 What's up everybody once again it's Brand Man Sean and I got to talk about something that I feel like a lot of artists are misunderstanding and that's lifestyle branding. Because I've heard a lot of artists say I want to be a lifestyle brand. I'm creating a lifestyle. This is what I hear a lot of times but understand this. Creating a lifestyle brand is a lot more than putting your name on a bunch of different products. As a matter of fact you almost don't want to put your name on a bunch of different products if you want to create a true lifestyle brand. Brand extension and lifestyle brands are completely different. And just because you're a big artist doesn't necessarily mean you'll have a lifestyle brand because we can think of artists as big as Beyonce, Beyonce herself does not really have a lifestyle brand. She might be goals for a lot of people but she's not a lifestyle brand. So how do you really create a lifestyle brand for yourself? As a foremost you got to remember that having a lifestyle, a lifestyle creating that has a certain set of values that come with that lifestyle. There has to be standards in that lifestyle and even bigger than that there has to be some repercussions if you don't meet those standards of that lifestyle. For example think about hip hop in general right there's a certain flyness particularly back in the day that gets associated with being as a part of the culture a way of dressing and moving and acting and you can even think about like people I know from Harlem. They're always talking about being stylish, fly looking good. That's what they're known for apparently. So the standard in that situation is looking good, dressing fresh and repercussions for not meeting that standard is oftentimes going to leave you to be roasted. It might not be extreme but it is a repercussion it is a punishment for not meeting the standard and that creates culture. So for the lifestyle there has to be a sense of culture, there has to be values of things people get but there has to be a culture so people can associate and understand the law of the land if they're living that lifestyle. So let's think about a company like Starbucks. Starbucks was pretty revolutionary in America because they created that third place a place between work and home right. People go to Starbucks for meetings, they chill, they do other types of work. It's more relaxing than older commercial scale models that existed. They really introduced that on a mass level. So they have this expectation where you feel like you can just go and you don't necessarily even have to buy anything if you go there. We're not going to get deeper into the business model and how beneficial that is for money but that was a complete paradigm shift when you think about all the other restaurants you might go to and they're like, yo, if you're not buying anything, you got to get out. But even greater than that, when we talk about community, things where people can have similarities or just understandings is language. Starbucks instead of saying small, medium, large, they say tall, vainty and grande. Now how they get somebody to choose between something being tall and being big is like the weirdest scenario but that's besides the point. They created their own way of doing things in their environment. You can even relate that to Travis Scott. I'm not going to go too deep into it because I already did a video on it. I'll put in the link in the description below. But Travis Scott has a way of doing things when it comes to his concerts. He actually creates a culture, an attitude that he wants his fans to have. He not only promotes it but he also regulates. If he feels like fans are aging out, having a great time and security guards are being too rough, he comes at the security guards and they're like, yo, don't ever treat my fans like that. He rewards fans for doing certain things, giving them shirts and rings and all these types of things. But he creates an environment where they are eagerly participating and in his high participation environment, he's still rewarding people that stand out and he's punishing people who are preventing that from happening. He even called out his own homies or maybe not as homies for sure, but some people in a VIP section for like just being on their phones as opposed to participating in the show. These are small types of things you'll see that are common in lifestyle brands, right? There has to be a way of doing things in this. There's a community that gets formed as a part of that. So when we talk about building a lifestyle brand, think less in product, but think of yourself as being a living organism, a living brand ambassador for the lifestyle that you want to create. What does that world look like? Create that world, participate in that world and you are a piece of it. When you think about lifestyle branding, when it comes to a commodity like Starbucks coffee, right? It's not about necessarily how many different ways can we sell coffee from the branding standpoint. It's more about what type of people drink our coffee. We're not going to go get involved in all these other areas on the outside, but what type of people get involved in our brand in the first place. What type of people like Travis Scott? What are those people's attitudes? When we think about weed, there's so much culture around just smoking and there's been movies created out of it. Snoop Dogg has an entire brand around it. Wiz Khalifa has an entire brand around it. And there's those rules that come along with it. And inside jokes, the puff puff passes. What does the rotation look like? How do you roll up? What's a bad roll up look like? So on top of the idea of just being an ambassador for the lifestyle that you want to be a part of and promote, understand that there's these other cultures that are already existing that you probably take some part of one or the other. And as you show your participation in these different cultures, it's not necessarily about you being the lifestyle brand. You're somebody who engages in a lifestyle. The lifestyle should be separate from the artist. The artist is somebody who lives that lifestyle. So create the world. What does that world look like and involve yourself in that world? ASAP Rocky does a great job in terms of just showing that he likes to live a certain type of lifestyle. So if somebody is a fan of him from that standpoint, if I like to dress this way and I like to date model chicks and I like to move and shake beat fashion shows, that's a certain world. That's a certain lifestyle and culture to be a part of. Your merchant, those type of products are a lot more about your brand and a lot less about the lifestyle brand. So when we're talking about the lifestyle portion, think less about your personal brand and the community that you want to create and what type of people you want to hang around, be around and have follow you. And that's it for now. Of course, as always, I would love to know you guys' thoughts. If you like this video, go ahead, hit the like button. If you like it, might as well share it. And if you're not subscribed, you know what to do. Hit that subscribe.