The Scott Sternberg guide to building emotional brands

After 5 years building in consumer, a huge learning is that “creating a feeling” is the most inportant thing for building a resonant brand. Product and services end up being interchangeable but the feeling in a customers mind is not. The best brands are the best storytellers with the most authentic messaging. To action this, we’ve seen success buil... See more

One of the benefits of producing consistent creative work is that it comes with a narrative network effect: The more people who know and love the story of an object, the stronger the tie to that object becomes. For a brand like MSCHF, success might not always come from money—sometimes, it comes from products that reinforce how they want to articula... See more

The goal is to make people feel like they’re a part of something — and like you’re part of their identity. And the payoff — if all goes well — is in the form of fierce loyalty, word-of-mouth promotion, organic curiosity and attention, higher lifetime customer value and share of spend, lower acquisition costs, etc.

The idea is that it’s easiest to scale a product, harder to scale a service, and most challenging to scale a feeling. Here’s my take: while consumers might buy a product once because of a trend, they’ll buy a product twenty times because of a feeling. Ultimately, it is that ability to evoke a feeling in customers that creates the highest impact and... See more