Ulli Appelbaum doesn’t “build” brands—he rewires them.
He’s the founder of First the Trousers, Then the Shoes, a name that sounds like a riddle but really means “strategy first, execution second.” That’s how he works: dissecting brands like he’s performing brain surgery with a Sharpie.

He told me, “It’s not me stating this—it’s science stating this. That’s what a brand is in the mind of consumers.”

That’s the core of his philosophy: a brand isn’t a logo, tagline, or clever story—it’s a neural network of meaning that lives inside people’s heads. Every jingle, color, slogan, or scent fires off memory after memory until a brand stops being a product and becomes a reflex.

As Ulli put it, “Everything that you associate and memorize about a specific brand—an experience, an emotion, something a neighbor told you—all these things work together to create this network. If it’s coherent, if it’s strong, it really helps the brand.”

So yes, when he looks at Coca-Cola, he doesn’t see a soda. He sees a slot machine of emotional triggers, a fizzing chain reaction of nostalgia, family, and summer afternoons burned into collective memory. Branding, for him, isn’t storytelling—it’s neural patterning.

When I asked what the strangest, most non-obvious idea he’d ever sold to a client was, he laughed.
“Maybe one breakthrough idea was a couple of years ago—I did some work for Red Baron, the frozen pizza. We turned the Red Baron into the Red Baroness.”

Let that sink in. The German flying ace became a female pilot—a “wingwoman for moms,” as he put it.
“We needed to jolt people out of their passive attitude toward the brand,” Ulli explained. “So we turned the Red Baron into a female pilot that was basically the wingwoman of moms out there.”

It worked. The campaign ran for two years and was “very well and very effectively used in the market.” Then the CMO left, and the new leadership ditched it—because, naturally, corporate gravity always wins.

Then he moved from pizza to perfume—the kind that smells like lemony victory.
He brought up Febreze. “People clean their house, and the last touch is to spray Febreze because the scent gives you a cue that now my house is clean,” he said.

It’s genius-level behavioral design. “If the house is clean and doesn’t smell fresh, it doesn’t really feel clean,” he added. Febreze didn’t just sell a product—it sold a ritual. It hacked the moment where satisfaction kicks in.

The scent itself became a memory cue, a neurochemical confirmation that the task is complete.
Ulli said, “Here’s a case where you use a ritual and a scent cue to communicate a message—but it only works because it’s based on real consumer behavior.”

He could’ve left it there, but of course, he didn’t.
He threw in another curveball: “Disney used to pump popcorn smell around their popcorn machines to get you to buy popcorn.” It’s Pavlov with better branding.

Ask most marketers how many brand cues belong in a 30-second ad and they’ll say one, maybe two. Ulli calls that lazy.
“Research shows that the ideal number of brand cues in your advertising is actually close to seven in a 30-second TV ad,” he said.

Seven.
Sound, color, jingle, character, logo, tagline, product shape.

Each one is another thread in the brain’s tapestry. “The more brand assets you build into your advertising and your communication,” he told me, “the stronger the memory recall of that brand will be.”

This isn’t creativity—it’s architecture. Every cue becomes a neuron, every campaign another synapse.
Branding isn’t about simplicity—it’s about coherence.

Every cue matters.
Color connects to memory. Memory connects to smell. Smell connects to emotion. Emotion connects to purchase.

When it works, it’s magic. When it doesn’t, it’s noise.
Ulli’s whole career is built on one truth: if your brand doesn’t live coherently in the consumer’s brain, it doesn’t live at all.

Paid subscribers get the full deep dive:

Because as Ulli Appelbaum keeps proving, the best branding doesn’t tell stories—it rewires memory.

Stay bold. Stay curious. And don’t confuse storytelling with science.

You’ve read the free stuff. You’ve laughed. You’ve nodded along like a strategist pretending the deck was their idea. But here’s the thing: ADOTAT+ isn’t for the dabblers. It’s for the people who want to know why brands make you feel things before you even realize it’s working. It’s where cognitive science meets sarcasm, and where “brand purpose” gets stripped down to the PR perfume it really is.

Ulli Appelbaum drops frameworks that actually have footnotes. Jeff Greenfield talks like Carl Jung if Jung had worked in adtech. It’s brand science, not brand fluff — and the only therapy session where the data talks back.

So if you’re tired of PowerPoint prophets and marketing mythology, join ADOTAT+.
Because insight this sharp shouldn’t be free — and neither should your brain.