Logos are worthless. Brands are priceless.

I used to think that branding meant the logo, the colors, and the tagline. We spent hours tweaking hex codes and font weights, convinced that if the design looked sharp, the clients would come.

It never really worked like that.

No matter how good your logo looks, it’s worthless if your clients aren’t moved by your brand.

We learned about Jack O’Neill, the guy who invented the wetsuit back in the 1950s, during a recent branding session for one of our portfolio agencies. He didn’t build a global brand because of a clever logo or slick ad campaign. He built it because he understood his customers on a gut level.

He and other surfers took to the waves when the conditions were right. Sometimes that meant surfing in cold water. No one likes cold water. Shockingly, his first prospective clients didn’t care about his new wetsuit.

Why then, weren’t they flocking to buy his wetsuit? Turns out, they already had a solution … oil soaked sweaters. The oil kind of kept the water out and their heat in. It worked, but can you imagine donning an oil-soaked sweater? Yuck.

Not understanding why they didn’t care about his superior product, he asked a lot of questions. He thought he’d get technical feedback, but instead he discovered that surfers dreamed about surfing when it’s summer. No surprise there.

So he tried a new angle. His new branding revolved around the tagline: “It’s always summer on the inside.”

And … bingo. Sales took off. He tapped into what surfers really wanted and they responded. That’s branding.

Branding isn’t what you sell. It’s what your clients believe about you. It’s how they describe you when you’re not in the room. It’s how they feel when your invoice hits their inbox. Your brand isn’t your deliverable, it’s the trust you build while delivering it.

Every agency owner I know wants to stand out. But differentiation isn’t about being louder, trendier, cheaper or pushing the latest shiny object. It’s about first being loyal to who you are.

The best brands create what’s called “irrational loyalty”: a deep bond where clients won’t even consider competitors because it’d almost feel like cheating on you if they did.

Here are the three questions that a brand should address:

1. What does it say about a client that they chose your agency?

2. What can they only get from you?

3. How do you make them the hero in their story?

When you can answer those, you stop selling marketing services. You start selling transformation.

At The Business of Agency, I teach agency owners how to build profitable, scalable businesses that give them more time and more freedom. Subscribe to my newsletter or visit businessofagency.com to learn how to grow your agency into a brand people can’t stop talking about.

I hope that helps.

~ Erik