or unintentionally forgetting to place their brand at the center of all decisions. Once a company begins to ghost their own brand, they can begin to lose significant importance and relevancy with their target audience. Gone are the days where “all press is good,” as social media practices have empowered consumers to call out brands for blind spots, missed customer service, poor expectations and more.

Since my own personal brand is infusing pop culture into everyday conversation and marketing practices, let’s explore how celebrity products have relevantly connected their brands to their offerings.

When you think of “celebrity products,” you most likely go to the popular skin care category. At least skin is something every consumer has, right? That makes the most sense. But for a celebrity to break into the consumer market in a popular celebrity arena, staying on personal brand is key to making waves.

Name one other celebrity in the ’90s that had a haircut named after them. Think of a haircut that had a name (a significant milestone in and of itself) that helped define a generation of pop culture in two words: The Rachel. Jennifer Aniston launched Lolavie—a line of hair care products. When you think of what defines Jennifer Aniston’s brand—not her products (movies and TV shows)—it’s as simple to me as hair. Any other product launch might have simply been lost in the skin care glosses of all other celebrities.

Another celebrity who’s embracing their personal brand as a product offering is Schitt’s Creek mastermind Dan Levy. While Dan could easily break into the Schitt’s Creek product offerings of memorabilia from the Crows Have Eyes 3 starring Moira Rose, he opted for eyewear because he has been known to emphasize his glasses everywhere from red carpets to personal social media images. What is the brand of Dan Levy—not his Emmy-winning show—but the person himself? To me, it’s simple: glasses.

Brands can also embrace a person’s or company’s legacy while leveraging their brand as the center of its success. LeBron James is an NBA legend, but first and foremost, he’s “just a kid from Akron.” This is a phrase he coined and that he has since based his legendary brand and foundation’s mission around. He often handwrites it on his shoes before a game, and most recently, it was referenced in the Sports Illustrated feature of him and his sons. “Just a kid from Akron” has been the personal brand of LeBron’s career. LeBron’s commitment to his roots in Akron is at the center of his ground-breaking I Promise school, an Akron public school designed for area students who are falling behind. LeBron’s personal brand is Akron, his hometown.

To shift from the multiple pop culture references I could make all day and focus on small businesses, how is your brand centered around every decision your company makes? Let’s use events as an example.

In a post-pandemic world, events are a great opportunity to showcase products and services through presentations, panels, tradeshows and so on, but they’re also a chance for a brand to remain memorable among attendees. This is especially true if there are multiple vendors and goodie bags for participants.

I once attended an event where a SaaS company focused on cybersecurity solutions for small businesses had a booth where the giveaway was a notebook and pen. This was for a SaaS company: an industry where most SaaS businesses are largely paperless and virtual. This handout may as well have been a sheet of granite and a chisel circa The Flintstones era. When I asked what prompted this decision, instead of an on-brand option such as a phone pop socket, a stylus or even a flash drive, the answer was this suggestion came from an outside advisor who wasn’t in the technology industry. I can hear all the collective sighs of marketing professionals everywhere. Taking the advice of a non-industry professional, who is also not in the company’s target audience, over the brand itself not only made the product “feel” old, but it was a missed opportunity to establish the brand as a modern solution in a virtual sea of competitors.

On the contrary, I attended another event where a digital company was rolling out its new mobile app features to existing clients. There wasn’t a piece of paper in sight. And the giveaway, which was perfectly timed for the winter season, was branded gloves with touch-screen capabilities. Now that is an on-brand product.

The most basic guideline for a brand is that it must make sense: for the company, for its employees, for its consumers and for the industry. And once it makes sense, it must remain consistent. Repetition in a competitive digital world is an undervalued strategy for marketing teams. Ask yourself a simple question: “What is our company most known for?” Include the answer in every decision you make going forward. Remember, Rachel Green was most known for one thing in the ’90s … well, other than that break they took.

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