At the agency, there’s a recurring learning session where someone talks about what they know, and the rest of the team hopefully picks up something useful. It’s a good initiative. Recently, HR asked me to lead one on Brand Strategy.
I said yes. Then a very real question hit me:
Would what I share help? Or would it cause more confusion than clarity?
I can’t change my views on branding. And those views don’t fit neatly into any 101 crash course format.
The longer I thought about it, the more I felt discouraged from participating. Yet the request had already sparked a chain of thoughts that refused to shut up. And that’s the problem. Once something takes root in your mind like this, you can’t just leave it alone.
So here I am, over the weekend, wrestling with the ethics of it: do I share what I actually believe, even if it contradicts everything they came to learn?
If I were sitting by a bonfire with a group of curious minds, this is exactly how it would start:
Take everything you think you know about branding. The academia. The online courses. The social media threads. All of it. Toss it straight into the flames. Because most of it is useless.
And I don’t say that lightly.
Education keeps trying to reverse-engineer success stories, filling the gaps with guesswork, then packaging the whole thing into a course.
You’re not taught how branding actually works. You’re taught how people believe it worked.
This is not a rebellion for the sake of sounding edgy. My gripe with modern learning is simple: somewhere along the way, education stopped expanding minds and started packaging consensus.
It rewards knowledge that fits into slides instead of knowledge tested in reality.
At school, I once asked my biology teacher why she chose teaching. She replied, To teach is to learn twice.
That line haunted me, not because it was poetic, but because it exposed what’s broken now. We have more teaching than learning happening around us. People gather readily available information, rearrange it neatly, and label themselves experts.
They forget the three ingredients that give teaching any meaning: instinct, intelligence, and integrity.
Without those, you get a finely plated dish with no flavor. It looks impressive, but it doesn’t nourish anything.
You follow the course. You pick up some tricks. You apply them. When they don’t deliver as promised, you keep using them anyway because the habit has already set in.
This is precisely what’s happened to branding.
Everyone is trying to manipulate how they will be perceived. And that’s as effective as throwing a stone at the sky hoping to poke a hole in a cloud.
We’re bombarded with lessons claiming branding is perception—but no one acknowledges the obvious truth:
Brand perception cannot be controlled.
Sure, perception can be influenced briefly—that’s what marketing and advertising do. They say: Look at me. Feel this way about me.
A good campaign can create attention, desire, even affection. But the moment the show ends, people go back to judging you by how you behave.
If clever tactics were enough, every brand would be respected and remembered.
But take any industry—we barely recall more than a handful of brands we trust. Everyone has access to the same tools and techniques. So why do only a few earn real recognition?
Because most believe branding is a trick. A good headline. A shiny logo. A marketing team celebrating click-through rates. That’s all distraction.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
Branding is perception.
And perception doesn’t listen to commands.
Trying to control it directly is a desperate attempt to make up for weak identity.
Branding education often studies what worked long ago and creates rules from hindsight. People memorize those rules and then wonder why reality doesn’t obey them.
Books make it sound like you can walk into someone’s brain and rearrange their beliefs like interior design. You can’t.
A brand owns its actions.
The audience owns the meaning.
Marketing and advertising are performance.
Branding is character.Branding isn’t the show.
Branding is the pattern that remains once the show ends.Patterns come from character.
And character reveals itself in the plain moments:
- How you handle bad news.
- How you talk to someone who can’t benefit you.
- How you work when no one is grading your effort.
All those branding terms. Persona. Voice. Image. They’re descriptions, not causes.
Branding isn’t what you claim. It’s what you consistently prove.
That still doesn’t guarantee you’ll be seen for who you are. Because perception belongs to others. You only control your behavior.
Take a simple example from real life.
Often, when I help filmmaker friends with their screenwriting, the first draft review arrives with caution. When he disagrees with me, he spends fifteen minutes reaffirming his respect before he dares challenge a thought. His perception, perhaps, is that I’m fragile enough to crack under criticism, that I might take offense.
On the other side of the table, I find his dancing around the subject unbearable. My perception becomes that he’s overly empathetic, terrified of hurting someone. It tells me something about how he reads me.
A simple professional interaction between two humans.
One event. Different perceptions.
Neither aligned. Both real.
That’s branding.
Branding in my opinion is not just for corporates and celebrities. It is as commonplace as commuting to work.
From the moment we wake up until we retire for the day, every interaction with the world of people is a brushstroke on our brand. We are building it subconsciously, constantly. Sometimes those perceptions fall in our favor. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they align with who we are. Sometimes they contradict it entirely.
So if you ask me what branding is, I would say this:
Branding is a way of life. It’s not the persona you construct for others. It’s character. Who you are, despite how others perceive.
We constantly emit signals: our confidence, our silence, our sarcasm, our midnight messages. Every interaction becomes a clue for someone else to interpret.
Branding isn’t the story you tell about yourself.
It’s the story others tell about you.Branding is not pretending.
Branding is living something long enough that people can’t miss it.
And this is where things get tricky:
- Reality and perception rarely sync neatly.
- You can show loyalty and still seem distant.
- You can be creative and still be judged chaotic.
People don’t decode signals the same way.
Brand character is the only piece you control:
- Your choices when something is at stake.
- Your tone in disagreement.
- Your craft when nobody sees the effort.
Perception is the world’s response—and the world writes its own script.
Branding is a life practice. A repeated expression of character. When perception begins to match who you really are, that is alignment. That’s branding working.
- It doesn’t happen often.
- It doesn’t happen fast.
- It doesn’t stop working once it’s achieved.
Branding feels easy in theory and maddening in reality because theory doesn’t account for human psychology.
So, if there’s one thing I keep circling back to, it’s this:
Branding is not what you do, or how well you package what you do.
Branding is who you are. Relentlessly. Consistently. Whether or not anyone acknowledges it at first.
Keep showing up as who you are.
Sooner or later, it becomes too obvious for the world to ignore.
When you chase tactics, you build a fragile illusion. You keep adjusting your mask depending on who’s watching, and eventually the mask cracks.
Character doesn’t need calibration.
Consistent behavior becomes pattern.
Pattern becomes reputation.
Reputation becomes brand.
That’s the only process that holds up over time.