Consume before you create
The popular advice for building a personal brand has always been ‘create before you consume’. Makes sense — a lot of people building personal brands are corporate escapees or marketing professionals (including me) chasing the autonomy and voice they didn’t have in their last job. Creating first is the payoff; it’s how you paint the picture and see how different interests blend together.
But that advice doesn’t immediately transfer to brand marketing. For brands, the payoff may be more on doing it the other way around: consume before you create.
Here’s why: The tastemakers building those personal brands — the ones creating, reviewing, comparing, recommending — are already doing your marketing for you, in public, mostly for free. In this era for brands, your job isn’t to create content first. It’s to notice what’s already being said.
Marketing in the Philippines taught me a different default: be first to launch, first to be noticed, first to be remembered at the check-out counter. It takes a bit of an epiphany — sometimes some flak, sometimes some courage — to consider being first to notice instead.
If you’ve dabbled in astrology even a little, you may have heard of Saturn — the discipline, restriction, and lessons learned the slow way — and Aries, the zodiac fire sign that wants to move first, launch first and win first. Put them together and you get a placement that basically describes what I just wrote: the pull to be first, and sometimes the fire that gets you first also gets you burned out. Aries wants to ignite. Saturn’s job is to put the guardrails where mastery and sustainability can co-exist in high temperatures. You don’t need your chart open to recognize this pattern. Most of us have lived a version of it at work.
Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert, Venus Arming a Warrior, possibly Johan Maurits at the Forge of Vulcan, c. 1644.
Brands with an existing superior product and strong customer service don’t need another creative brief telling the agency or social team to “move the needle”, “go viral” or “make traction.” They are at the stage where listening offers a higher pay-off than broadcasting. The people curating their own taste online — and offline — are an untapped resource. They’re not just an audience to reach and re-engage. They’re collaborators who can do the culture-reading and trend spotting for you if you let them.
Case in point: Vaseline. What started as a candid video of a Korean beauty influencer mispronouncing “Vaseline” as “Ba-se-lin” due to the absence of the native ‘v’ sound in Korean language became a celebration of cultural embrace. Vaseline leaned into it: appointing Min Day Lee as the “CEO of Baseline” and even went all the way as updating their social media logos globally. Riding the momentum, they followed up with a video crediting the original content creators behind trending Vaseline hacks.
The online consensus: whoever’s running Vaseline’s marketing deserves a raise. All because they decided to listen and pay attention to what the noise was all about. The discipline can be summed in three moves: listen → amplify → synthesize.
Whether you’re a corporate professional or a business owner curious how “tastemaking” can help your brand, I wrote about three things you can pitch tomorrow to your team in a Substack piece here.
If this got you thinking where to start noticing inside your own brand — chart included, if you’re curious — that’s a conversation I love having.
Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert, Venus Arming a Warrior, possibly Johan Maurits at the Forge of Vulcan, c. 1644. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
