Branding is just like life: Better to live it than overthink it

I just read an interview with Miuccia Prada by Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagen. At one point in the conversation, O’Hagen notices that everything Prada is wearing is her own creation. He tells her that if he were in her shoes, he’d sometimes be desperate to get away from the brand. Her answer: “I’m never in the brand.” Her answer stuns him for a moment. “That’s not where you live?” “No, I want Prada to be successful. But the idea of the brand doesn’t interest me, and I never think about it.”

Maybe some of this applies to you. Okay, I know you’re thinking, “Easy to say if you have 500 stores in 70 countries.” But let’s save that thought for a moment and see if maybe there’s something worth examining here for those of us who have brands in the under $5 billion category.

What’s your approach to branding?  It sounds really simple to say “I never think about branding,” but if you do branding, you know that this is an unbelievably hard thing to do. It’s almost always powerful to go against the grain, but not everybody can pull it off. Prada is not denying that she has a brand. It’s more like she’s saying that her brand is the result of everything she does–her work and her life are the same thing–so she doesn’t have to think about the brand per se.

Stop worrying about your brand and start living it. With all the eyes on branding today, one of the possible messages is: focus on what’s important to you and your business, and don’t worry what other people think about it. Better to live it than overthink it. This way your brand is more the result and less the goal. It’s like the difference between being self-aware and self-conscious. When you stop worrying about how your words and your actions affect other people, you create room for you to be more true to yourself.

You have to touch something deep. It’s not like Prada doesn’t think about how to communicate and get through to people. In fact there is a clarity about her approach to branding that is dazzling. She puts off thinking about the title of a show until the final moments. “And then I try to make it more clear, so that it appeals to people who maybe know less about fashion as well as appealing to people that are fixated with it. There are different levels of understanding. You have to touch people…you have to touch something deep.”

Drive your business from your ideals. What can you hope to learn from an Italian socialist billionaire about branding? Maybe that it’s possible to drive your business from your ideals without losing sight of making money. Or maybe that people hand over their money because you are doing something that is relevant to them. Prada says, “To sell is to prove that what you are doing makes sense.” There is a more personal lesson here, too. Don’t be afraid to reach into what makes people human. This means starting with you.

Branding Is Just Like Life is a series for people who want to build brands that are human.