Have you heard of Life is good? If not, you should check ’em out. It’s an amazing brand with a great story.
It’s also a brand that is constantly trying to be duplicated, emulated, copied and ripped off. It is now a very BIG company with ginormous distribution and market share. They are successful. People want to be like them. So they try and replicate it with lazy attempts of blatant “Life is good” style designs, slogans and sayings.
This drives me crazy. They have been building this brand for more than 15 years. It did not happen over night. But for some reason, people think they can piggy back off their success and become the “next Life is good.”
The thing is, there is no such thing as the “next Life is good.” Just as there is no such thing as the “next Michael Jordan” (they’ve been trying to label players with that for years…remember Harold Miner, aka “baby Jordan”?).
Life is good tapped into something powerful. Life is good is a genuine brand with a genuine story….which is what it’s imitators lack. You want a successful brand…be genuine.
But people don’t seem to want to take the longer, harder route of creating their own legacy or successful brand. I’m not a very patient person, just ask my wife. I can’t stand the wait in a restaurant, lines at the store, big crowds or the 2 minutes it takes to reheat left-overs in the microwave. This probably explains why I love escaping on a sailboat, a ski hill, the beach or the woods…peaceful and therapeutic.
However, I have learned that in order to grow Snoloha into the global brand that I have envisioned…it is going to take patience. Snoloha is still a very, very small brand. It’s not even a speck on the global brand map. Snoloha will be 3 years old in February. It’s still a toddler with a lot to learn and a long way from being fully mature.
I have to step back and remind myself of this every now and then. I have several brands that I watch very closely and would love one day for Snoloha to be in the same echelon as them. And every so often (okay, quite often) I find myself frustrated that I’m not there yet… so when I see yet another Life is good wannabe, it’s always a good reminder that this doesn’t happen overnight and I’m not trying to copy another’s success, instead working to create my own.
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