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I am not in marketing. I did not go to school for marketing, or communications, or advertising. I think most corporate marketing, no matter the industry, is stale. It's a cycle of recycling the same boring ideas we've all seen for a decade or longer. They swap in their logo and colorway and call it a campaign or a brand. Yawn AF.

What I am is a big believer in brand. A brand does not have to be a company, per se. A brand can be a logo, or a symbol, or a hashtag. A brand should be desirable. People should want it. Want to touch it. Want to be associated with it. Feel like they've got a little dose of swag when they're rocking it.

A brand should also be cool. Cool so that when someone cool sees it they think "cool." Cool isn't the appearance of trying too hard. It's cool because all the hard work has already been done in the creative process and the only thing left? Distilled coolness.

Is this cool? Beats me. It's meant to promote Nutanix Acropolis. Is it a completely original idea? Not really. It reminds me of a Neil Barrett design. Deconstructed. Minimalist. Looks urban and edgy. So I applied those design traits to an Acropolis image. Some slices. Some color inversion. Boom. Done.

This design made it onto the front of a t-shirt that's shipped a few thousand units now. More importantly (to me) is that it doesn't look like a tech company t-shirt. To me that's cool. It also helps drive a desire and an action. Want an Acropolis shirt? Then enable or sell Nutanix Acropolis.

Takeaway: find something that catches your eye and copy what you like about it.

Sometime in early 2016 I remember watching some short nature video of a lion, the king of the jungle, and thinking of how I kind of saw the letter X in the lion's muzzle. The Nutanix logo, for those unaware, has a stylized X.

So I started working on a concept.

Once I had a concept (lion muzzle with an X) I needed a design aesthetic. I've always liked the doberman prints by Givenchy. So I decided to try something similar. Dark. Carnal. A bit scary. Something that looks like it will eat your soul if you piss it off. At the same time I was finishing this design I was also taking on a new role at work focused on selling Lenovo HX. I decided to apply the lion design and a tagline, #BeTheKing, to this new Lenovo HX team. I even pulled out some emoji flow (crown emoji over a lion emoji) for branding inside of tweets and emails.

Why is this important? The brand, the lion muzzle, and the hashtag all provide a rallying point for the troops. Sales, marketing, engineering. Here we all are rocking the design.

By the way, here's a more corporate take now used for polos and embroidered goods. For more of my designs check out sickbeets.com. Note, stuff isn't really for sale that's just my inventory tracking mechanism.

A brand has the potential to be a focal point for a mission, a campaign, a product. Here the lion muzzle coupled with the #BeTheKing tagline and hashtag provides something for us to get behind, something for our partner ecosystem to get behind, and something for our customers to embrace.

So where do you find inspiration for brand?

I personally find Instagram to be a great source of visual ideas. Most of my IG feed is dedicated to fashion, memes (read: pop culture), architecture, detox teas, photography, automotive, and luxury goods. By the way, luxury goods provide a ton of inspiration! High end designers are all focused on differentiating in a very competitive market and trying to give off an air of luxe.

How many times have you thrown away vendor swag because it looked cheap? A cool brand design can take an affordable t shirt and turn it into something someone will wear under a blazer to a meeting. A cool shirt gets a "where did you get that shirt from?" by strangers in an airport or train station. Now the affordable t-shirt is coveted simply because of a cool design representing your brand.

Illustration marketplaces are another great resource. I love cool illustrations like those found on the covers of The Economist. They're professional. They're creative. You have to turn your brain on a little bit to get the overall concept. I follow a fair amount of political cartoonists as well and I always appreciate the clever ways in which they deliver their message.

Sometimes I find the artwork before I have the idea.

Take the above image for example. I was simultaneously working on an SAP-focused campaign for Lenovo HX and found this illustration on one of the many websites I frequent. Immediately an idea was born. I changed the colors to use Nutanix blue and green and dropped in some of the historic Lenovo red, but other than that I had a cool-enough image and now just had to build a cool campaign and presentation around it.

Protip: Get some basic Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign skills.

Hey what's that SAP thing again?

You mean, the Lighthouse Program?

Yeah, that. Sounds cool man. Can we schedule a call so I can learn more and how to position it?

I've had more than one conversation like that alone in the last 24 hours. Why? I don't know - it looks kind of interesting and the content behind it was also solid. Again, you can't brand crap product and expect it to work. But assuming you already know your business well enough to build a solid product or campaign, then brand is how you get your product or idea or campaign more readily adopted by the masses.

"Word on the Street" a/k/a WOTS, an internal video series to share knowledge across sales teams. Another example of a non-corporate brand penetrating the workforce.

Are you 🎣 in that 💰 or are you ⛵️?

Assuming you aren't sailing through life and you're reeling in that $ then you want your brand to be a beacon that people gravitate towards. Brand doesn't need to be an image or a design for a cool campaign. Brand could be a combination of emojis or a hashtag or anything else. Brand is something that people see, react to [positively], and want to participate in or be associated with.

If you work in a large company and are trying to get your team's voice heard then building a brand can help. Make it cool to interact with your team. Make it so people want to share the fact that they are interacting with your team with the greater community.

"Wow, Felipe has one of those cool Project Uni wrist bands. Seems cool. How can I interact with the Project Uni engineering team?? hmmmmmmm."

If you interact with a channel of resellers or distributors brand can help you cut through the noise. I've seen colleagues such as Andrew Mills or Jim LeVan create cool brands that people get behind. Is their "product" better than the rest? Maybe maybe not. Do people want to work with their teams because the brand is cool? Absolutely.

The company I work for (Nutanix) is a great place full of creative people. It's also grown a ton since the ~60 person company I joined way back in the Maybach of 5 years ago. Imagine working at a company of 5000 employees. 150000 employees. How do you get your message through the sea of mindless chatter? Make sure your product is awesome and then build a brand to make sure people want to get down with your product. For me, brand creates the waves people want to ride. 🌊 🌊 🌊 

That's next level. Ante 👆.