Hi from NYC,
I hope you are having an incredible end to your week.
One thing will always be true: we all fall in love.
These things must be true for people to fall in love with your brand and remain loyal:
Your product actually works & isn’t annoying to use
Your brand has a vibe that’s catchy
Your brand has a personality
Your brand has standards. It says no to a lot of wrong things and yes to things that extend it and help it continue to grow and take shape.
Your marketing should be so powerful that your brand ultimately becomes one of the loves of your life.
You know what feeling in love is like. Being in love with your brand will feel just like that.
And once you do feel it, you can confidently pull customers in and keep them inside the love bubble
That’s when brands become cult favorites.
That’s when customers become retentive.
That’s when creators work.
I love building positive brand echo chambers that make your brand inescapable. Here’s exactly how B2B and B2C companies can use creators to do this.
Architecting the Echo Chamber Love Bubble
Your brand is the backbone of the echo chamber.
This is what people are going to be mimicking and distributing.
The brands people fall in love with, the ones that earn devotion, all have these true core features:
Core belief: This belief will show up everywhere because it is the root system under everything you build.
If you cannot finish this sentence clearly, your brand isn't ready: “The world is currently X. We believe it should be Y.”
Emotional trigger: This will engineer an attachment and hook people in.
A living personality: A brand with no personality won’t survive in an echo chamber; there’s nothing to echo. A brand with personality behaves consistently across: voice, aesthetic, behavior, decisions.
If your brand were a person, could someone predict how it would react?
Would it say no to a partnership that doesn’t align with its taste?
Would it hit back to backlash? Would it stay silent? Would it flirt?
Brands without personality collapse under scale because every new touchpoint dilutes them. Brands with personality compound because every new touchpoint reinforces identity.
Standards and Refusal: Taste comes from refusal.
Every brand people fall in love with has a clear perimeter, a line around what it will never be.
Many founders never draw that line because it’s hard to say no. Their brand becomes a polite, flexible organism. No one falls in love with polite.
Don’t overcomplicate this part. Here’s exactly how you can build your brand in 7 days.
After you lock in your brand (a hard requirement for the echo chamber you’re building for people to constantly stay in a love bubble with your brand), list the types of people you want to pull in.
Here’s where you should start:
ICP (inner ring): Make sure you do an end-to-end exercise where you are confident in the ICP you’re targeting.
Example: BoomPop targets roles like Head of Marketing, Chief of Staff and EAs at companies with $MM in annual revenue who are interested in throwing events.
Btw, huge congrats to the cofounders Blake + Healey – both longtime subscribers of this newsletter – on their $41M raise, announced this week.
The Surrounding Ecosystem (middle ring):
People who influence and share space with the ICP
Example: Bilt partners with Equinox because their members already fit Bilt’s psychographic profile: high earners, status-driven, and obsessed with maximizing rewards. Even if they’re not applying for a credit card at that moment, the association reinforces Bilt as a “premium lifestyle brand” inside that ecosystem.
Example: When a larger conversation about the vertical you operate in takes place, how does your brand show up?
The Cultural Outer Ring (outer halo):
These people will make your brand feel everywhere. You can get their attention even if they don't buy.
Example: Ramp stunt with the office guy that got way too much press allowed their brand to push into a larger cultural conversation.
Okay, cool. Now, let’s manually fill out the echo chamber so the decision makers in the rings are strategically being fed content:
Micro Creators:
Who: Creators will smaller audiences (under ~0-50k followers or subscribers) that make content specific to your vertical
Common mistake: Most people think that you can pick any small micro creator and this will be impactful. This is not the case unless you are doing large scale UGC – and that is NOT what i’m referring to here.
How to avoid ^ this mistake: At Knight Vision, we’re building custom creator programs for top startups with the sole core belief that you need to pick creators who have prebuilt audiences filled with your ICP (and may also tap into the surrounding ecosystem or cultural outer ring).
Macro Creators
Who: Creators with larger audiences (above 50K followers or subscribers) that make content specific to your vertical
Common mistake: I’ve seen so many brands think that partnering with a celebrity (arguably could be considered a tier of the world's largest macro creator) will drive influence. For most brands, especially B2B, this is SO wrong. Don’t waste your money here – even if there’s a spike it won’t be retentive users.
Exception: Long-term partnerships (multi-year, exclusive, like how Alo works with the Kardashians).
How to know who’s worth it: Do your research and check to see what their engagement is. You need to have a trained eye (it has taken me 4+ years of reviewing creator accounts) to know what to look for. Start with the basics:
Reach, avg views, likes, comments, shares
Ask for metrics from previous partnerships
Media kit
Natural brand advocates, partners, customers
Who: Anyone already inside your ecosystem who has some level of incentive to care about you. If they benefit from your success, they belong inside the echo chamber. Examples:
Customers paying you
Partners you pay & partners who pay you
Investors
Advisors
Beta testers
Early believers
Affiliates
Creators already under contract
People who owe you favors or want continued access to you
Common mistake: People don’t ask enough. You should ask EVERYONE to build content to fill out your echo chamber. Whether its a testimonial, referral, live event you can throw. You’ll only lose out if you don’t ask.
When is it ok to upset a partner here? Competitors are sensitive. It's up to you to walk the line correctly between using them to fill out your echo chamber and not upsetting other entities that you want to work with
Example: Gov tech companies need to be hyper-aware of this.
The biggest waste in early-stage marketing is leaving warm relationships unleveraged. You should always be asking: “How do I extract the maximum signal from every single person who already knows we exist?”
Founder & team led content
Who: You. The founder or team, face and primary belief engine behind the brand. One strong founder and team post can do more than 20 paid creator videos if your POV is sharp.
Common mistake: Not understanding that you can craft yourself to be the language your entire echo chamber will repeat. Founder content extends far beyond LinkedIn. Podcasts, Tiktok, newsletters, founder websites, events. Even who you’re friends with.
Something interesting to post: Talk about your killer team, company momentum & what’s being built, the industry at large & where it's going, and industry news.
Dylan at Profound rips posts on LinkedIn every single day. Do you think he’s overthinking it? No, and he just raised $20M Series A in June and $35M Series B led by Sequoia in August.
The most annoying founder posts long posts that no one cares about. Don’t be that person.
If you do this right, people will feel surrounded by you.
Well, How’d I Do:
If you’re in love, do you ever really fall out of it?
People who fall in love with brands usually stay hooked. They are the easiest to resurrect. They want your brand and business to succeed because life is better with it.
There are love ties. Those never really go away.
You have the power to architect a positive echo chamber around your brand to target your ICP, greater ICP ecosystem, and the surrounding cultural world.
You now know how.
Use every surface area you have, micro creators, macro creators, partners, customers, and your own voice, to build, target, and reinforce the love bubble.
This echo chamber is one of the most powerful ways creators can be used, especially in B2B. You’re making your brand unavoidable and unstoppable.
Building, existing, and living in the world isn’t easy. But this season is a reminder: you’ve already built more than most people ever try.
I hope you have an incredible week ahead. I can’t wait for my favorite holiday, Thanksgiving, that’s right around the corner!
Julia
