The Game with Alex Hormozi - The Bouquet Theory of Building a Brand From Zero | Ep 974

Episode Date: May 28, 2026

Join Alex at the 2-Day Interactive Scaling Workshop in Las Vegas: https://www.acquisition.com/o-vegas Most brands don't fail because of bad products but because they were not built on purpose. In this episode, Alex breaks down exactly what a brand is, why it makes money, and how to build a great one from scratch. He also shares the three metrics that tell owners whether their brands are working or dying. In this episode 00:00 Branding as a deliberate pairing of things 03:44 How to recover from bad pairings 05:29 Offering great products to reinforce great branding 07:35 The 3 metrics that measure brand strength 12:01 Tradeoffs can happen when you expand your audience 13:42 How Alex intentionally built his brand More Value: Download your free personalized $100M scaling roadmap in under 30 seconds: https://www.acquisition.com/roadmap?el=yt-alex-486r&htrafficsource=youtube Join The Live Scaling Workshop In Las Vegas: https://www.acquisition.com/o-vegas Discover The Easiest Business I Can Help You Start (Free Trial): https://www.skool.com/hormozi Free Books and Video Courses: https://www.acquisition.com/training Get the $100M Book Bundle: https://shop.acquisition.com/pages/100m-book-bundle Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials: ⁠⁠LinkedIn ⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠YouTube ⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Acquisition ⁠ DISCLOSURE Information shared here is for educational purposes only. Individuals and business owners should evaluate their own business strategies, and identify any potential risks. The information shared here is not a guarantee of success. Your results may vary. Copyright © 2026.

How to start or grow your own brand. So if branding is the deliberate pairing of things, your thing plus what your ideal customer has through an outcome, and good branding is the deliberate pairing of your thing with something good, to start a brand, we have to know what we want to pair it with to attract ideal customers. So here we've got Bud Light, UFC, good outcome for the majority of the audience. And we want to understand that just as much

as we should also understand what to avoid pairing our brand with to lose customers, like the Dillamoveda example. And so here's how I like to think about assembling the pairings for a brand. So if you're at ground zero, you have no brand. You've got these elements

that haven't been put together yet. So I think about it like a table full of flowers. So if you want to put a bouquet together, you start by having lots of different flowers all over the place. On their own, those flowers are not a bouquet. Just as products, values, experiences, people, et cetera, on their own are not a brand. The flowers are like the brand element that we pair with stuff our audiences like. With enough

pairing over and over and over again, they form a bouquet. Now replace the word bouquet with brand. And so that assembly is the connection, it's the association between those things. Because the brand fundamentally doesn't actually exist. If I take the flowers out of the vase and scatter of them across, was there ever a brand to begin with? It's simply the association we make between those things that creates the one-of-one brand. And if we unravel it, the brand disappears. And so the deliberate pairing of those things makes the brand. And if we want to get narrower on our brand, so let's say I talk about tacos, lifting, and philosophy, if I want to narrow my brand, I'll just talk a bunch about tacos. And then all of my flowers are just taco related.

If I'm only talking about tacos, but I want to expand the stuff I'm talking about to my audience and maybe capture a wider audience, then I might talk about tacos, casadillas, burritos, things that are tangential. And then if I want to expand even broader, I might just talk about food in general. And then I might talk in alcohol, then I might talk in restaurants, and then things that go wider and wider from there. And so we get narrower as we niche down and we go double down on one type of topic. And we go broader when we branch out. but distant and random pairings hurt a brand because they're so hard to make the associations with and this is what most brands are and do most people's brands happen by accident it's just whatever they appear next to whatever their people associate their stuff with good branding

happens on purpose because like what are we looking at with a bike a single flour some socks and a burger. Not a lot. Not a lot to hold together there. And so think about it like curating a garden. You want some flowers to grow and you want to pull out the weeds. You have to do both. You have to add the good and take away the bad in order to assemble the ideal brand for you. And in the beginning, our brand won't be strong, just like yours one. If you're building it, then you might only have a couple flowers there. And it's because you haven't had that many instances to pair your brand for that customer. But the more good stuff we pair with our brand for the customer, the stronger it gets.

You go from one flower to many red flowers or many red roses that become a bouquet of red roses. That's what you're about. And the more you're about it, the more the brand strengthens. Now, what if we make a branding mistake and pair with the wrong thing because it's going to happen? One bad pairing can absolutely hurt a brand. So if I now give this lovely red rose bouquet to my wife and I say, hey, Don't you love this bouquet? And she sees this rotten flower sticking out of the front.

She might be like, ooh, this bouquet sucks. Or this brand sucks. Or, hey, that guy got a DUI and I thought he was this paramount of good ethics. Well, that would hurt the brand. And so just like one ugly flower messes up the whole bouquet, it changes how everyone sees the brand. This bouquet sucks. Now, to recover from something like that,

you just have to overwhelm customers with the stuff they like until eventually the bad pairing shrinks into irrelevance. So we don't try and eliminate the DUI. We don't try to eliminate the dead rose. It happened. There's nothing we can do about it. But what we try to do is just overwhelm it with way more of the stuff that the majority of our people actually like.

And so Kanye, for example, has said some things that people don't like. But he also comes out with products that people love. He made a Super Bowl ad. He sold shoes. He just came out with an album that came out after having some cancel culture stuff around him and things he had said. And so over time, people forgot the bad stuff and associated the good stuff back with him and purchased. They still bought. And so you need to decide what values, people, experience, et cetera, that you want to use to connect the audience to your product.

And equally importantly, what things you want to avoid, remove, or ignore from the stuff they hate. And so it goes without saying that even if you say your premium but people think your thing sucks, that suck will stick. And so up to this point, everything I've talked about has been the things external to the product. They've been the people

you associate the product with. Almost all of that occurs prior to purchase. So you can absolutely get someone to buy the thing. But how many experiences are people going to have with the thing

once they've purchased it? Probably far more than they have with your advertisement. And so the advertisement can let people know about it. The branding makes a good association of the person. They make the purchase.

And then afterwards, the product does a lot of the branding after that. Because if I buy that amazing Nike T-shirt and there's a hole in the armpit when it comes in, I might say, if this is the first time ever bought a Nike product, this product sucks. Therefore, Nike sucks. And then I think the whole thing's a sham. And then I also start to hate LeBron for even recommending, right? Starts to transfer backwards. Now, on the flip side, brand can influence how people see the product.

So if the product is what I would call it good enough, So it doesn't have any holes in it. Now, is it the highest quality it possibly could be? Maybe not. But it's good enough that no one's going to find an immediate problem with the product. That's where brand can carry you the extra distance to still make it a positive experience for the person. And so brand in a very real way can affect how people perceive value through products. Now, me personally, it's a pro tip here.

If I'm going to charge a premium price, I absolutely want to make sure that the product is dialed. so that I only further reinforce how much they like my brand, rather than let my brand carry me or, at worst, have it conflict with the impression that I gave them of the thing they were going to buy prior to them buying it. So this is a quote from Warren. Your premium brand had better be delivering something special or it's not going to get the business.

And the only tweak I'd have on this is it's not going to keep the business. You'll get the first purchase. You just won't get the ones after that. And so all these things are like, okay, got it. So brand is pairing. I get how the pairing makes me money. I have these big margins. I got more CTRs, more people buy,

and as long as my thing doesn't suck, ideally that it's good, people keep buying. Awesome. But how do I measure that? So brand has three main metrics. One, which is influence, which is how likely it is to change someone's behavior. So if I show someone a brand

and they react in any way, they recognize it and they do something about it, then we have influence. Second is direction. Are they changing, the way we wanted. Are they running away? And third, how many people it changes for?

That's it. So if I show them 100 people and 100 people react versus two people react, the 100 person reacting, at least recognition, that is the reach. How many people it changes it for? So, take into the hypothetical extreme. A small, weak, and neutral brand, very few people recognize and the people that do don't care that much about it either way. And on the other polar extreme, you have a very few people.

a large, large, strong, positive brand. So that would be lots of people recognize the brand. It changes the behavior when they see the brand. And the behavior is generally towards. So they try do in accordance with what that brand is asking someone to do. And I want to make this point. A lot of people have this misnomer that any strong brand is polar. That because lots of people love it, lots of people also have to have it. Now I say this by percentage, not necessarily by absolute. If you have, if the whole United States knows you are, you're going to have a percentage of people that hit you just because there's crazy people. And that's not what we're talking about. I'm saying, is there a brand that can't have that kind of status that isn't polar? So I'll give a polar

example first. So I have the silhouette of Donald Trump here, and he has a very strong brand. He has a big reach. Lots of people recognize him, even just the silhouette alone people recognize. He has strong influence as in the percentage of people that when they see this have a reaction in either direction, positive or negative, but just that they react shows that he has strong influence. And then third is the direction. Now for him, he is polar, meaning many people move towards him very strongly and many people move away from him, very strong one. And so many assume that all brands are that way. And that's just because there are many examples of that, but that doesn't mean it has to be that way. And so I'll give you a different example. So some brands managed to change many people's

behavior towards them all at once. And so like Taylor Swift, sure, I'm sure she's got some crazies. Don't get me wrong. But the vast majority of people who see Taylor Swift recognize her. She changed their behavior and most of the time it's towards her. So she is a large, positive, strong brand. This is also personally why I think the idea of like seeking out controversy absolutely gets you recognized, but you don't have to make that trade. You can't absolutely just build a strong positive brand. Mother Teresa has a strong, positive brand. A lot of people know her, influenced a lot of behavior, did a lot of good stuff. Most people weren't like I hate Mother Teresa. Some people do, but most people don't. And the same thing goes with Apple. A lot of people like their products.

I'm sure there are some tech geeks that are like, Android's way better. Right. They're like PC's awesome. And that's great. That's good for them. But the vast majority of people who encounter the product like it, which is why they're one of the largest companies in the world. So all those examples that I gave to you up to this point have assumed a large audience. And I do that because this is a prostitution and it makes more sense for me to work with you on stuff that you already know. But this concept carries independent of whether you have large reach, and this is why it applies to you. So if you had a small audience with high influence, what would you have? Got mom and dad. They are high influence, as in most people when they see their parents, their behavior changes.

They have low reach because for you, they're only your parents. They might be any other people's parents, but not very many people's parents. So you have low reach. And it will be, your behavior will towards for some and a way for others. Meaning some people hate their parents and don't want to do anything they say. And some people like their parents and do whatever they say.

And there's a lot of people in between. And so that's how we measure if what we're doing to grow our brand is actually working. Are more people finding out about it? Are more people changing their behavior when they do it? And ideally, are they doing that towards the direction that we want them to go? So if I say, hey, everybody, go

click here, go download this thing, go attend this event, go buy this product, whatever it is. If a lot of people do that, then we know that the brand is growing. And so when we want to build our brand, we want to pair our stuff for the things the highest percentage of our ideal audience like. And so whenever we pair anything with a brand, because especially if you're starting out, everything is new. And so every new pairing has risk. And so you risk losing a certain percentage of your audience who has a bad experience of the thing you pair. There's always that risk. There's always going to be some people who don't like something you do. If anyone seen a small town band go hit it big, some of the old towners are like,

oh, they sold out, they did whatever. But what they did was they gambled the short term loss of that local audience, potentially for a much broader, bigger audience. So they made a bet. They did lose people. They did gain people. They just gained more than they lost. And so to the same degree, when you make that bet as the local band, you risk gaining other people who have had a positive experience with this new thing. And ideally, we have more green than red. And so those new pairings, the new pairings you make with a brand always lose audience, right? He's sold out. I like the old stuff better. This also happens with content, by the way. And so this person is the red bucket. Fantastic. And the new stuff might also cause people to say, no, this new stuff rocks. And that person

is in the green bucket. And so whenever you try to grow and you make any new pairing, meaning you make new content. You make a new genre. You make a new song. You make a new anything. You make a bet. That more people from our ideal audience will like the pairing than people who don't. TLDR that you'll net an increase in reach, influence, and positive direction. And so my ask for word here is don't let the five mean comments stop you from gaining the 500 new people who like the new thing. So let me finish the real life example to make this whole thing real for you. I want to say, myself with business value. So I associate myself with making people money and growing their

businesses. So there's me, there's me making content, and then ideally money. And so the best way I can do this is make content for the small business owners to consume and books for them to read and use so that they then profit. The good thing. And then they associate that growth and profit it with me. And so then they consume more of my stuff. They drink the next soda. They buy the next shirt. And so the next time they wanted to happen again, they take the action or they have a higher likelihood of taking the desired action. And equally important, people who don't like business stuff won't like my stuff or they'll just prefer to watch other things. So you've got this married couple, they say, we hate people who talk about money. They're probably not going to like my stuff. And that's okay.

but people who like business have a business or we're trying to start one might want more and this grows the brand because people consume the stuff and they say hey you got to check out her rosy stuff and then that person they tell it to says right on they check it out they get that positive outcome they make the pairing as well and the brand grows and ideally with my ideal audience and so to see this in action if you use this information from today to make money Good branding has occurred. And so I said I was going to cover three things. What branding is,

ideally what good rating is, why it makes you money and how to start and grow yours. So hopefully you feel like I've fulfilled those three things.