Ensemble Brands

Ensemble Brands are built on the foundation of any good Naked Brand.

As David Perell has articulated, Naked Brands are transparent, founded by social media influencers, and prize on-going communication with their fans and customers.

The issue with these brands is that they often have a single point of failure. There are significant physical and social constraints on a single voice and face being responsible for a brand’s message. 

Also, that voice can become stale, or worse, irrelevant.

The tragic passing of Kobe Bryant exposes the risks of any enterprise built around a single personality. 

The solution is to build a stable of personalities that all work together to elevate an unified brand.

The magic of ensemble brands is that they accomplish the same sensation as popular movies and shows like Ocean’s Eleven, New Girl, and the Avengers.

Viewers start to imagine themselves as a part of the group, and their behavior follows accordingly. It’s a continuation of the framework laid out by marketing strategist Seth Godin in his bestseller Tribes.

“A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.”

The digital platforms that dominate culture and our lives are perfectly in sync with crafting a tribe from scratch. Below, we’ll outline some tactics and rules for how to best build your own.

Twitter is the Company Water Cooler

The corporate world has long defaulted to privacy and secrecy on all matters. It’s still important to maintain this for cutting edge research & development, but considerably less so for the majority of your efforts.

Iconic digital ensemble brands, like Barstool Sports, use Twitter to legislate inter-office drama, discuss pop culture, and talk about how the company is doing.

This is the CEO of a 9-figure media company. Her company’s largest shareholder is an $11.5 billion casino company.

All four lines of that tweet thread are unfathomable to 95% of executive board rooms. 

Yet, it is the transparency (warts and all) that yield unflinchingly loyal fans. Fans that trust the ensemble’s characters when they earnestly pitch a product. Fans that want to find ways to be more involved.

That involvement could mean buying more stuff, working at the company (usually below market value), and evangelizing your brand to others.

At Least 4 Distinct Personalities

A duo isn’t an ensemble brand because the relationships between multiple members become characters unto themselves.

An ensemble brand becomes more interesting as the audience begins to understand how everyone relates to one another.

Let’s use Friends as an example.

Are Ross and Rachel together? Does Monica think they were “on a break”? Can Chandler handle the awkwardness in the group now that there’s conflict??

This may seem asinine, but the minutiae of interpersonal relationships is something that we are biologically hardwired to pay attention to. 

The Kardashians have ridden this specific impulse to billions of dollars in enterprise value. Barstool Sports also leans into drama to keep the eyeballs on them.

You don’t need to go that far, but if each personality in your ensemble operates in a vacuum, you’re missing some low-hanging fruit.

Fluency in Multiple Mediums

Naked brands built around a single individual require that person to be a triple threat. They must be compelling in multiple formats.

The advantage of an ensemble is that they can form a team of specialists that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Perhaps one character hosts podcasts and relies on their wits. Maybe one character is the jokester and consistently delivers a chuckle on camera. Another is focused on aesthetics and has compelling Instagram stories.

These relationships also naturally cross-pollinate within a company or brand.

You may initially be invested in the jokester’s vlogs, but as you consume more of that personality you’re drawn deeper into the universe of the brand with cameos by other members of the ensemble

An iconic example of this is the popular viner-turned-YouTuber David Dobrik, along with his vlog squad.   

Examples of Ensemble Brands

There are a number of brands that epitomize the Ensemble Brand framework.

In NYC media, you’ve got Morning Brew and Barstool Sports.

In gaming, 100 Thieves and FaZe Clan are riding a stable of personalities into fast-growing empires.

TikTok stars get this most intuitively, with the teams of influencers banding together in Houses to cross-pollinate audiences and increase their collective relevance.

David Dobrik is the most famous person in the world to people under 22, largely on the back of his Vlog Squad ensemble.

Traditional corporate retail brands are beginning to understand the value of building an ensemble that their customers can follow. Sephora names its annual “Glam Squad” of micro-influencers to be the faces of their brand. 

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be doing some specific breakdowns of these businesses. 

Let me know which company you think fits the bill of an Ensemble Brand.