Your Brand Is a S'more and You're Probably Building It Upside Down

A brand that earns fans has four layers, and — like a s'more — it's built from the bottom up: foundations, values, stories, and then the symbols everyone fixates on. Most brands start at the top, with a logo. The ones people root for start at the bottom, with what's real.

I know — a branding guy comparing your brand to a campfire dessert. Stick with me, because the order is the whole point.

Walk up to most rebrands and you'll find a team arguing about the top cracker: the logo, the color, the wordmark. Understandable — it's the part you can see. But you can't build a s'more starting with the top cracker. It just falls off. Same with a brand. The stuff that makes people come back, bring a friend, and defend you in the group chat is underneath, and it goes in a specific order.

The four layers, bottom to top

Bottom cracker — your foundations. Your people, your methods, your hard-won experience. This is the base everything else rests on. It's not glamorous and no one photographs it, but skip it and the whole thing collapses the moment someone leans in. It's also where innovation lives — a strong foundation is what lets you flex without falling apart.

Dark chocolate — your values. The rich center. What you're actually made of, and what you refuse to compromise. Warm it up and it melts into everything above it — which is exactly what real values do. They're not a poster in the break room; they're the flavor in every decision.

Marshmallow — your stories. The gooey part that binds the whole thing together and, yes, gets everywhere. Stories are what make a brand stick — to memory, to emotion, to the people who repeat them for you. A brand without stories is just crackers and chocolate: fine, forgettable, and structurally unsound.

Top cracker — your symbols. Now the logo, the name, the labels. They matter — they're how people recognize you — but they only work because of everything holding them up. A gorgeous top cracker on a hollow stack is the branding equivalent of a logo refresh that changes nothing.

No s'more is perfectly balanced — and that's the point

Here's the part the recipe cards leave out: no two s'mores come out the same. The marshmallow's a little burnt, the chocolate slides, the crackers never line up. And somehow that's when they're best.

Brands are the same. The great ones flex and innovate on top while keeping the reasons to trust firm underneath. The goal was never a perfectly symmetrical brand — it's your recipe, stacked so it holds together and tastes like you. Fine-tuning that balance is most of the work.

Fans don't fall for the cracker

Nobody's ever become a fan of a logo. They fall for the whole stack — the foundation they can rely on, the values they believe in, the story they can't stop telling. Then they do the thing that actually grows a brand: they pass it around the fire.

That's the mechanism behind "brands that earn fans." One spark catches, then spreads — person to person, s'more to s'more — until there's a crowd around the fire.

We've been helping teams stack theirs for three decades, across sports, social impact, B2B, and technology. Different recipes, same order every time: build from the bottom up, and the top cracker takes care of itself.

Now, if you'll excuse me — the marshmallow's ready.