In Any Given Sunday, Al Pacino rasps through one of the all-time locker-room speeches. His team’s a mess. Season’s on the line. He tells them football – and life – is a game of inches. You claw for every inch. Half a step too slow, half a second too late, and you lose.
For poignance and resonance in the canon of “guy culture”, it’s up there with Rudyard Kipling’s If, Churchill’s wartime leadership, the Apollo Moon landings, and Ali v. Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle.
It’s also the sort of thing business people love. Marginal gains. Compounding advantage. Sweat the details and the inches will add up.
So it’s tempting to throw brand in there. Another inch to fight for. Get the product right, the pricing right, the distribution right, add some brand polish on top. Sweat the details, right?
But here’s the thing: that’s not what happened in the film.
The team didn’t win because they played each down flawlessly. They won because Pacino gave a speech that made them want to fight for the inches in the first place.
The speech wasn’t one of the inches.
The speech was the thing that made the inches matter.
That’s what brand really is.
Brand Isn’t the Uniform, It’s a Touchstone
Most people misunderstand brand. They think it’s logos and colours, maybe a few choice words and some company values. And in fairness, that’s what they’ve been taught. It’s the received wisdom: build the product first, raise capital, get distribution – then, once there’s more time and budget, sort out the brand.
The problem is that by the time “later” rolls around, the company already has a brand. Just not one it chose. Employees are working for a story, customers are buying into an idea, investors are pricing a reputation. The brand exists whether you’ve defined it or not. And if you realise you need to change that, there are plenty of agencies ready to help you spend a lot of time and money fixing it.
That’s why treating brand like a uniform – something you put on at the end – is a mistake. Real brand is a cultural touchstone. It operates inside and outside at once. To employees, it says: this is who we are, this is why we’re here. To customers, investors, and partners, it says: join us if that’s what you want too.
And here’s the thing: brand doesn’t have to start as a giant campaign or a hundred-page guidelines deck. It can be an MVP (the tech kind, not the sports kind). The basics are enough: who are we, what do we do differently, why does that matter?
In Any Given Sunday, Pacino’s speech is just words, delivered in a locker room by a coach to his team. Not a slick video, not a campaign. It was the MVP of communication – he talked to his team.
For your business, the basics of brand are the same. That small, intentional step sets a trajectory. Infrastructure, polish, and scale can come later. But without that MVP, you’re just adding inches without the speech to bind them.
The Speech in Business
When it comes to famous branding moments in business, it’s tempting to talk about the splashy ones – usually the ones that go wrong. But the real brand events are often subtler. They’re actions, decisions, and signals that show up if you’re attuned.
Elon Musk: Tesla and SpaceX. Musk insists Tesla doesn’t “do marketing.” Technically true, if you mean ad spend. But his real talent is mythmaking (aka. Brand) – though he’d never call it that. His companies run on myth: make life multiplanetary; accelerate the transition to sustainable energy. Every launch event, every chaotic tweet, every rocket landing (every rocket explosion, for that matter) reinforces that myth. The backlash is constant: SEC battles, labour disputes, personal controversies, most of Europe. But the longer view is unmistakable. He’s created the most valuable car company in history and a private space programme that outpaces all nation states combined. His companies attract the brightest engineers with story more than salary. Musk doesn’t claw for inches of awareness. He gives the speech that makes people claw for the inches alongside him.
Coinbase: The Line in the Sand. In 2020, Brian Armstrong published an open letter telling employees that political activism wasn’t Coinbase’s mission. If they wanted a company that engaged in those battles, they should leave – and he’d pay them generously to do so. The backlash was immediate. Critics called it tone-deaf in a year of global protest. Staff departures followed. But Armstrong was clear: Coinbase existed to build an open financial system, not to litigate every political issue. In the moment, it looked brutal. But it was existential for Coinbase, and ultimately only 5% of the company took up his offer. Armstrong might not have recognised it as such, but this was an act of brand. Not a new logo. Not a campaign. A hard perimeter drawn around identity. For the people who stayed, the message was unambiguous: this is who we are, and if you’re here, you’ve chosen this fight and we fight together. That was a brand event that drove a culture.
When the Speech Works (and When It Doesn’t)
I’ve worked on brand processes for more than two decades, most recently at Molten Ventures, and I’ve learned the hard lessons. What separates the two isn’t budget or creative polish. It’s the choices you make at the start, long before the market gives any feedback.
It comes down to three things:
The Speech Has to Matter
Pacino’s team was staring at elimination. High stakes. Branding without a business reason is just noise. Boredom, fashion, “it’s time for a refresh” – those aren’t reasons. Starting something new, entering new markets, moving up-market, staring down irrelevance, or the feeling in your gut that your existing brand isn’t yours – those are reasons. If you’re doing a brand activity driven by a business need, you’ve got your head straight before you even step on the field.Who Delivers the Speech Matters
The words land because of who says them. Pacino had authority because he knows what drives these men. Your process may involve top agencies, but inside your business, the leader who owns the brand process decides if it works. Like in an IPO: a seasoned CFO steadies the ship. Without senior conviction – and an experienced brand CMO running the project – the process collapses under its own weight or meanders into expensive irrelevance.The Speech Has to Feel True
If Pacino had fed them lines they didn’t believe, the players would’ve laughed. Same with brand. The good ones feel like something everyone felt in their gut, finally put into words. This requires deep empathy focused by insight. The bad ones feel imposed. That’s why the case studies of Musk and Coinbase matter: they articulated existing truths. They demonstrate authenticity in a world that only ever talks about it.
Getting the Ball Over the Line
Most companies treat brand as one more inch to claw for. But brand isn’t an inch. Brand is the speech. The thing that makes people fight for the inches together.
Pacino’s team didn’t claw back because of flawless execution. They clawed back because belief came first.
That’s why it’s never “too early” to start. A brand MVP at seed stage sets intention that compounds down the line. By Series B, it becomes culture. By IPO, it becomes valuation.
Every company plays the game of inches. Brand is the speech that makes you fight for them at all.