Transcript: How Do You Feel About My Shoe?

Hey, creative. How do you feel about my shoe? You ever see <laugh>? You ever seen a red Sealy, s suede, Adidas, Sealy? How do you feel about this shoe? You have feelings about this shoe? I do. And that’s important because when you’re trying to build a brand, it’s important to know that human beings buy on feelings. We like to think we buy on our rationality and we weigh all the pros and cons and make little thing, but for most of the time, we buy with our feelings. Now, when you saw that red Sealy shoe, you might have no feelings at all. Or you might think, oh, that’s a shoe for old guys. Um, but that said, I know all you kids out there wearing bands and you’re wearing all the Adidas and you’re wearing all the cool pumas and stuff like that. You think you invented those, but you didn’t. I grew up in the eighties and that’s when those shoes came about. Anyway, which brings me to my point. That’s a whole other thing.

When I was a kid, uh, growing up in the eighties, um, those shoes, those swayed Adidas shoes were so cool to me. All the cool kids wore them. I was never a cool kid. I don’t know if you can tell I was never very cool, but more importantly, my parents couldn’t afford to buy those kinds of shoes for me. And so I wore like the, the equivalent of what the Walmart sort of shoe would be. But I always wanted some of those suede, these awesome, these awesome s suede Adidas. I wanted one of these really bad. And so when I, when I got older, uh, one of the first things I did was I was, I bought myself a pair. I have a deep con emotional connection to those shoes. You may not feel that at all. You may be repulsed by those shoes, and that’s okay.

But that brings me to my point. When you’re building your brands, you should focus on the feelings you want people to feel when they interact with you and they interact with your brand. Focus on the feelings. Too often we lead with like price and timelines and all the, the logic of our brands. What people really want to feel good, they want to feel connected to your brand. One of the biggest and best examples in the history of the world, I think is, is probably Apple, right? I’m not an Apple person, but my daughter and my business partner both are, and they’re, they’re on me all the time cuz I use my Android phone and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I can’t deny that Apple people feel something strong about being an Apple person. That’s why I call them Apple people. If you can tap into the feelings about your brand and your artwork that make people feel good, okay, make them feel e emotionally attached to your brand.
You are onto something, you’re building a tribe and they will tell their friends about you because they feel so good working with you. Lemme give you a book, Seth Godden, s e t h g o d i n. If you ever ever heard of Seth Godden, he’s a incredibly well-known marketing theorist and marketing writer. Seth says that human beings, um, because we are tribal and we like to be in groups, he says, people say it like this, people like us do things like this. People like us do things like this. Apple people, people like us. We buy the new iPhone, we buy the Apple watch, we buy all the things. People like me, kids who grew up in the eighties and didn’t have a lot of money. We buy our nostalgia shoes, the ones we always wish we had. People like us do things like this.

So think about your brand and think about your art. What emotion can you tap into to build a tribe? So say people like us, hire that musician at our restaurant. People like us have that person put a MUR on our wall. People like us hire that video company. We all films because we have a type. We have a group that just loves what we do. We love them right back and they tell their friends and we’ve built a business on it, on a strong emotional connection. That’s what you’re going for, y’all. You can do it. Think hard about that. People like us do things like this. I love you.