36 | Stop chasing ubiquity

WeTransfer and the urgency of lower case b brands.

Note: This is the third in a short series about the book I co-authored with WeTransfer co-founder Damian Bradfield on building a more soulful brand. Not a Playbook: The science Art of Building a Brand is available here, and — as of May 22 - on Amazon and as an audiobook on all the usual platforms.

Next week, Not a Playbook and its blue cover will blanket the shelves of an outdoor newsstand in London.

News & Coffee puts up the stand, as they’ve done in the hearts of Valencia, Madrid, Barcelona and —beginning last year — in the redeveloped parts of Kings Cross, a stylish if corporate little tech alley that ends in Granary Square. They partner with authors and create little book launch events. They stamp the book title on coffee cups, and offer it for sale alongside a curated collection of printed matter.

News & Coffee in London. We’ll be at another newsstand, though.

Rarely, do those events include DJ sets. But this is one of those exceptions.

Our lineup includes all-world musical curator Gilles Peterson. I spent one of the more pleasant evenings of my life in conversation with him and friend-of-the-letter Stephen Canfield in a restaurant in DTLA a few years ago. He’s done more to elevate the diversity of musical voices than any living radio DJ. He also paid me one of the best compliments I’ve ever received.

After he wraps up, the actor and podcast host Russell Tovey will talk to us about brands, artists and the future of creativity in the age of AI. Then Joe Talbot, who I watched send an entire arena of Amsterdammers into choreographed mayhem with his band IDLES, will take over on the decks.

The common denominator — as with most of the interesting Anglo luminaries in my life — is Damian Bradfield, the driving force behind the book we’re promoting this coming week.

Damian co-founded WeTransfer, a tech company that refused to act like one, and became an unlikely patron of the arts and a model for how companies build loyalty through relationships founded in trust.

Those relationships extend to their creative collaborators, who have included all of the names I listed above.

And there’s no better advertisement for the success of those relationships than the fact that they — months since Damian left WeTransfer after its acquisition — continue to show up for him: without a contract, without a sum of money exchanging hands.

This is the hallmark of a lower case b brand, one that eschews short-term growth at all costs and sets its sights firmly on the long-term.

A lower case b brand also doesn’t chase ubiquity, but instead focuses their efforts and investment on reaching, serving and uplifting a core group of customers and fans.

Below, a few other tenants:

They walk before they run

That means they build slowly and deliberately, forgoing VC or private equity investment that demands an unsustainable growth curve, and the tacky trust-eroding tactics of most growth stage companies. They’re also unlikely to subscribe to the “playbooks” that have produced a plethora of companies that look and sound the same.

Privately funded Teenage Engineering is a good example of this. The Stockholm-based brand builds premium, cool-looking synthesizers (like the Pocket Operator above) and consumer electronics that captivate a global audience of music nerds and design aesthetes.

They take their audience with them

When it comes to their customers they build deep, not wide. The storied Texas Monthly columnist Molly Ivins put it this way: “You got to dance with them what brung you.” She was referring to politics in the Clinton Years, but the message works for the branding world as well. Lowercase b brands get their core product or service right, empowering customers to offer the input that helps push innovation. When they move into a new category or business vertical, they don’t leave that core behind.

Nothing Phone and their community board representative is a great example of this, as is their laconic CEO Carl Pei and his soporific (and illuminating) reaction videos to reviews of his latest phone model.

They don’t list values in a deck, they act on them

They design with intention beyond profitability, foster trust and embrace instinct over data obsession. The last of these has been the trickiest over the last decade of data-driven marketing strategies and funnel playbooks, but brand personalities and behaviors can’t be built by predictive machine.

A great example of this from WeTransfer’s early days is taking unsold ad inventory and using the space to highlight the work of artists they liked.

They challenge platform dynamics

In the increasingly beige aesthetic and monoculture created by social media, they find ways to reach their audience in unconventional ways.

MSCHF’s 1.0 web site has become one of the rare URLs that people bookmark to check in on the latest unpredictable — but never incoherent — product drop.

They elevate their community

Whether an owned web site or blog — I know both are considered vanishing breeds — or through workshops and third places, they find spaces and strategies that enable customers to become co-creators and ambassadors.

Rare for a luxury brand, Leica actively seeks the opinions of its core photography customer to help push innovation and creates opportunities for them to get together. Their workshops and trips don’t just help fill out the brand universe, they deepen appreciation for the practice of photography, and place Leica firmly in the advocate’s role.

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We’re firmly in an era of tech overreach, where once-trusted brands from Facebook and Instagram, to Don’t-be-evil-Google, and former-employer Apple, have successfully altered behaviors and infiltrated business plans to our detriment.

Their practices have served as a model for an avalanche of digitally native companies who’ve attempted the same, chasing reach and ubiquity at the expense of values like privacy and trust and — often — the moral compass that once guided their founders.

What lower case b brands represent is an approach to enterprise building that is methodical and focuses on the long term. Inherent in those methods are strategies that seek depth, not breadth; intentionality beyond profitability; and community over clout.

Given the tectonic shifts in society, politics, and the private sector over the last few years, these values feel more important than ever. It’s why I felt so lucky to get a front-row seat to a company that built with them, and why Damian and I will continue to seek out and align ourselves with other brands that do the same.

If you think of a few more, send them my way and I’ll do my best to spread the good word (and give you a friend-of-the-letter shoutout, of course).