Unlabel: Selling You Without Selling Out

by Marc Ecko

You must move from the mind-set of “I am a consumer and I want X” to “I am a producer and I create Y.

Building a brand is like creating your own personal religion. You need to be willing to fight for it, defend it, die for it. It involves being something of a zealot.

Visions can start small. Visions should start small. They’re incremental, like building Legos:

I now know that this is normal for every entrepreneur. You’re always pitching. You never stop auditioning. Even for Spike, even Mark Zuckerberg, even for the president. You will always keep pitching, and you will always have to deal with rejections. This doesn’t mean you should give up; it means you’re human and you have a pulse.

“Marc, you don’t want be forty years old, saying ‘coulda, woulda, shoulda.’ If this is what you want to do, you need to go for it.

Think of a brand as a triangle with three legs: Governance, Swagger, and Brute Force. No single part is more relevant than