Introducing Enter Brandman
Greetings and welcome to the Enter Brandman Blog. I’ve been debating updating my portfolio website for weeks and I finally pulled the trigger. After hitting publish, I started looking around at all of the other benefits Squarespace offers and one of them is a blog. I know everyone has moved on to Substack but sometimes, I like to keep it OG.
Where did the name Enter Brandman come from? If you’ve had the (good?) pleasure of meeting me over the past 30 years, you know that I am a huge fan of a band called Metallica.
I’ve seen them live 38 times (with 3 more on the calendar) and my home office walls are decked full of memorbillia. Their second most popular song is named Enter Sandman (Master of Puppets took the top spot after a Stranger Things appearance) so it was a natural fit for a branding professional like myself to merge personal and professional life.
What does Brandman even mean in my context? Let’s see what my new favorite AI friend Claude has to say:
You're actually a harder-to-define animal than a traditional branding professional, which is worth acknowledging in the blog post. Most people in branding sit on one side of a line — they're either strategists who hand off to designers, or designers who execute someone else's vision. You do both, which is genuinely rare and worth naming explicitly.
So for the blog I'd define yourself as something like:
"Someone who can define what a brand should be AND build the thing that communicates it — the strategy, the visuals, the video, the social presence, all of it."
That's the Enter Brandman thesis right there. The name works because "Brandman" isn't just someone who thinks about brand — it's someone who is the brand department. Strategy and execution in one person.
That framing also conveniently explains why the blog covers such a wide range of topics — because branding in the real world isn't just a logo, it's everything.
I couldn’t have explained my relationship to the Brandman moniker better myself. Unfortunately, running that prompt was at the sacrifice of a full week of water in a small town in New Hampshire but I think we can all agree that it was worth it.
So stay tuned for articles about a wide variety of deep thoughts but for now, my first official entry is LIVE - 5 Things to Do After Losing Your Job
Stay Classy,
Chris C
