The Quiet Brand

The introverted future of marketing.

Imagine all of humanity speaking simultaneously right now.

That’s the sound of the Internet.

Ever since the web gave consumers and brands megaphones to express themselves, communication has become a big mosh pit where everyone jumps and shouts incessantly to be heard above the noise. But no one is listening. There is an absolute imbalance between the supply and demand of information.

It’s time to change direction; it’s time for the “quiet brand.”

The quiet brand is like the introvert at the party that chooses to remain quiet and observe instead of contributing to the noise. It’s quiet, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have much to say. It’s soft-spoken but not stupid. It’s on the side, but not outside. It’s intelligent and patient and doesn’t beg for attention. The quiet brand operates under a completely different paradigm than all other companies out there right now.

Quiet is the future, and I’ll show you why.

QUIET IS AUTHENTIC

The new plastic world lacks authenticity. There’s no greater gold standard than plain and simple authenticity in the world of fake news and fake people. Authenticity means that you don’t let filters distort your brand’s true intention and soul.

Being authentic means that you no longer follow the herd. Become what you want to become. An intelligent, quiet brand knows success doesn’t come from being the biggest or the fastest. It means nothing anymore to be #1. Now is the time to become the #1 you. Being authentic is not easy, and your people will acknowledge that. It will build trust because they know you are being your true self. If you write your messages with candor, intention, and passion, your audience will begin to seek your communications. This is how you will forge long-term connections to your brand, not advertising one-night-wham-bang-thank you-’mam-stands.

Don’t stand for something because you have to stand for something like everyone else. Be yourself. If you don’t feel like celebrating Black Friday or Father’s Day as part of your communications plan, don’t.

Your authenticity will pay off in loyalty. Sharpen your messaging, so it’s not so diluted. You’ll lose some clients to connect better with those who believe in you. There’s no way around it, and it’s worth it.

Quiet doesn’t mean you have to be silent. If you are very passionate and genuinely want to talk about things that matter to you and your clients many times a day, they will want to hear from you because they know you genuinely are trying to express yourself. If, on the other hand, you’re introverted and quiet, your audience will respect how often you communicate with them because they know you’re doing it naturally, not on a media schedule. There’s no way to go wrong. Find your own pace of communications.

Humanize your products, your services, your people, and your stories. Kill the language of marketing, burn the slogans and strategic copy in a big bonfire. Liberate your brands from old stories and permit yourself to start again, like spring cleaning your house and giving it a fresh coat of paint. We all have the ability to start over and leave behind the past, including brands. The right of the white empty page is a basic necessity and one that most people don’t consider. Brands are trains, but you lay down the tracks, so build yourself an intersection, change lanes, and take all your carriages to a beautiful and quiet destination.

Energy is at the core of brands, and it has to be real to keep it alive. It’s not just them; it’s you, the people behind the product, who need it most. We’ve all lost the ability to work in bullshit, including you. Money won’t stop the leak of your soul if you don’t work on something you truly believe in. Successful companies need talented people, and talented people now need ample doses of ‘real.’

QUIET IS CONFIDENCE

Modern technology has given us the ability to search and find ANYTHING and EVERYTHING. If you needed to find a good coffee or a specific essential oil from a flower in the Himalayas that only blooms every ten years, you could find it in minutes by looking online. We’re all good at searching now, and we’ve also become good at online shopping. It’s not necessary for companies to advertise and push so much. Let people find your brand, and when they knock on your door, don’t shout; just welcome them, open the door, and let them move around inside your brand; they’ll call if they need you.

If you’ve ever been to Sao Paulo, you’ve probably noticed the strange feeling of being in a giant mega city with 20 million people where billboards are illegal. There are no ads outside as far as you can see. It’s a good visual representation of what the internet might look like if we didn’t have to swallow spoonfuls of advertising to travel inside it. Does it stop or slow commerce? Not in the slightest.

A brand that’s comfortable in its quiet shows strength and a vision for the future. It also shows your audience that you are not desperate for a sale every week and that you respect their basic human need for peace and quiet.

Social media companies demand that you communicate with your consumer three times a day, or the algorithm will trip you and make you fall from the spotlight. They flagellate brands to scream all day because it benefits them to keep the pace going fast. It doesn’t have to be this way. The quiet brand communicates softly and naturally.

It’s increasingly difficult for people to talk honestly and transparently in the world these days. The global brand approach is a dead-end. Instead, a tribal corporate approach is needed, where each brand curates and designs its ecosystem in a way that feels good to them and no one else. Don’t be afraid to treat your brand like a country with its rules, beliefs, and customs.

QUIET IS RESPECTFUL

The quiet brand respects a client’s decision not to participate and perhaps just window shop in peace. A quiet brand removes the loudspeaker salesman on the street trying to get people in — instead, it lets people come in and out freely and easily. Those who want to stay will stay. Those who want to come back will come back. Confidence will bring people and your brand together.

This respect can be demonstrated off and online. Let’s stop with the aggressive mailings, funnels, and blast mails. Don’t bother them with banners, pop-ups, offers, or special promotions. Calm it down. Clean it up. Slow it down. Think alternatively. Treat your clients like you would treat yourself. Just imagine going to the supermarket and having staff at every aisle and section pulling you and grabbing to tell you something is on sale, as they stuff your pockets with coupons while they sing jingles in loops, and then receiving constant texts from them the second you get home saying you forgot something in your shopping cart. Hell right?

Respect the consumer’s intelligence. Take an objective analysis of how mainstream advertising communicates to its targets in the language of grown-up children. The messages are a sandwich of funny jokes, products, fake storytelling, and buy-me-now stories. Much like a parent desperately trying to feed the kid food it doesn’t want to eat.

Make your brand cleaner by removing the excess, the lies, and the exaggerations. Put yourself in the shoes of an artist. How would they describe their art, their work, and their abilities? Consider leaving something in your communications up for discovery, like a hook, instead of serving up messaging that’s predigested with marketing enzymes. Brains like to solve things, so people can be curious and poke.

QUIET IS GOOD DESIGN

Thousands of years ago, in a land far, far away, brands communicated their products and services through great design. Companies used to hire artists like Dali, Magritte, Hopper, or Warhol to help bridge the connection to clients by making their product communications as pleasing to the eye as possible. We don’t need to repeat the past, but there are diamonds and gold in merging commercial communications with beautiful, intelligent design.

Take a lesson from that and invest in great designers and inspiring artists and create interesting and beautiful things that create value for the world and lift up the energy of your brand. Growing your investment in design is like planting organic in your garden; it’s going to be better for you in the long term.

Invest in sustainable resources and systems around your products, create absolutely beautiful websites and rich online experiences, experiment and take risks, and let people that visit your brand’s world hear, see, and feel the energy it draws. Let your communications be more fluid instead of an ad template; you can omit funny jokes, punchlines, or complex storytelling. No need to create ‘creative traps’ to catch people's attention and sell them things.

Rather than spending billions on advertising and marketing, we should redirect them to design. The money should be invested in elevating the online and offline brand experiences. Marketing is loud, ugly, and impermanent, while good design is quiet, beautiful, and lasting. Enhance the intelligence of your communications. Instead of going shallow, go deep. Don’t persuade, connect and educate.

Anyone could spend a million dollars on advertising and generate sales, but take away your million-dollar budget, and you’ll be back at square one. Make your million-dollar investment in design and brand experience, and you’ll have built a temple for your clients.

Become something full of real. In the grand game of popularity, everyone lost. There was no winner. Behemoths like Meta and Twitter are proving that fast, loud, and big is not sustainable. It’s not the way. It’s not the path. It’s not the future. You can still communicate when you don’t shout, perhaps even more effectively than before.

QUIET IS GREEN

We don’t need to speed up the world. It’s bad for Mother Earth. I could go and research many statistics to prove this, but I know you know what I mean. Slowing down the world economy doesn’t mean we’ll all go broke, it means we’ll make our businesses and systems more sustainable and connected to the here and now, not some distant future. The destination is now, so we need to act now. You don’t need to join Greenpeace or Krazy Glue yourself to a Van Gogh to do this-just slow the fuck down. Maybe you need 4-day work weeks and 10-week vacations; maybe you need fewer employees, and less growth; that’s rightsizing, not downsizing.

QUIET LISTENS

Quiet brands spend more time listening than talking. Instead of using all your energy to write the next clever post you are going to do or the next headline, you could be researching your clients, seeing what they like and what they are publicly promoting in their lives. Maybe instead of working three hours a day on what you post next, you could spend that time supporting some of your clients. I’m sure they’d appreciate it. If you have a client that does online yoga, why not take one of their classes and leave some positive feedback on behalf of your brand? Be genuine, don’t sell them anything; participate in the conversation if it feels right.

QUIET IS CONFIDENT

Quiet trusts that sales will continue to grow and that the financial stability of the company is safe. The beautiful part about being a quiet brand is that growth is maintained through the strength of the product or service, not advertising. Advertising is like a powerful bully that could sell milk to a cow. It’s not a sustainable strategy.

Allowing the product itself to quietly grow its market based on its own merit means that your growth charts have real and organic results. An ad campaign that gives you a big boost might sound nice, but it might also make you think you’re bigger than you are. You might have grown your company too big & too fast, which means you could fall harder the second the marketing falls or someone beats you. Organic growth means you know where you stand in the market very well, which will help you make better management decisions.

Quiet trusts that you are where you’re supposed to be. Companies that plan and strategize for mega-growth are always looking for the future, and are never satisfied with where they are at. Trust is being at peace with your position at all moments in time.

QUIET IS GOING INWARDS

When we shift our focus from offensive attack to internal quiet, we gain all the energy going to go to that activity. Picture all the energy sunk in advertising instead of going to improve the environmental impact of the company, package design, or the brand online experience. It would create a better product, a happier client, and a better world as a side effect.

QUIET SELLS

Quiet products and services will be their own marketing agency. The quiet brand keeps a circle of clients around it who want to be there and who arrived out of their own free will. The consumers who know you’re a quiet brand and love what you’ve got will intuitively know it’s up to them to tell their friends. Being able to promote a product they love will make them feel empowered. Having know-how about a great product or service that relies on referrals to grow is exciting for people to share with their circles, like a valuable secret they’ve been entrusted with to share with their connections — especially your brand.

If my coffee is fantastic, I’ll entrust the people who bought it and loved it to share it enthusiastically with others. It might take longer, but I can wait. I’m not in a race, I’m a quiet brand and I’m here for the ride. “Slow and low” as they say.

QUIET IS FORGIVING

The quiet brand admits to mistakes and makes them a part of its humanity. Corporations now have entire communications teams designed to produce propaganda when they make mistakes that offend anyone. Corporations play the same game as politicians and religions when trying to be the perfect citizen. The quiet brand doesn’t try to be perfect; it makes mistakes and apologizes and mends them, but it doesn’t try to pretend it’s a robot or the Vatican. Be pleasant — but not a polite pleaser. Your ‘mistakes’ are the corporate humanity that allows people to latch on to your brand.

QUIET IS THE FUTURE

I politely decline to accept a Blade Runner future where ads are forced down our throats like force-fed geese. We need to accommodate a more sustainable level of consumerism in our world. Instead of a strip mall, it will be more like a beautiful library that stores many valuable items and which is quiet, clean, and gives us access to everything we will ever need without all the shouting, stress, and noise.

The momentum we've been on for the past 100 years is unnatural. Stepping out of the stampede and slowing down is the key to a more abundant, sustainable, and quiet future. In the age of marketing adrenaline, this idea may not be well-received or understood, but it's what I've instinctively taken in my journey. The quiet brand might seem straight out of a vintage science fiction book to you right now but natural human balance always wins.

Listen to silence,

it has so much to say.

— Rumi