“If you do not build a brand, you will become a commodity.”
Gary Vaynerchuk said that during our conversation on The $100M Entrepreneur Podcast, and I think it sums up why brand building has become so important for entrepreneurs.
We’re entering an era where creating content is easier, competitors can appear faster, and artificial intelligence is changing how customers discover products, services, and businesses. When almost anyone can create professional-looking content and compete for attention, simply having a good product is no longer enough.
That’s why I don’t see brand building as just another marketing activity. Done properly, it creates recognition, trust, reputation, and ultimately preference. It gives customers a reason to ask for your company instead of simply comparing everyone in your category.
Gary and I covered a lot during our conversation, including resilience, content creation, AI, pricing, privacy, authenticity, and the weaknesses entrepreneurs have to confront as they grow. But when I looked back at the discussion, seven brand building lessons stood out.
1. Brand Building Stops You From Becoming a Commodity
Let’s start with Gary’s warning. If you don’t build a brand, eventually you risk becoming a commodity, and commodities usually end up competing on price.
Think about how customers buy. If someone needs an accountant but doesn’t know one, they search for accountants and compare their options. The same happens with plumbers, lawyers, software companies, business coaches, and almost every other category. Customers look at price, reviews, features, availability, convenience, and anything else that helps them decide. Effective brand building changes that conversation.
Instead of asking, “Which company should I choose?” you want the customer thinking, “I want that company.” That distinction is important because brand building isn’t just about getting people to recognize your logo or remember your name. Awareness is useful, but preference is far more valuable.
You want customers to understand what you stand for, know why you’re different, trust what you deliver, and have a reason to choose you before they start comparing prices. If there is no meaningful difference between you and everyone else, price becomes an easy way for the customer to decide. Brand building creates reasons to choose you that have nothing to do with being the cheapest.
2. Resilience Is Part of Brand Building
One thing Gary and I agree on is that you don’t survive very long as an entrepreneur without resilience. Business has never been predictable. Markets change, customers change, competitors appear, technology develops, and strategies that once produced great results eventually stop working.
AI is simply the latest major shift. The problem comes when a company becomes too dependent on one way of generating customers. I’ve watched businesses discover a marketing channel that works, pour everything into it, and gradually build the entire company around that channel. Then the algorithm changes, advertising becomes more expensive, organic reach falls, or customer attention moves somewhere else.
Suddenly, the business has a problem. That’s another reason brand building matters. Your brand needs to become bigger than the platform you use to distribute it. Google might be important today. LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, or another platform might matter tomorrow. Use those platforms, but don’t confuse access to an audience with owning the relationship.
Good brand building gives you something more durable. Platforms can change, but your reputation, expertise, positioning, customer relationships, and the trust you’ve built can move with you. The channel may change. The brand shouldn’t disappear with it.
3. Content Should Become Part of Your Brand Building System
Gary has been one of the loudest advocates for creating content at scale, and during our conversation he talked about businesses publishing 20 to 30 pieces of content across social media every day.
I know what most business owners think when they hear a number like that: “When exactly am I supposed to do that?” The answer is that you shouldn’t be doing all of it yourself.
You wouldn’t expect the owner of a growing company to personally write every contract, issue every invoice, answer every email, and perform every administrative task. Yet when we talk about brand building through content, entrepreneurs often assume they need to record, write, edit, design, publish, and distribute everything themselves. That isn’t a content strategy. It’s another job for the owner.
Systemize Content Instead
The better approach is to treat content as a brand building system. One conversation can become a podcast episode, several short videos, an article, an email, social posts, quotes, carousels, and answers to frequently asked questions. The entrepreneur provides the expertise, experience, and point of view. The system turns those ideas into distribution.
That’s how you increase output without making the owner responsible for every individual piece of content. It also addresses another objection I hear from entrepreneurs: “I don’t want to become an influencer.” You don’t have to.
Brand building doesn’t require showing people your house, family, vacations, meals, or every detail of your personal life. You can build your public presence around expertise. Teach something useful. Answer questions. Explain mistakes. Share lessons and show people how you think. Gary talked about being a very private public person, and I think that’s an important idea for business owners. You can have privacy and still build a recognizable brand.
4. AI Is Changing the Rules of Brand Building
This was one of the most interesting parts of my conversation with Gary because we’re already seeing a shift in the way customers search.
For years, digital marketing revolved heavily around search engines. Someone needed something, searched Google, received a list of results, visited several websites, and decided which business deserved their money. AI introduces a different customer journey.
Instead of researching ten websites, someone can ask an AI platform which product to buy, which business to use, or who they should hire. The technology can increasingly help narrow down the options before the customer ever visits your website. That creates a new challenge for brand building.
The Goal Is to Become the Brand Customers Ask For
There is a big difference between someone asking, “Who is a good business coach?” and someone asking, “Tell me about Brad Sugars.”
In the first scenario, I’m competing with the category. In the second, brand building has already done part of the work because the customer knows who they’re looking for. That’s why I don’t think AI makes brands less relevant. I think the opposite is true.
AI will make many things easier to produce. Businesses will create polished content faster, conduct research more efficiently, and develop marketing materials at a fraction of the time and cost. As those capabilities become available to everyone, simply looking professional becomes less of a competitive advantage.
Trust, reputation, authority, recognition, experience, and a distinctive point of view become more valuable because they’re harder to manufacture. For me, that changes one of the questions businesses should be asking about brand building. It isn’t only, “Can customers find us?” Increasingly, the question becomes, “Do customers know enough about us to ask for us?”
5. Brand Building Can Change the Pricing Conversation
Gary’s approach to pricing is characteristically direct. His point during our conversation was that entrepreneurs should continue testing what the market is willing to pay instead of assuming their current price must be correct.
Too many owners price from fear. They’re worried customers will say no or that a competitor is cheaper, so they reduce their price before the market has given them enough information. Then the consequences begin.
Lower prices mean you need more customers to generate the same revenue. More customers usually mean more work, more people, more complexity, and more pressure on the business. A pricing decision that felt safe can quickly become a profitability problem.
One rejection doesn’t necessarily mean your price is wrong. Perhaps the price really is too high, but perhaps the offer isn’t strong enough. Maybe the sales process isn’t communicating the value properly, you’re targeting the wrong customer, or your brand hasn’t established enough trust yet.
That’s where pricing and brand building start to overlap. Customers don’t evaluate price in isolation. They compare the price with the value they believe they’re going to receive. Reputation, positioning, proof, experience, and trust all influence that perception.
Strong brand building doesn’t mean you can charge whatever you want. The market still gets a vote. What it does mean is that customers have more to consider than simply asking which company is cheapest.
6. Authenticity Makes Brand Building More Sustainable
There’s a version of personal brand building that turns a lot of legitimate entrepreneurs off. You’ve probably seen it. The rented Lamborghini, private jet photo, giant house, luxury watch, and carefully manufactured lifestyle designed to prove someone has “made it.”
You don’t need any of that to build a brand. One of Gary’s points was that you can create a successful public presence without turning your life into that kind of content. I agree because sustainable brand building usually starts with what you genuinely know.
If you understand business, teach business. If you’re great at leadership, talk about leadership. If you’ve spent 20 years in construction, explain what those 20 years taught you. If you’ve built companies, share the lessons. If you’ve made expensive mistakes, help someone else avoid them. Your experience already gives you something worthwhile to talk about.
Authenticity Doesn’t Mean Sharing Everything
There is also a difference between being authentic and making your entire life public. You can keep parts of your life private while still allowing people to understand who you are, what you believe about business, and what expertise you bring to the table. That’s actually an important part of sustainable brand building. If your strategy requires you to constantly pretend to be someone you’re not, eventually creating content becomes exhausting.
Your expertise can be public. Your ideas can be public. Your values and business lessons can be public. Your family, home, relationships, and every personal moment don’t have to become marketing assets. The goal isn’t unlimited transparency. The goal is consistency between the brand people see and the person or business behind it.
7. Brand Building Starts With Self-Awareness
One of my favorite parts of the conversation had nothing to do with AI, content, or social media. Gary talked openly about something he has struggled with as a leader: being candid enough with employees. He described it as one of his “kryptonite” areas. I appreciated that because every entrepreneur has something.
Some owners avoid confrontation. Others micromanage. Some hold onto employees for too long, while others lose patience too quickly. You might be brilliant at generating ideas but terrible at following through, or excellent at execution but rarely make enough time to think strategically.
Whatever the weakness is, eventually it tends to appear somewhere in the company. You see it in the culture, team, numbers, customer experience, or quality of decisions being made. And yes, it can affect brand building too.
Your external brand is ultimately connected to what happens internally. If the customer experience is poor, leadership is inconsistent, or the culture doesn’t reflect what your marketing promises, the market eventually notices. That’s why self-awareness matters.
You need people around you who are willing to tell you what you can’t see yourself. That might be a coach, mentor, leadership team, advisor, customer, or peer who knows you well enough to challenge your thinking. The business can only grow so far if the owner refuses to grow with it.
What Does Brand Building Mean in the AI Era?
When I look back at the entire conversation with Gary, the biggest takeaway is that brand building has become much bigger than logos, colors, social media posts, and advertising campaigns.
Your brand is what the market knows you for. It’s the reputation you’ve earned, the expertise you demonstrate, the expectations customers have when they deal with you, and the reason someone remembers your name when they need what you sell.
Increasingly, brand building may also influence whether someone asks an AI platform about your company specifically instead of simply requesting a list of businesses in your category.
That doesn’t mean you need to chase every new platform or rebuild your marketing strategy whenever another technology appears. It means you need to create something underneath those channels that customers recognize and trust.
How I Would Approach Brand Building Today
If I were starting that process today, I’d begin by getting clear about what I want the company to be known for and who I want it to serve. That’s where brand building starts.
What problem do you solve? What do you understand better than most? What do customers already value about you? What should someone immediately associate with your name or company?
Once you know that, identify the ideas and expertise you can consistently teach. Create content around those ideas, then build a system that allows that content to be repurposed and distributed without depending entirely on the owner.
You don’t need to begin with 30 pieces of content every day. Start with something you can execute consistently and build from there. Then listen to the market.
What questions keep coming up? Why do customers choose you? What do they tell other people about you? Which ideas resonate? Where are you being misunderstood? This is something businesses often forget about brand building: you don’t control the entire brand. You influence it. The market completes it.
Over time, your brand becomes what customers have learned to expect and what they tell other people about you when you’re not in the room.
Why Brand Building Is a Long-Term Business Asset
Marketing campaigns come and go. Advertising stops producing results when you stop paying for it. Platforms rise and fall. Algorithms change without asking your permission. A brand can compound.
Every useful piece of content can add familiarity. Every good customer experience can add trust. Every result can add proof. Every recommendation can strengthen reputation. Over time, brand building creates an asset that makes future marketing, selling, recruiting, partnerships, and customer retention easier.
That’s why I don’t think entrepreneurs should treat brand building as a campaign with a start and finish date. It’s something you’re doing every day, whether you’re intentional about it or not. Every customer interaction contributes to your brand. So does every piece of content, every sales conversation, every review, every employee interaction, and every promise your company either keeps or breaks. The question isn’t whether you’re building a brand. The question is what kind of brand you’re building.
Brand Building Doesn’t Replace a Good Business
There’s one more point I want to make because it’s easy to misunderstand this conversation. Brand building cannot rescue a bad product. You can have excellent content and a huge audience, but if customers consistently receive a poor experience, eventually the reputation catches up with you. The strongest brands align what they say with what they actually deliver. Marketing creates the expectation. Operations have to fulfill it.
If you promise great service, build systems that deliver great service. If your brand is based on expertise, continue developing that expertise. If you claim to care about customers, make sure the customer experiences that care when something goes wrong. That’s how brand building becomes more than promotion. It becomes part of how the company operates.
Build the Brand Before You Become the Commodity
I keep coming back to Gary’s statement: “If you do not build a brand, you will become a commodity.”
Business owners need to take that seriously. As technology lowers the barrier to creating content, launching products, and competing for attention, genuine differentiation becomes more valuable. AI will continue improving. Platforms will change. New competitors will appear. Customer behavior will evolve. That’s business. Brand building gives you something that can survive those changes.
So don’t build a company that can only compete on price. Don’t become completely dependent on one algorithm or marketing channel. Create useful content, develop your expertise, deliver what you promise, build customer trust, and give people a reason to remember your name. You don’t need everyone in the market to know you. You need the right people to know what you stand for, why you’re different, and why they should choose you. That’s the real goal of brand building.
There was a lot more to my conversation with Gary than I could fit into this article. We talked about entrepreneurship, resilience, content creation, AI, pricing, privacy, self-awareness, brand building, and how the rules of marketing are changing.
If these ideas got you thinking about your own company, listen to the full conversation because Gary shares plenty more that I haven’t covered here.
Hear the complete episode of The $100M Entrepreneur Podcast for my full conversation with Gary Vaynerchuk and more of what we believe entrepreneurs need to be thinking about as business, marketing, and technology continue to change.
Frequently Asked Questions About Brand Building
What Is Brand Building?
Brand building is the ongoing process of creating recognition, trust, reputation, and preference around a company or individual. It includes your positioning, content, customer experience, expertise, messaging, reputation, and the expectations people associate with your name.
Why Is Brand Building Important for Entrepreneurs?
Brand building helps entrepreneurs differentiate their companies from competitors offering similar products or services. When customers understand why you’re different and trust what you deliver, they’re less likely to make their decision entirely around price or convenience.
Why Is Brand Building More Important in the AI Era?
AI is changing how customers research products, services, and companies. As AI makes it easier to create content and compare options, recognizable brands with established expertise, reputation, and customer trust may become increasingly important to the buying decision.
How Does Content Support Brand Building?
Content allows you to demonstrate expertise, answer customer questions, communicate your ideas, and remain visible to the market. Consistent useful content gives people more opportunities to discover, understand, and remember your brand.
Do I Need a Personal Brand for Brand Building?
No. A company can develop a strong brand without making the founder a public personality. However, entrepreneurs who are comfortable sharing their expertise can use their perspective and experience to strengthen the company’s brand building efforts.
Can I Do Brand Building Without Sharing My Personal Life?
Absolutely. Your content can focus on expertise, education, customer problems, business lessons, industry insights, and your professional point of view. Visibility does not require giving the public access to every part of your personal life.
Can Brand Building Help Me Charge More?
Brand building can strengthen perceived value, trust, reputation, and customer preference, which may give a company greater pricing flexibility. But the business still needs to deliver enough value to justify what it charges.
How Long Does Brand Building Take?
There isn’t a single timeline because brand building happens through repeated experiences over time. Consistent content, strong delivery, customer results, recommendations, and clear positioning gradually build recognition and trust.
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