 Wow, what's up everybody once again, it's Brand Man Sean and today we are going over the branding and mystery of Pharrell Williams, but first we got to acknowledge something important. My boy Pharrell Williams has been in the game for a long time This is a very important detail. You can go all the way back to 1992 where it was said that he wrote Teddy Riley's verse on Wreck and FX's Rump Shaker And then I know I was personally bugging out when I found out that Pharrell had this very small cameo and one of my favorite SWV songs Small contributions, but these were huge songs in their era It's just a fact to show that Pharrell's been doing this for a long time 1992 people and when you look at his timeline working with Teddy Riley who was like a mentor to him And if you don't know who Teddy Riley is He's basically like the Pharrell of the New Jack era. He defined that whole era of the 1980s But you can see through the 90s where as Pharrell and Chad, you know working in the background Writing largely doing some production as well, but they're still in the background building their name and brand that way That's one era of Pharrell and then you move to 1998 where Nourie grabbed Pharrell to produce Super Thug that project And that's when you start to see that boost and Pharrell's brand and notoriety and what's important about this is once again We're talking about different eras. So once he is that 1998 mark We start to see a lot more mass awareness for him eventually in the early 2000s I mean Pharrell becomes basically a hit-making machine. That's when people start to want his voice That's when the Neptune's project start to hit and once again You're closing out another era of Pharrell's career and what's really important about that era there Is not only is it really important that the Neptune's came out with a project and they start to really visibly Show their different artistic indirection and take hold of a fan base of their own Pharrell's involvement in songs outside of that specific demographic Especially when people start wanting that little whisper soft voice that he has and that became to define a song in itself Where certain artists would be like yeah, I want you to produce my stuff But I want you to have some words whether it's the chorus or not It came time to mix the record and I was like well Who we gonna get to sing this part cuz I was just imitating it as a reference Right, and they were like no job wants to leave you and I'm like job wants to leave me on That allowed Pharrell to go from behind the scenes with production to actually being in front of the scenes and a Significant figure in popular hip-hop while also being able to serve another niche with nerd without Contradicting his own brand so back to Pharrell because of that whole awareness and Recognizing him as this different figure at the forefront of this culture next thing You know people start to be curious on his taste in style after at first people thinking he was weird at first But then eventually he turned people because that's just how the process works They start to wonder what's his opinion on style He comes up a billionaire boys club ice cream things like that and those brands were lifestyle Extensions of who he was and what he represented all throughout this time Pharrell was not really necessarily Mysterious, this is arguably his first period of him being super hot individually as a brand of course with that bus He ends up coming out with a project and even if you look throughout this time Pharrell the way he's talking in interviews is kind of different in the way he might talk during interviews now And then he starts making those memes That's how it works though Watch the facets glow But don't try to run up on the board like a matador and try to grab it though My security cuz the gas will blow and just think you will sink in that casket low And what I mean by that is simply considering the character or how people perceive Pharrell to be based on how he is and presents himself now Some of the interviews were a little bit more boisterous His rap lyrics were a little bit more in your face and more reflective of that time And it didn't seem that mystery was even something on his personal roadmap for goals and although I could go into a lot more detail We've really gotten to a point of talk about enough to really talk about what's important for Pharrell's mystery The first thing is the fact that he was not always mysterious Pharrell again has been in the game for 25 years Even if you look at one of the most mysterious characters in music of all time Prince Prince was not always Mysterious so the point number one is the fact that for a lot of people who desire mystery is that you do not have to come out The gate mysterious. Yes, you have people like the weekend. You have people like her That's cool But especially if you plan on creating a whole career you can come out and be in people's faces like crazy right now and then Five years from now become the biggest mystery of the world But how number two you have to continue producing what's key about what Pharrell has done is first He had all these errors of rebranding which is highly necessary for a continued and long thriving career But on top of that he continued to make sure he was putting out product producing and contributing to the culture So immediately after he was super hot and there was nowhere else to go He was due for a reinvention error This is really where you start to see a lot more of his involvement in the arts culture and fashion culture and all these things They're not even necessarily that he wasn't doing it before that time But from a PR standpoint you start to see more of that stuff at the forefront Then a lot of the music and other things like that and the reason that him contributing to culture constantly in some relevant way It's so important is because if you want to be mysterious You still have to make sure people care about you remember branding is all about other people's perception of you Not how you think about yourself You could think you're being mysterious by not telling me your last name But if I don't care about what your last name is and I'm not wondering about it in my head That doesn't make you mysterious So he'll continue to do more cool stuff and stay at the top of people's mind was highly relevant for him to be Mysterious whether he was planning on doing it for that purpose or not There are a lot of people who get really hot and then they just say hey I'm gonna go behind the scenes and you don't see anything or see their name attached to anything and you're not wondering about them They just seem like has-beens or just people who did their thing and now they're not in the game anymore And lastly he had to rebrand his approach even when he was doing certain things in public mystery is a combination of one making people care to lack of information and three Presentation so from the presentation standpoint you have to look at the fact that he rebranded yet again Right before he wasn't necessarily all vocal, but he had the arrow of him being high He started to get out there a little bit more boisterous and all that kind of stuff after that He kind of went back into what seemed to be his more natural state anyway of being more laid-back Answering questions a little bit more cryptically But even more so him highlighting things that he thought that matter and a lot less so a lot of those superficial things when we talk About the entertainment industry and you can kind of dig in and start to notice that transition from right after he was high So let's just say 2008 and beyond and that's when you see the cultivation and incubation of this whole mysterious persona That he has now in the public which allows him the ultimate freedom of him doing Whatever he wants to do because that's how Pharrell seems to use his mystery as opposed to exploiting it If you look at somebody like Pharrell and Prince people often look at them as these guys who you don't necessarily know everything about you Can't figure out but they're kind of going around do what they want to do And there's like small little stories associated with them that people kind of talk about them being magical Almost because they're like little fairies or pixies that are moving around just appearing and disappearing I get way deep on a lot of these things in the Prince mystery video and the whole mystery series I did that's largely why I'm not gonna get into that stuff here But my point is they use their mystery for freedom to do whatever they want to do without having to worry about a Lot of that public persona stuff getting into a lot of these interviews and just Making that superficial run that a lot of people have to do because they've attached and built their careers that way when a lot of people Who seek mystery are usually exploiting their mystery But Pharrell and princes is more long-lasting and legendary because they're not Flipping their mystery just to do something else like if you look at the weekend Not saying that he can't create long-lasting mystery But the primary way he became mysterious even her is really hard to mimic the feeling that's associated with a high level of Mystery they had when people first found out about them Especially if you want to talk about creating more and more and more product It's also incredibly difficult to do a lot of other things from a branding standpoint Whereas like I said Pharrell's type of mystery is a lot more freedom He can pretty much do whatever he want to which at the end of the day brings me back to literally the primary reason I decided to do this video on Pharrell a lot of people want to be mysterious But I just want to remind people that you do not have to come out the gate mysterious You can always rebrand It's just a little finesse to create a different vision and version of yourself But you have to have the patience over time mystery itself is not necessarily even created overnight You know what to do. 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