brand world building, the untapped strategy for 2025

Summary

branding is not a logo. it’s not a color palette. branding is a gut feeling in your customer, and that gut feeling comes from a whole world you’ve built for them to step into. I call this brand world building.

the six-step framework:

1. define the hero. the customer is the hero, not you. who are they? what do they want to become?
2. establish your role. you’re the guide, not the hero. what’s your unique vantage point?
3. create jargon. specific language only insiders use. one of the strongest signals of belonging there is.
4. identify the enemies. every world has antagonists. globo gyms. influencers. the broken status quo. give your community something to define themselves against.
5. set the beliefs. what does your community believe that outsiders don’t?
6. define the mission. the rallying cry. ours used to be “better you, better biz.” it told you what you were here for.

the working example: Garage Gym Athlete. heroes were the athletes themselves. jargon included things like “Meet Yourself Saturdays.” the enemies were globo gyms and people coasting through the same workout for ten years. core beliefs around hard work, autonomy, training at home. mission was clear.

as AI commoditizes everything, the brands that win are the ones building worlds that humans want to live inside. you can’t outsource that to a model.

Transcript

why most brands rely on branding (not pricing)

So only one company can be the cheapest. Every other company is going to have to rely on branding. Branding is really a gut feel people have about you or your company. It’s not your font. It’s not your hex colors. It’s not your logo. It’s that gut feeling and you get that gut feeling by building a world for your customers and your clients.

So today let’s talk about how to build a world for your brand. So the largest brand I’ve ever built in terms of community size is Garage Gym Athlete. Garage Gym Athlete has tens of thousands of people who have used the workout, who’ve been a part of the community and it still thrives today. And I built that brand over a decade and what I didn’t know I was doing at the time was I was absolutely building a world for that brand, for that community.

This came naturally to me because I’m so immersed in being a Garage Gym Athlete. I actually am that thing. And so we had our own terms. We had our own rituals, traditions. We had an enemy. We had a hero. All of these things that built our own world we had and that’s what made Garage Gym Athlete so successful.

what made garage gym athlete a lasting community

It’s only now looking backwards 10 years of what I was doing and realizing that the world building I was doing at the time is what made that brand stick and last up until this day. So if that’s what you’re looking to build, let me give you my 10 years worth of experience in building a world for a brand, boil it down to a checklist so you can use it and you can build your own world, your own community for your brand and your company.

All right, so let’s dive into the six steps you need to start building a world inside of your brand. I’m going to be going over who the hero is, who you are, some of the jargon, enemies, beliefs, missions, all of these things. These are things, a common checklist you need to start building that world inside of your brand and I’ll give you examples of how I’ve done it, how I’m doing it right now and then hopefully that spurs some creative juices for you to be able to do it too.

So the first thing you just have to do is you have to establish who the hero is. And if you’ve read any of the books like Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller or any marketing in general, you know that you are not the hero. Hopefully you know that. Your customer is the hero, but you shouldn’t stop there.

step 1: naming the hero and giving them identity

You really should name the hero kind of as an archetype. And so in Garage Gym Athlete, what I have done is everyone’s an athlete. So our heroes are athletes. It’s not just them, right? There has to be a community, a body of people and they are athletes in Garage Gym Athlete. Here at Better.biz, I have decided to call everyone builders and I’m starting to define more and more of what that means.

I’ve been doing it in some recent content about how builders want depth. Builders are sophisticated, builders are intelligent because that’s really the audience I realize I’ve been creating and the audience I ultimately want. And so the hero is them, yes, but then also name them. What are they? Give them a name, give them something they can associate with so they know right away is like, hey, am I a builder?

Am I an athlete? And then you really will start to build this community around that identity. Now the second thing, you need to decide what you are. Who are you in this? Are you the coach, which would be my role at Garage Gym Athlete, or here I’m more of the mentor, and ultimately you can be the guide, right?

step 2: who are you, mentor, coach, or guide?

Still going off of that basic marketing 101, but what are you going to call yourself? Where are you on this journey? Are you the quarterback of their health? Are you the coach? Are you the mentor? Are you the guide? Who are you in this process? Now that is some very basic level world building and marketing in general, but now we start to get a lot deeper into how to build this world.

And the first thing I want to go over is jargon. So a lot of times people will tell you jargon is bad. You don’t want to tell an inside joke or you don’t want to have a bunch of terms like, a new person doesn’t understand, but I think sprinkling that in from time to time is okay. Like if I were to just spend the next three or four minutes talking about past episodes I’ve done on this podcast or past terms I’ve thrown around, you know, all these things, they won’t resonate, mainly due to the time.

step 3: creating jargon that binds

But if I throw in one or two here and there, people are going to start to pick up on like, hey, this is something different. This isn’t just content being blasted to my face, like we’re actually building a community here. People are going to start to understand. And again, I’m trying to build builders.

That’s who I want in my community. I want them to take the extra minute to understand who we are, who they are, and where they fit into all of this. So jargon is a huge part of that. So at Garage Gym Athlete, we have something called MYS or Meet Yourself Saturdays, and we talk about these quite frequently on the Garage Gym Athlete podcast.

Meet Yourself Saturdays, that’s jargon, MYS, that’s jargon, that’s an acronym. That’s very military style, you know, thing that most people won’t pick up right away, but they will eventually get it. I don’t want 47 different acronyms and pieces of jargon, but I do want to have some things that solidify our community.

Meet Yourself Saturday within Garage Gym Athlete are just hard workouts that we have our athletes do. You know, other jargon that you could have, you know, really to your company and whatever you have, like one we have here for better is depth sequences. And depth sequences are pretty simple. I’ve gone over these in other podcast episodes, but a depth sequence is where you show your audience you’re capable of depth and that you truly understand something, and we typically do this through email.

And I think depth sequences are really powerful in helping build your brand. Again, that’s very specific. If I just came on here and I was like, hey, yeah, don’t forget about your depth sequence, people wouldn’t really know what that is, but you start to build this jargon in terms so people understand that there’s more here.

step 4: choosing and naming the enemy

There is another layer underneath all of this, and we’re not just trying to appeal to surface level people who aren’t interested in joining a community or being part of a movement. Now next I’m going to move to the enemy. Every business needs an enemy. So in Garage Gym Athlete, we had multiple enemies, and it is okay to have multiple.

So we started with Globo Gyms, especially back in the day when garage gyms were not much of a thing. We weren’t attacking like CrossFit gyms or those kinds of strength and conditioning gyms. It was really more of the planet fitness, lifetime fitness, those where you pay a monthly membership, most people never show up.

That was our enemy at Garage Gym Athlete. And then we slowly moved to influencers. These monkey see, monkey do programs are so stupid. It’s like, look how jacked I am, look how fit I am, you should do what I do. That’s not even how fitness works, so we attack those people as much as we can. And so those have always been the enemies within Garage Gym Athlete.

For better, and what I’m building now, the enemies are two-fold, again, zombies, is what I’m calling them. Zombies are the followers, they’re the people who don’t really understand your content, they’re there for quick hits of dopamine, they don’t want to be educated, they don’t want to go deep, they are just mindless scrollers.

I don’t want those people consuming my content. And to be honest, if you’re this far in the video, you’re not one of those people. Zombies don’t make it past the first 60 seconds of a video like this because they realize, oh crap, he’s going deep. And so zombies is a big enemy. And then another enemy that we have is just you, the worst version of you, the lesser version of you, the person who isn’t better, the person who doesn’t try hard.

We all have that person in our psyche, right? So that’s the other enemy that I’m going after in my better brand is I am going after you. There’s a better version of you in there. Like my favorite quote, hell on earth, it would be to meet the man you could have been. I don’t want to meet that person, I don’t want you to have to ever meet that person either.

step 5: declaring your core beliefs

So those are the enemies. You got to have enemies to start building a world. Now, you need to have certain beliefs as well. And beliefs are very important to building a brand. So one of the beliefs that we have at Garage Gym Athlete is concurrent training. And if you don’t know what concurrent training is, concurrent training is just the blend of strength and conditioning.

So you have high levels of performance and then you also have high levels or you’re shooting for longevity as well, right? That’s ultimately what we believe. And I think if you can get other people to believe that as well and they get really bought into you being the best at that thing, then you’re starting to build a world.

Now, the belief we have here at Better is better you equals better is. My handwriting is terrible. But ultimately, that’s the main belief around here in everything that I’m creating content for is, yeah, I’ll get into the weeds, I’ll do some business math, I’ll talk leads, marketing, I’ll do all of it.

But at the core belief of everything I’m doing is you need to get better for your business to get better. So if you’re not developing yourself, you don’t have a chance at growing your business. That’s the ultimate belief. So if you’re here and you believe that, cool, you are part of the community. You’re starting to become a part of what I’m building here, this world, right, this brand.

step 6: making the mission clear and inspiring

And that’s what ultimately I want. So what is the belief that you need other people to get on board with to truly resonate with your content and your message? Now, the last thing is just the mission. What is the mission? At Garage Gym Athlete, we are building what we call autonomous athletes. And we do that through educating at a very deep level for fitness.

We want athletes not to need us but to want us. And so what I mean by that is we educate them so much on programming and nutrition and everything else that they don’t really, they shouldn’t need us after a certain point in time. They shouldn’t be dependent on us, right? And so what we want is for them to become autonomous, but they choose to continue to use the service because it is ultimately good for them and it makes their life easier.

So we want autonomous athletes. That’s the big mission there. Now, the big mission we have here at Better is to, it’s very similar to the belief, Better You, Better Biz. And this is ultimately what I want. I’m not putting a number on it. All I really want to do is help people realize that when you become better, your business can get better.

And I don’t think people truly understand that. And even when they do, they don’t put enough into it to make the progress that they really should. And they don’t have a practice that continues them down this path. Now I could talk about the mission here and what we’re doing for days on end, but I’m not going to, I’m going to, I’m going to sum it up right here.

recap: why this is more than just marketing

If you have the hero and you name the hero, the collective, if you will, you know what you are. You have a couple of points of jargon, not too much. Don’t confuse the new people, but you have some jargon. You’re very clear on who your enemies are and you constantly or continually throw stones at the enemy.

You have a very strong set of beliefs and you have a mission. You’re marching towards something. You are starting to build a world inside of your brand. And this is far from hex colors and logos and fonts and what your website looks like. This is building a movement. This is a mission. This is a world.

This is what people want to be a part of. And I think this is only going to get bigger and bigger as time goes on because content isn’t going to be the thing that separates people and a good service isn’t as well. Depending on your job, AI might just replace all of those things in the future, but AI doesn’t replace human to human interaction.

AI doesn’t replace a movement. AI doesn’t replace leadership. AI doesn’t replace a lot of the things that you have when you are building a world for your brand as opposed to just a brand or scalable company. But to do any of this, you’re going to have to try harder.