Table of Contents
Why I Picked Up This Book
Here’s something most successful business owners don’t want to hear: if your business looks like everyone else’s, you’re already losing.
It doesn’t matter how good your systems are or how tight your niche is.
If people can’t tell you apart from your competitors, you’re a commodity.
And commodities compete on price. That’s a race to the bottom nobody wins.
I learned this the hard way. And the book that made me face it was Ben Settle’s Brand Barbarian.
Brand Barbarian Ben Settle isn’t your typical marketing book.
Ben Settle doesn’t write for big agencies or huge companies.
He writes for people in the trenches- small business owners, coaches, and experts who need branding advice that actually works in the real world.
The book isn’t cheap. Think $400 to $500. But what I took away from it was worth every cent.
Here are the five biggest lessons from Brand Barbarian Ben Settle that I’m already putting into practice at Radical Marketing.
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1. Your Business Might Already Be a Commodity
The first lesson from Brand Barbarian Ben Settle hit close to home.
Even with solid systems, a clear niche, and a strong track record,
Radical Marketing still looked like every other digital marketing agency out there. And honestly? That’s on me. I got so focused on getting results that I let real branding slide.
Most business owners make the same mistake. They build a great product, get some clients, and think that’s enough. It’s not.
If a competitor could swap their logo onto your website and it still makes sense..
You don’t have a brand. You have a business card.
Brand Barbarian Ben Settle makes it simple: the market doesn’t reward the best product. It rewards the most different one.
2. Build a Brand Philosophy, Not Just a Logo
The second lesson is about who you are as a business.
Back in the golden age of advertising, the best agencies had a clear way of doing things that showed up in everything they made.
You knew their work before you saw their name.
That’s the standard Brand Barbarian Ben Settle holds businesses to.
For Radical Marketing, this meant getting clear on what we actually stand for. For us, it’s direct response storytelling ads – stories built to make people take action.
That’s our philosophy. Everything we make has to go through that filter.
If you can’t say your brand philosophy in one sentence, you don’t have one yet. And without one, your marketing will always feel all over the place.
A strong brand philosophy also makes your webinar lead generation work harder. People don’t just sign up for your webinar, they sign up because they already feel like they know you.
3. Ditch the Stock Photos
This one sounds easy. It’s not.
Brand Barbarian Ben Settle is tough on generic images. Stock photos are everywhere, which means they register as nothing.
The brain is wired to ignore things it’s already seen a hundred times. And nothing is more familiar than a smiling stranger in a blazer shaking hands in front of a glass building.
At Radical Marketing, we’re removing stock photos from our brand.
When we do use them, we edit them so much they don’t look like stock anymore.
We’re also looking at custom illustrations, visuals no competitor can just copy and paste.
This ties into our Brandvertising framework, the idea that ads should build your brand while they sell. If your visuals look like everyone else’s, your ads will perform like everyone else’s too.
4. Your Origin Story Needs to Actually Mean Something
Most business websites have an About page. Almost NONE of them are worth reading.
Brand Barbarian Ben Settle pushes hard on the origin story – a real brand tool.
People don’t connect with companies. They connect with stories. And a good origin story is one of the strongest ways to build that connection fast.
My story starts at 19. I was a student when I found a direct mail book at a bookstore. Reading it felt like finding a secret world, the world of direct response marketing, Dan Kennedy style.
That love never went away. It’s why Radical Marketing exists and why we do things the way we do.
That story needs to be front and centre on our website, not buried at the bottom of an About page. Because it’s the one thing no competitor can copy.
Napoleon Hill understood this better than almost anyone. His whole brand was built on one big story: his obsessive mission to study the habits of the world’s most successful people.
If you want to see how a great personal brand creates a lasting legacy, his story is worth a read.
5. Kill the Sacred Cows
The fifth lesson from Brand Barbarian Ben Settle is the most uncomfortable one.
Every industry has unwritten rules. Things everyone does just because everyone does them. Ben Settle calls these sacred cows and his advice is to get rid of them.
In the marketing agency world, the sacred cow is the retainer model.
Agencies charge a monthly fee no matter what results they get. Clients pay whether the campaigns work or not. Everyone does it.
We don’t. At Radical Marketing, we work on a performance-based model: no results, no fee. It’s the clearest way to show we back what we do. It’s bold. It makes some people uncomfortable. And it immediately sets us apart from every agency still hiding behind a monthly retainer.
Getting rid of your industry’s sacred cow is a statement about what you stand for.
If you want to see how bold positioning shows up in real ad creative, Brian Kurtz’s approach to direct marketing is one of the best examples of it done at scale.
The Bottom Line
Brand Barbarian Ben Settle isn’t a book about fonts and colour palettes. It’s a book about having the GUTS to be different when everyone around you is playing it safe.
Own that you might be a commodity. Build a real brand philosophy. Use images that actually stand out. Tell a story that means something. And get rid of the rules that are keeping you invisible.
None of this is complicated. But most business owners won’t do it because it feels uncomfortable.
That’s exactly why it works.
If you can get hold of Brand Barbarian Ben Settle, do it. It’s expensive. It’s worth it.
FAQs: Brand Barbarian by Ben Settle
Brand Barbarian is a branding book by copywriter Ben Settle. It teaches small business owners, coaches, and experts how to build a brand that stands out instead of blending in with competitors. Unlike most branding books written for big companies, Brand Barbarian Ben Settle focuses on practical strategies that work for smaller businesses.
Ben Settle is an American copywriter and email marketing expert known for his direct, no-fluff style. He is the author of several books including Brand Barbarian, and is widely respected in the direct response marketing world for building a multi-million dollar business almost entirely through daily email marketing.
The five main lessons in Brand Barbarian Ben Settle are: recognising if your business has become a commodity, building a clear brand philosophy, ditching generic stock photos, crafting an origin story that connects with people, and challenging the standard rules in your industry to stand out.
Yes. Brand Barbarian Ben Settle is specifically written for small business owners and solo operators, not big marketing agencies. The lessons are practical and actionable, and focus on how to build a distinctive brand without a large budget. For coaches, speakers, and experts trying to stand out in a crowded market, the insights are directly applicable.
Brand Barbarian by Ben Settle is a premium book priced at around $400 to $500. It is not widely available in bookstores and is typically sold directly through Ben Settle's own channels.
Ready to Build a Brand That Actually Stands Out?
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We’ve helped over 100 clients across four continents fill their webinar rooms with the right people using a mix of story-driven ads, battle-tested funnels, and our own Blitzvertising System.
We handle the marketing so you can focus on what you do best: delivering results for your clients.
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