Your brand should be bigger than your billboard

Your brand should be bigger than your billboard commercial.

That idea came to me as a kind of shorthand for something I kept observing: companies investing heavily in how they appear while neglecting what they actually are. A billboard is a promise. The brand is whether you keep it. When the promise and the reality diverge, customers notice—not always immediately, but eventually, and with a clarity that no subsequent advertising can fully repair.

The brands that endure are not the ones with the largest advertising budgets. They are the ones where the experience of the product, the behavior of the people, and the values of the organization all point in the same direction. Apple in its heyday was not loved because of its commercials, though the commercials were good. It was loved because the products worked beautifully and the company behaved with a consistency that made the advertising feel like a fair description of something real. The brand lived in the design decisions, the packaging, the Genius Bar interaction, the software update that actually improved things. The billboard was downstream of all of that.

In software, this plays out at every scale. A startup’s brand is shaped more by how it handles a difficult support request than by any product hunt launch. An engineering team’s reputation within the company is built on whether their systems are reliable, their estimates accurate, and their code readable by people who join later. A consultancy’s brand in a market is built through the quality of the work delivered and the honesty of the advice given, not through the credentials listed on the proposal.

The billboard—the pitch, the marketing, the conference talk, the LinkedIn post—can amplify a brand. It cannot substitute for one. Organizations that confuse the two end up with impressive outward surfaces and disappointing interiors, and the gap between those two things is exactly what their most perceptive customers remember.

Building something whose brand can genuinely outgrow its marketing is harder work than running a campaign. It requires treating quality and integrity as strategic imperatives rather than aspirational values—things that actually constrain decisions rather than decorate the about page. But it is the kind of work that compounds. Reputation built on substance is remarkably durable.