It’s not enough to be — you also have to seem.

In my notebook this absolute gem is attributed to Jaime Echegoyen, the CEO of Spanish bank Bankinter (a company for whom I worked on a couple of projects while I was at Saffron), and I’ve always loved it. There’s real wisdom there, a deep truth.

Because what people ‘get’ about you is strictly limited to how you seem to them.

And yet, while it is difficult, usually impossible, for an entity’s brand to seem too awfully different from how the entity actually is, being and seeming *are* different things, distinct concepts.

Jaime’s pithy quote suggests a simple, two-step model for brand building:

1) Actually be the way you would like to appear to people. (Socrates had this one worked out two millenia ago: “The way to gain a good reputation is endeavor to be what you desire to appear.”); then…

2) Make some additional efforts to appear the way you really are.

Is branding really, truly any more complicated than that?

The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David, 1787