Branducation with Bill Harper

Can your brand grow before it looks the part?

Branducation explores real-world branding challenges and the entrepreneurs behind them. In this episode, I sit down with Will Nitze, founder of IQBAR, a functional food company that scaled into major retail before seriously investing in branding.

Will shares how he negotiated time to build his business while still employed, turned a kitchen prototype into a CPG product, and leaned on exec...

You don’t need more leads—you need better words.

Most entrepreneurs think their pipeline problem is a volume issue. But more often than not, it’s a messaging problem.

You’re chasing new leads when the real gold lies in how you speak to the ones you already have.

In this episode, I sat in on a live coaching session with Justice Anderson, who focuses on sales strategies for service companies. We worked through how just a few tweaks to h...

Most businesses get branding completely wrong.

They focus on logos, colors, fonts, and all the other visible elements that form the wrapper of a brand.

But that’s only a small part of what branding truly is. 

In this episode, Atul Minocha, author, teacher, and fractional CMO with Chief Outsiders, explains why most businesses fail to grasp what branding really means—and how they can fix it. With decades of experience, Atul helps compan...

Most businesses are stuck in the ‘ER’ game—bigger, faster, newer, cheaper… 

But here’s the harsh truth: this approach is killing your business.

Too many brands focus on features, trying to outdo their competition by improving their product. But when you compete on product alone, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Customers don’t remember features—they remember stories. And when your brand is just like everyone else’s, it becomes...

Don’t trust your gut!

Many business leaders confuse gut instinct with strategic insight, resulting in missed opportunities and stagnation… To put it plainly, they fail to move the needle because they don't truly understand their target audience. Sound familiar?

You're not alone. Julia Kinner, founder of the specialized marketing and strategy consulting firm JK & Associates, has worked with ...

How do you market a sex education brand? 

Branducation focuses on interesting brand challenges and the brand leaders who face them. In this episode, we go behind one of the most complex and culturally loaded branding missions out there: MakeLoveNotPorn. This video platform showcases real-world, unscripted sex to challenge the performative myths of mainstream porn.

Abigail Mlinar, Head of Sales at MakeL...

It's not the market, it's not the economy, it's not your competitors, it's you. 

If you're running a business making between $3 million and $15 million a year and you've hit a wall, here's the brutal truth: you're not telling the right story. If you don't fix this now, you'll stay stuck while others fly by.

But there's good news. Once you've learned how t...

85% of consumers say color is a major factor in their buying decisions.

Leading brands like McDonald’s, Spotify, and Google are well aware of this. They use carefully curated color palettes to spark emotion and build trust. But here's a catch: picking colors at random can actually wind up hurting your brand, especially if they clash, because they wind up sending the wrong message to your target audience. 

So here's how you ca...

How did Dollar Shave Club become one of the most successful brands in a commoditized market?

Michael Stutts, the new Chief Brand Officer at Dollar Shave Club, has the answer. The former banker turned branding expert reveals how humor and irreverence helped Dollar Shave Club disrupt the razor industry and stand out from the competition. Despite facing growing pains after corporate shifts and ownership changes, the brand continues to ...

You need to fix your broken brand messaging before it’s too late.

In the first two parts of this three-part series, you learned about the commodity trap and the brain science behind attention. Now it’s time to put that knowledge into action—because real brand differentiation isn't a mystery. It's not a million-dollar rebrand, a clever tagline, or a fancy photo shoot. It's a series of strategic decision...

Why is everyone ignoring your brand?

It’s not just a branding or copywriting problem—it’s a brain problem. If you don’t understand how the human brain processes information, your marketing, no matter how polished, will keep getting filtered out.

That’s why today, in Part 2 of my complete roadmap for building real brand differentiation, I’m diving into the brain science of attention and why differentiat...

Your biggest threat isn’t your competition. It’s being ignored.

The most dangerous thing that can happen to your brand is falling into the commodity trap. This happens when your brand becomes indistinguishable from everyone else in the space. You're not hated—you’re just not meaningfully different. And when that happens, the market starts doing the one thing that kills your momentum: comparing you by price. To put it plainly, if...

What does it really mean when people say “sell the sizzle, not the steak”?

It’s actually pretty simple. Just look at Steve Jobs' revolutionary iPod messaging—remember “1000 songs in your pocket”? That one line makes it crystal clear. Great marketing doesn’t brag about specs. It solves problems. Today, we’re going to take a closer look at this messaging trick and learn how to sell the sizzle, not the steak. 

Every business has the exact same opportunity to become the next Nike of its category.

Any brand can do it—and your brand can too. But you need to understand marketing and branding, and how to use them to gain a competitive advantage in a crowded space.

That’s why today, I’m breaking down everything you need to know to start building a brand that counts—and that truly connects with its customers. Just imagine how much easier it would...

Having trouble getting customers? 

Here’s the truth most businesses don’t want to hear: Your product isn’t the problem. You are.

You are making it too difficult for people to buy from you.

Why? Because you look and sound like everyone else. Your brand doesn't stand out, your messaging misses the mark and customers have to jump through way too many hoops to actually buy from you.

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Businesses keep making the same 5 marketing mistakes—without even realizing the damage. 

Take it from me! Over the past 35 years, I've owned five advertising agencies serving more than 500 businesses, from Anheuser-Busch down to napkin notes startups, and we've generated more than $2.5 billion in net new revenue on their behalf through unique marketing campaigns. During this time, I’ve watched tens of thousands of businesses...

How much easier would it be to grow your business if you knew exactly what to say to your customers to get them excited about buying your product?

There's a reason why so many businesses fail, and it's almost always due to one key problem. They are saying the wrong things to their customers! Companies get so caught up in talking about their features, benefits, innovations, prices, and promotions that they end up losing touch...