#69 How to build a memorable brand?

I'll be honest with you.

For most of my career, brand wasn't something I thought about deeply. I thought about positioning, messaging, product launches, go-to-market… the PMM toolkit.

Brand felt like something that lived in a different department. Or at a different stage. Something you got to after you'd figured out the product and the pipeline.

Lately, I've been questioning that.

I've been spending more time studying what brands are actually doing. Not just tech brands. Sports teams. Retail. Consumer. Brands that have nothing to do with B2B SaaS. And the more I look, the more I think PMMs are underselling how much brand is their problem. Their opportunity, really.

Because here's the thing: brand is what makes positioning stick. It's the emotional infrastructure underneath everything we build. You can have the sharpest messaging in your category and still lose to a competitor that made people feel something first.

So this edition is about brand. Why it matters for us specifically. And what I keep seeing the best ones get right.

Why PMMs need to care more about this

Product marketing lives at the intersection of product and market. We're supposed to understand what customers believe, what they fear, and what would make them move.

But most PMM work is reactive. Someone launches a feature. We write the one-pager. We brief sales. We update the deck.

That's not wrong. It's just incomplete.

Brand is the proactive version of that work. It's deciding in advance what you want people to feel and believe about you, before they ever read a data sheet or talk to a rep. It shapes whether your launch lands or gets ignored. Whether a customer says "we use them" or "we love them."

The PMMs I've seen grow fastest aren't just great at messaging. They've developed an intuition for brand. They ask: is this consistent with who we are? Does this build something over time, or does it just fill a slot in the content calendar?

What three very different brands taught me

I've been drawing from examples all over the map because I think the patterns are clearer when you look outside your own category.

Sephora. They don't sell makeup. Thousands of places sell makeup. Sephora sells the feeling of walking in and belonging. Whether you're 16 and figuring out skincare or 40 and could teach the staff something. A loyalty program that feels like rewards, not data extraction. A community that turned customers into each other's best source of truth before "community-led growth" was a phrase anyone used.

The brand lesson: brand is what happens when you take your values and turn them into operations. "We are not intimidating" isn't a tagline. It's a hiring decision, a training decision, a store design decision.

The Knicks. This one hits different if you've watched them through the wilderness years.

The Garden got loud again. Not because they rebranded. Because Jalen Brunson took hometown pay. Because the front office started making decisions fans could believe in. Because the team showed up differently.

The brand lesson: you can't announce your way into credibility. The Knicks didn't post "We're back" and expect anyone to believe it. They earned it, slowly, through actions that accumulated. Brand trust is declared by your audience, not by you.

For PMMs, this is the most uncomfortable truth. The best positioning deck in the world doesn't hold if the product experience contradicts it. Brand is the sum of every real interaction someone has with you. Get those right first. Communicate second.

Lovable. A newer one, but worth watching closely.

They're an AI-powered app builder for people who can't code. Simple enough. But what they got right is something a lot of AI companies are still fumbling: they made the brand feel like it's for someone specific. Not for engineers. Not for a generic "technical user." For the person who has the idea but not the skills to build it.

The product demos that let real people show real things they built in 20 minutes. All of it points in the same direction.

The brand lesson: in a crowded category, specificity is brand strategy. Everyone is "AI-powered something." Lovable is for builders who aren't developers. That clarity is what makes people choose you and then tell others about you.

Three things to keep in mind when you're building yours

Whether you're in tech, ecommerce, or somewhere else entirely, these are the patterns I keep coming back to.

1. Pick one thing and commit. Not five values. Not a mission statement that could belong to any company. One clear emotional territory. Sephora owns belonging. The Knicks own real New York grit. Lovable owns accessible building. What's the one thing you want people to feel? Start there.

2. Brand lives in decisions, not decks. How do you hire? How do you handle a bad review? What do you refuse to do even when it would be easier? What does your onboarding feel like at 11pm when no one's watching? Those are your brand. The deck just describes it.

3. Proof carries more weight than claims. Tell me less. Show me more. Results, stories, community, product experience — these compound into brand faster than any campaign. The best brands don't explain themselves constantly. They let real things accumulate until people start explaining them to others.

The hardest part of brand building isn't knowing what to say. It's having the discipline to say the same thing, and do the same thing, long enough that it becomes automatic. For your team. For your customers. For the market.

That doesn't happen in a quarter. But it compounds in ways that make every other thing you do easier.

I'm still exploring this. If you've seen a brand do this really well recently — in any industry — hit reply, would love to chat!