The CRAVE Diagnostic: Five Elements That Reveal the Heart of Your Brand
There is a moment when a belief shifts. Something in the body knows before the mind catches up—attention sharpens, breath slows, the scroll stops because this new way of seeing has reached through the noise and touched something that was waiting to be touched. You are arrested. Transfixed. The world narrows to this one moment in time.
It is recognition before understanding. Desire before reason.
In CRAVE: A Love Story. A Brand Story., I introduced the diagnostic I developed after years of studying what creates that moment. This post walks through all five elements—not as a checklist but as a map of the territory. Because when your brand is not landing the way you know it should, one of these elements is starving. And you deserve to know where to look.
All five elements spring from your Core Truth—the essential belief you want your audience to rally around. Without that foundation, nothing else holds. But assuming you have that foundation, here is what each element asks of you.
Compelling: The Courage to Be Heard
There is a difference between making noise and having something to say.
Most brands are loud. They post constantly, chase every algorithm shift, optimize for visibility without ever asking whether anyone would miss them if they disappeared. They grab attention the way a child grabs a sleeve—desperate, insistent, exhausting. And then they wonder why no one stays.
Compelling brands do something different. They cultivate attention the way you cultivate a garden: with patience, with consistency, with the quiet confidence that what you are growing is worth the wait. They have chosen a point of view—not a vague one, not a safe one, but a belief that draws a line. They have planted a flag on terrain they refuse to surrender, and they show up on that ground again and again until the people who belong there find their way.
This requires sacrifice. The first cost of being compelling is that not everyone will like you. Some people will disagree. Some will scroll past. Some will actively resist what you are offering. And that is exactly how you know it is working. If no one could possibly argue with what you believe, you have not said anything worth believing. You have become background music—pleasant, forgettable, easy to ignore.
The diagnostic question: If someone discovers your brand today and six months from now, would they recognize the same conviction running through both? Or have you pivoted so many times you have become unrecognizable even to yourself?
Resonant: The Frequency That Calls Them Home
Compelling gets them to turn toward you. Resonant is why they stay.
I think of resonance the way I think of tuning forks. Strike one, and another across the room will begin to hum if they share the same frequency. No effort required. No persuasion. Just two things vibrating at the same pitch, finding each other across the distance.
This is what happens when a brand truly resonates. You are not creating desire from nothing—you are naming the desire that already exists. You are giving language to the longing your audience has carried privately, sometimes shamefully, often without recognizing it as longing at all. When you speak to that hidden frequency, they do not need to be convinced. They feel found.
But resonance requires knowing your audience deeply enough to speak their language instead of your own. Not the words they use when a marketer is listening—the words they use among themselves, in the unguarded moments, when they are trying to articulate what they actually want. That language is different. That language is gold.
The diagnostic question: When your ideal customer reads your messaging, do they feel seen? Do they think "this is exactly what I have been trying to articulate"? Or do they feel like you are speaking to someone else entirely?
Authentic: The Permission to Be Whole
There is a particular exhaustion that comes from maintaining a performance.
You know the feeling. The careful curation. The voice that sounds like you but slightly flattened, slightly safer, slightly less strange. The hiding of the parts that do not fit the professional template—the unusual influences, the unexpected background, the particular madness of how you actually think and work and create.
Authentic brands have stopped performing. Not because they share everything—authenticity is not confession—but because the mask and the face have become the same thing. What you see is what you get, and what you get is someone who has fully inhabited their own particular magic.
The things that make you "too much" in certain rooms are exactly what make you irreplaceable in others. Your unusual path, your unexpected obsessions, the strange alchemy of influences that created your perspective—these are not liabilities to manage. They are the moat that no competitor can cross because no competitor has lived your life.
The diagnostic question: Does your brand feel like you? Or does it feel like a costume you put on each morning and cannot wait to take off?
Vivid: The Discipline of Being Remembered
Vague brands are forgettable brands. This is not opinion—it's neuroscience.
Memory requires distinctiveness. The brain encodes what stands out and discards what blends in. If your brand could be described using the same adjectives as your competitors—innovative, passionate, committed to excellence—you have not given anyone's brain a reason to hold onto you. You are wallpaper. Pleasant, perhaps. But ultimately part of the background.
Vivid brands are specific enough to be remembered. They use language so concrete that someone could describe them to a friend without resorting to placeholder words. They have visual identities you would recognize from a fragment—a corner of a logo, a particular shade of a particular color, a texture that belongs to them and no one else. They have made choices, and those choices are specific enough to exclude.
This is where Artifice lives. Not artifice as deception, but artifice as the strategic use of beauty, the understanding that how something looks and feels and sounds matters as much as what it says. Aesthetics are not decoration. They are meaning made visible.
The diagnostic question: Could someone describe your brand without using any adjective that also applies to your competitors?
Emotive: The Invitation to Feel
People make decisions emotionally and justify them logically. You have heard this before. What you may not have heard is that emotion is not something you add at the end—a coat of paint once the structure is complete. Emotion is the structure. Emotion is why any of this matters at all.
My former rabbi taught me that rituals help us enter into the spirit of something. A doorpost with a mezuzah signals a threshold. A Shabbat candle marks the transition from ordinary time to sacred time. These are not empty gestures. They are invitations to shift how we feel, to cross from one state into another.
Your brand touchpoints work the same way. Every interaction—from discovery to purchase to advocacy—is an invitation for your audience to enter into the spirit of what you offer. When those invitations are aligned, when every touchpoint reinforces the same emotional truth, people feel something they cannot easily explain. They trust you before they have conscious reasons for trust. They return without being asked. They become evangelists without being incentivized.
The diagnostic question: What do you want people to feel when they encounter your brand? Is every touchpoint reinforcing that feeling—or are some quietly working against it?
Where to Look When Something Is Broken
When your brand is not working, the answer lives in one of these five elements.
If you are struggling to get attention at all, look at Compelling. You may be saying what everyone else says, or saying nothing at all.
If attention is not converting, look at Resonant. You may be speaking to the wrong craving—or using your language when you should be using theirs.
If you feel like you are performing rather than expressing, look at Authentic. The gap between who you are and how you show up may be costing you more than you realize.
If your brand feels forgettable even to you, look at Vivid. You may be hiding behind abstractions when what you need is the courage to be specific.
If you are getting transactions but not devotion, look at Emotive. Your touchpoints may be functional without being meaningful—getting the job done without creating the feeling that brings people back.
All five elements rest on a foundation: your Core Truth. Without that foundation, even the most compelling, resonant, authentic, vivid, and emotive brand has nothing to stand on.
