The Stan Lee Rule of Branding: Every Time Is Someone’s First Time

The first rule of comedy is: tell a joke once and it’s funny. Tell the same joke five times and it’s not funny anymore. Tell that same joke nineteen times to the same people, and suddenly it’s awkwardly hilarious.

That’s brand storytelling.

Say your story once and it disappears. Say it a few times and people shrug. Say it so many times that you feel like a broken record, and that’s when it finally sticks. That’s when people start repeating it back to you.

I learned this from Stan Lee. Yeah, that Stan Lee. We weren’t best friends, but we emailed a couple times a year, had dinner twice, and he even wrote me a foreword for a book I never published. Stan was Stan. Love him or hate him, as Gilbert Gottfried said when refering to Jerry Lewis, “he was always nice to me.” He even sent me birthday emails.

Stan used to say that every comic should read like it’s the reader’s first issue. Never assume they know the backstory or the characters. Every issue has to stand on its own. And if you think about it, that’s the blueprint for how you should tell your brand story. Every time you tell it, someone out there is hearing it for the first time.

I think about this a lot when I talk about my friend Jon Wye . Jon makes the best belts in the world. He’s a genius craftsman, and he’s done a lot of cool things to promote his business. But sometimes he skips the early stories, the scrappy ones. Like how he once bought a classified ad in the back of Rolling Stone magazine because it was dirt cheap at the time. That story is gold. It’s creative, resourceful, a little punk rock, and it tells you everything about the spirit behind the belts. But unless Jon keeps telling that story, it just fades into history.

And that’s the mistake most brands make. They think people already know the story, so they move on. But most people don’t know. And the ones who do? They’re not bored of it, you are.

Look at Liquid Death. They sell canned water. That’s it. No one should care. But their story? That they’re this over-the-top, heavy metal, death-metal-water brand created to “murder your thirst”? They’ve been pounding that same story into the ground for years, across ads, stunts, merch, partnerships, you name it. They’ve told it so many times and in so many ways that it’s impossible to separate the water from the story. And now they’re worth over a billion dollars. Not because the water tastes different, but because they never shut up about who they are.

That’s the playbook.

Repetition makes things memorable. Repetition turns a slogan into culture. Repetition turns an origin story into a legend. Nike has been telling us to “Just Do It” since 1988. Apple keeps dusting off the garage origin story. Patagonia can’t stop reminding us they’re here to save the planet. None of them get tired of repeating themselves, because they know that brand is built by hammering the story until it’s undeniable.

So here’s the uncomfortable truth: if you’re worried about telling your story too often, you’re already losing. Treat every telling like it’s the first issue of a comic book, clear, exciting, impossible to ignore. Keep it alive. Tell it until people roll their eyes. Then keep telling it until they start telling it for you.

Because when you stop telling your story, it dies. When you keep telling it, over and over and over, that’s when it becomes folklore. That’s when you stop being just another company and start becoming unforgettable.