K atie c ouric

Focus on Who You Are
Everyone has a gift to give to the world. To find it, stay still, listen to your
intuition, and know that you are complete as you are. Keep looking inside
and ask yourself what makes you unique, why you’re here, and what you
have to offer.
Prince Ea offers the following questions to discover more about
yourself, which can be applied to building your brand:
1. Why am I on the planet?
2. What can I give others?
3. What makes me happy?
4. If I had five years to live, what would I do?
5. If I had one year to live and knew that whatever I chose to do was
guaranteed to succeed, what would I do?
Answering the above questions can really help you understand what you are
here to do, help you believe it’s possible, and help you have more follow-
through in your work and in building your brand.
Nate Morley, founder of Works Collective and one of the top brand
strategists in the United States, has worked as a group creative director at

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some of the best agencies in the world, including 72andSunny and Deutsch
Los Angeles. He’s also worked in global brand marketing at Nike and as the
CMO at both Skullcandy and DC Shoes. At DC Shoes, Morley helped
pioneer a new kind of branded content—the iconic Gymkhana series of
films that have been viewed well over 500 million times. Gymkhana Three
alone has been watched 65 million times with no paid support.
Morley says that when building a brand, there’s a difference between
who you are and what you do. “Most people think of Nike as a shoe
company, but they’re not,” he said. “Nike is a performance company that
makes shoes as a way to inspire and enable human performance. The
expression of performance (shoes) has changed dramatically over the last
forty years, but who they are as a brand has not. Nike started as a
performance company, and that’s who they are today, and who they will be
in the future.”
Creating a brand is hard. There are lots of shoe companies, but there is
only one Nike.
Morley says that once you truly know who you are, you can do lots of
different things and appeal to lots of different people. He applies this
approach to his work with companies at all stages. “Most start-ups are
hyper-focused on building a product and getting to market—and that’s a
good thing,” he continued. “But there comes a time when a company needs
to tell the story of who they are rather than what they make or do. What you
make or do is an expression of who you are as a brand.”
Chatbooks is a start-up that prints photo books from your camera roll
and social media accounts. As a member of the advisory board, Morley
helped Chatbooks realize that they’re not a book-printing company—
they’re a “hold on to what matters” company that exists to inspire and
enable people to hold on to and preserve the moments and people that
matter most. The way they do that is by printing books, but that’s not who
they are at their core. Morley explains, “This approach will allow
Chatbooks to evolve their product and service if they choose to without
changing who they are as a brand.”
Becoming a brand also helps you last in a changing world. For example,
if you’re a processing company that makes the world’s best processor, but
that’s all you do, then the second someone else makes a better processor
your company ceases to matter. That’s why the best companies in the world

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use advertising to sell products as an expression of who they are as a brand.
The best brands know how important it is to use resources exclusively for
brand building.
Morley developed several campaigns for Target that didn’t feature
products at all. They purpose of the campaigns were simply to help people
feel that Target is fashionable, cool, accessible, and fun. Most of the items
Target sells can be purchased anywhere, but people want to buy from a
brand they love.