Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The Brand Atelier Show
Most brand advice chases trends. This podcast builds brands that last.
Hosted by Shayne Mackey, a brand strategist with over 30 years working with Fortune 500 companies and legacy brands, The Brand Atelier Show cuts through the noise of viral tactics and flavor-of-the-month marketing to focus on what actually matters: strategic positioning, enduring identity, and brands built for the long game.
If you're a founder, brand strategist, or creative director tired of being told to "just post more on TikTok," this is your antidote. Every episode delivers expert-level thinking on brand architecture, messaging, visual identity, and the strategic decisions that separate brands people remember from brands people scroll past.
No hype. No shortcuts. Just decades of experience distilled into actionable strategy for building brands with staying power.
New episodes weekly.
Shayne Mackey (00:00)
Welcome back to the Brand Atelier. I'm Shayne Mackey. And today we're having a real conversation because something keeps coming up in my client work, in my DMs, and right here in this Brand Atelier community, whether it's podcast commentary or it is students that have been taking my branding course. And it's this. Most people are building inside the wrong brand architecture and they really don't even know it.
They're trying to grow a business on a structure that was never designed to hold the weight of what they want. They think they're influencers when they're actually experts, or they think they're founder led, but they're still operating like influencers. And almost no one is thinking like an enterprise brand, even when they desperately want enterprise level results. So today, I wanna walk you through the four pillars of modern brand architecture, not academically, not like a lecture.
but like a real conversation about how brands actually work. This is the clarity most founders and small business owners and mid-sized business owners and even large business owners sometimes never get. So let's dive in. I want you to think of architecture as the operating system of your brand. It answers the real questions. How does your business behave? What does it need from you? How does it grow? What breaks it?
what sustains it, and most importantly, what exactly are you scaling? Are you scaling your personality, your thinking,
your beliefs, your systems, your services, your offers? Because here's the truth. If you build inside the wrong architecture, nothing works the way it should. You're gonna chase tactics that don't fit.
You mimic strategies that don't belong to your model. You create content that attracts the wrong audience and you feel pressure that isn't yours to carry. Really solid brand architecture liberates you. Once you understand your structure, everything aligns. So let's walk through these pillars. Pillar one is the influencer brand, which is the emotional currency model. Influencer brands are built on emotional currency.
like proximity, entertainment, lifestyle, aspiration, beauty, humor. It's the feeling of looking in on someone else's life. It's a performance-driven business model, and when it works, it works beautifully. But here's the part that no one says out loud. Influencer audiences are trained to watch. They're not trained to buy. Watching is very
Passive. Buying is a very active response. And when your content conditions your audience to observe you, enjoy you, follow along, and consume your personality and your lifestyle, you're not creating the psychological environment for conversion. You're creating an environment for engagement. This is why influencer brands fall apart when they try selling transformation. Consulting, coaching, programs, services,
anything requiring commitment. It has nothing to do with the offer being weak, but it has everything to do with the architecture that can't support that type of sale. Because remember, influencer brands thrive on sponsorships, ads, collaborations, merchandise, affiliate deals, and visibility-based revenue, not deep, sustained transformation.
And this is where vanity metrics mislead people. The likes, the follows, the shares. I know, you know that I say this all the time. I know that I say this all the time. Vanity metrics don't matter. Conversion matters. ROI matters. If you have 300 followers and 200 conversions, you are a phenomenal success. If you have thousand followers and 50 conversions, something is misaligned at the structural level.
Influencer metrics measure popularity, whereas expert metrics measure trust. And trust, not visibility, is what drives sales. So here's the turning point. If your brand trains people to watch you, they will not pay you. But if your brand trains people to trust you, they will follow you anywhere. And that is the moment you stop entertaining and start transforming.
And that is the bridge into the expert brand. And pillar two, the expert brand is the intellectual authority model. So let's talk about why expert brands convert. Expert brands convert because they sell certainty. They offer clarity, diagnosis, frameworks, perspective, a step-by-step path, and the confidence of I know how to get you from where you are to where you want to be.
People follow influencers because they like them. They buy from experts because they trust them. Experts don't need massive visibility. They need a point of view, a sharpened message, a body of work, and content that teaches, not performs. This is why tiny expert brands often outperform big influencer brands, because expertise
compounds. And something beautiful happens here. When your ideas get so clear, so strong, so useful that they stop being your ideas and start becoming a system, you transition again.
There's a moment every expert reaches when the work becomes bigger than the person. Your framework becomes a methodology. Your methodology becomes an ecosystem. Your thinking becomes a world, a vision, a philosophy you want to bring it to life. And that's the moment you step into the founder-led brand. So the founder-led brand is the conviction model. Founder-led brands grow because of conviction.
not personality. At this level, this is not my story, my healing, my journey. That's influencer territory. Founder led brands are built on a philosophy, a worldview that shapes design, product, culture, behavior, customer experience, and team dynamics. ASAP is restraint and sensory experience. Rothy's is sustainability and material innovation.
Warby Parker is accessibility and responsibility. These are not stories. These are belief systems expressed through behavior.
Where founders go wrong is making the brand about themselves instead of their conviction. A founder-led brand is not a diary, it's a system of beliefs brought to life. And when those beliefs become so stable, so clear, so transferable that other people can carry them for you, then you're ready for the fourth pillar.
A founder brand becomes an enterprise brand the moment the founder's philosophy becomes operationalized, meaning it can be taught, repeated, scaled, protected, and stewarded by people who are not the founder. That's when the brand outgrows the individual.
Enterprise brands doesn't mean big necessarily. It means structured. It means the brand has systems, standards, rituals, playbooks, templates, culture, onboarding. It has a narrative discipline. This is the architecture of endurance. Apple is Apple, whether it's Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, or the college kid working the retail floor.
Equinox is Equinox in Manhattan or in Miami. Sweetgreen is Sweetgreen whether you know the founders or not. Enterprise brands think in systems, not impulses. They build legacy, not moments. So how do you know where you actually are? You can ask yourself a few questions. Where does my value truly come from? Is it my personality, my expertise, my conviction, or my systems?
What breaks if I step away for 60 days? That will tell you absolutely everything right there.
What am I actually trying to scale? Visibility, thinking, beliefs, structure. And what future am I really building toward? Revenue, impact, legacy, a sellable company. Your architecture will always tell you the truth.
So this may be a little mind blowing because I basically said you can go from an influencer to a enterprise brand, which is true. Most people actually start at the expert level and can evolve to the enterprise level. And brands evolve, they should evolve. The natural progression often looks like influencer, expert, founder, enterprise.
It's never perfect, it's never linear, but directionally it always holds. Influencer to expert, your personality crystallizes into perspective. Expert to founder, your ideas become systems. Founder to enterprise, your systems become much bigger than you. And that's the long game. Now, some of you may wanna stay as an enterprise or as a...
expert brand or a founder led brand and that's absolutely fine. But this is how you can see that evolution happen and where you can choose how you move from one place to the next. So as you sit with this episode, I want you to ask yourself one thing. What architecture am I actually building inside? And does it match the business I want five or 10 years from now? When you see your architecture clearly, everything else finally makes sense.
Shayne Mackey (11:02)
So as you sit with this, as you think about the way your brand behaves, what it asks of you, what it offers your audience, I want you to remember this. You're allowed to build the brand that actually fits you. Not the brand Instagram told you to build, not the brand you think you should build, the brand that is true to who you are and what you're here to create. Brand architecture isn't a box, it's a map.
And when you finally see where you're going on that map, you know exactly where to go next. And next week, we're going to take this from theory to practice. We're going to zoom in on one brand that embodies its architecture so clearly you'll never look at your own the same way again. I can't wait to start pulling these brands apart with you. I'm Shane Mackey. This is the Brand Atelier Show, and let's build something that lasts.