How to Build a Truly Timeless Brand in 2025

How does a brand get worldwide recognition before the internet even exists? Cokes existed longer than anyone on earth has been alive. And apparently the guy who created it did use it to kick a morphine habit that he picked up after an injury in the civil war. So that explains at least half of the name, but it doesn't explain how a product can go from a drink created for his own personal needs to the most recognized brand in the world for over 138 years. Probably seen a million videos, read a million articles on ways to build a brand, ways to market your product. And typically, they're all going to tell you that it's all online. Everything has to be done online. But AI is coming for all of us. It's making it easier than ever to create anything. And this content flooding the feed is going to erode the trust of anything that's done in the digital space. The thing that I think will really unlock how you think about long-term brand building and long-term marketing strategies is to look to the past, look to the survivors, and bring as much as you can from everything they've spent, everything they've learned forward into the future. So, I've gone deep down the Coca-Cola rabbit hole and I'm pulling forward four really timeless marketing and branding lessons that I think everyone should know. They took Coca-Cola from a stall on the side of the road to the most recognizable brand on the planet. And they could just help you become the most recognized brand in your market, too. You couldn't just spool up 500 variations of an ad. When John started coke, calling him John, firstname basis, I did about 20 minutes of research on this, but Dr. John Peton, he looked for the highest visibility, cheapest marketing possible in the early days when he was pushing this liquid drug delivery device on the masses. We're talking logos painted on side of barns, general stores, anywhere people were traveling. And it was cheap and it was high visibility. You could find someone to paint a sign pretty easily. And back then, I'm sure the logo had a bit more variation in it from sign to sign. They didn't have printers back then. He wouldn't have had a lot of budget at the start and he was looking for places where he could get the most visibility for the lowest cost. In most cases, these days for businesses, that's going to be online ads. But not always. I think some businesses could really benefit from going back to the basics, walking around their neighborhood with flyers, letter box drops, sticking them up on walls, or even just going out into a crowd and handing out flyers. Because if everyone's marketing the same things online in the same way, those things lose efficiency really fast and a physical piece of paper can stand out a lot more. And everyone seems to forget that there are ways of communicating that don't involve online and digital. But that's not alone going to build an empire. Do you know that Coca-Cola's success predates people even having fridges in their house? So he had to go where the customers were. So he was giving away free drink coupons. He was using branded trays and glasses. You've probably seen these glasses if you've seen those Macka's limited run glasses similar to that. Basically, he was giving those out at soda fountains. And for anyone young in the audience, I mean, even I had to look this up. Soda fountains are where you used to go to drink soda. Like I said, you didn't have a fridge in your house. So, he was able to insert himself into a place where people were already buying and putting his brand in front of people, building himself into the community. This is a bit like today, inserting yourself or your brand into communities where people are already learning or communicating with peers. It might be a worksheet people use that has your logo on it. It could be a school community with your name figurehead at the top, but basically you're going to be inserting your brand and your relevance wherever the community already leads while they're already consuming. If you're trying to sell a product, this message is as timeless as it's ever going to be. The easiest sale that Coca-Cola could ever make was when someone was already thirsty or they were already somewhere where they're buying things. And just by showing up and being a brand that's seen or associated with those spaces, you're going to increase the leverage on your efforts 10fold. If you can create the tools or a sharable experience from your product online or offline, you need to do it and really focus on it. It's kind of like if you've ever been to a bar and you've been served a beer of a certain brand in a cup that was the another brand of another beer. This is that effect in play. And in a digital space, it's kind of like if you've ever seen a video shared, it has the Tik Tok logo. You want to be part of the delivery of the education or the entertainment. So when people are getting value, be that being entertained or be that being educated, you're part of the sharing somehow you're this like Spotify wrapped is another example of this that's sharing personal profile out. Make your product viral in that nature. Especially if you can figure out how to get people to share that sort of stuff online and physically show things to people is going to have a huge network effect on growing the business where you don't have to do the promotion. So you want to be thinking about is there a delivery device in a digital space or a vessel that you can use as a marketing opportunity. Once Coca-Cola had grown enough to be able to afford it, they started covering their delivery trucks in the branding. And this was moving billboards and they were painting the town literally like gas stations, restaurants red in coke branded colors and owning the color red to keep the product top of mind where the people bought which is kind of like having your product or your brand available to a network as a preview with another business offering like a subscription discount for members of XYZ community. We noticed this when we took preede investment from Antlar. They had a perks platform and heaps of software subscriptions were there knowing that startups are going to want these software subscriptions. They were all in this platform giving away discounts, giving away volume. This is like AWS $20,000 credits and stuff to try and lock you in at the right time. And you're being in their face right when they consume. I also noticed this with Lenny's podcast. He started bundling in with his premier subscription. The types of products that people who are readers of his newsletter are likely to want to use. You know, the audiences match and it can be a really easy lift to get more customers that way because you know that they're your market. You know the audience, you know the pain points and they match between the two things. And this is bundling, which I think you'll see more and more in the rise of AI is like tools bundled with other tools. Did you know that Coca-Cola was the first commercial sponsor of the Olympics ever? And there was never one single ad that was like you have to buy Coca-Cola. They were just kind of there. And don't even get me started about how inappropriate it was that athletes who probably couldn't touch a gram of sugar over their associated macros, were all standing right next to signs of Coca-Cola, a very high sugar drink. But what they were doing was hijacking the themes of the Olympics like greatness, excellence, best in the world and having their brand applied to it. So when you thought of Coca-Cola, you thought of the athletes, you thought of triumph, you thought of victory. All of those things tied this brand association together. So that Coca-Cola didn't have to have a company mission statement that said we are for greatness. It was just implied by the association of the two things being close together. They were one of the earliest brands to adopt the strategy of brand activations, being at parades, being at baseball games, being at county fairs, getting really indepth, pervasive into the community, into the local community where they didn't have to say you go buy Coke because it was just associated with all of these community events and going out and doing stuff was associated with drinking a Coca-Cola. We're considering trying to do something like this at the moment. And this made the brand feel like it belonged in the community a long time before digital communities ever existed like Slack, school, Discord, Facebook groups, Vimeo, OTT, Circle, Kajjabi, like there's a million of them. They wanted to be there. They wanted to be present and they wanted to be noticeable while staying out of the way and never actually directly asking for a sale. We're considering doing something like this at the moment with Clipflow because all of the biggest contentdriven business owners talk about all the time how you need to be making more content. So this is like Alex Hoszi, Gary Vee, Daniel Priestley, Cody Sanchez, Dan Martell, they all preach making so much content to grow your business. So we were thinking of starting something like the 300 club which users of the system and anyone in the content space could sort of align to which is publishing 300 pieces of content a week because it's one of the benchmarks that a lot of these people talk about trying to achieve if you want to grow your business. And if we do this, it will be an opportunity to attach ourselves to their thinkings and attach the product that we're developing to those thinkings as well. Because it's 100% true that we are inspired by and build the product because of that research because we know that businesses are going to catch up and we're going to try and do this stuff. And so we just have the tool that can help them do that. And we get to associate with every piece of content they put out. We get the association of anyone who goes ClickFlow is about this thing. These people are about this thing. Those things are all tangentially linked and we get a little bit of a halo effect from that. We get their words for free. We get their marketing dollars for free without having to say these people are directly affiliated. We're affiliated with the ideas that they preach. All right. So, just to recap, it's cheap marketing. So, doing whatever you can and thinking outside the box. Don't just think about buying digital ads. The cheapest possible ways of marketing with the highest exposure. And a lot of the time this is going to be offline, not online. Depending on what your business is, there are a million and one opportunities to do offline marketing first and online marketing second. However, met ads can be pretty cheap at the start. If you just want to test things, it's a good way of doing that. It's a good fast way of getting feedback cycles. But don't just get locked into thinking that online advertising is the only way to market your product. Then there's being where they buy. So figure out where your ideal customer is already buying things and try and attach your product and your brand to those areas. Not for a hard cell. This is like chocolates at the aisle while you check out. You just want people to be able to see you, see your logo, see whatever it is right near where they're already in purchasing intent for another thing which is around the same pain point. Then there's going for the throat, which is finding vessels, finding a way of attaching your brand or your logo to a thing that is delivered from person to person. So, like I said, worksheets, things that are shared from your software, or if you're doing something like coaching, giving people resources. Say for example, their progress with a brand attached to it. So, when they share it to their friend and say, "Hey, look how I'm doing. These are my results from the last month. It's been going really well. It's got your logo with it. Those things get shared around. That's a really powerful way to lower your cost because other people can do the marketing for you." And then there's hijacking the awareness and the trust. Find brands or things that happen that convey the same values that you do and find a way to attach yourselves to save yourself on having to say exact words that you want people to think when they think of your brand. Instead, they assume those things just by the association. All right. And that's the TLDDR of the the big swings, the big things that made an impact from Coke in the early days to Coke. Now, Coca-Cola has some other really interesting lessons about branding and testing. And if you want to get one of those videos, I'm sure one of them will pop up here if I've made it yet. If I haven't, hit subscribe and hopefully the algorithm shows the video to you and you have an opportunity to click it and learn from it because I think there's so much we can learn from the masters of the past that can build a lot of longevity and scalability into your product that the latest tips and tricks won't necessarily consider from a broad b from a much larger business sense. Space.