I watched a talk recently from Jesse Cole, the creator of Banana Ball and the mind behind the Savannah Bananas. The guy built a baseball team that sells out every single game for years at a time. Not because the baseball is better. Because the show is better.

And while I was watching, I kept thinking. This is the clearest blueprint I have ever seen for building a standout consumer brand.

Here are the lessons I took straight from Jesse’s playbook and how you can use them to build a brand people actually talk about.

Jesse learned from P. T. Barnum. Without promotion nothing happens. You can have the best product in the world but if no one knows or cares you lose.

This hit home for me. So many founders obsess over attribution, channel mix, and conversion rates while forgetting the one thing that actually moves markets. Attention.

Your job is to be impossible to ignore. Launch something bizarre. Share a story that fires people up. Create a product experience that makes people pull out their phones.

In a crowded marketplace attention compounds faster than paid media.

One of Jesse’s core lines. Do the exact opposite of whatever is normal.

Baseball was slow and quiet. He turned it into a circus with dancing players, banana costumes, and a marching band.

Most consumer brands are stuck in a loop of beige. Same packaging. Same homepage. Same influencer strategy. Same founder story.

If your brand looks like everyone else, you will force yourself into a paid acquisition treadmill forever.

Ask yourself. What would it look like to do the exact opposite of your category?

I built Feat into a multi eight figure brand because we leaned into comfort at a time when apparel was trying to be performance focused. The opposite creates differentiation. Differentiation creates margin. “BlanketBlend” was unique, visually differentiated and memorable.

Jesse is obsessed with fans. Disney was obsessed with visitors. The greatest operators in history build worlds that exist for the customer, not for the company.

When Jesse realized baseball was not fun for spectators, he rebuilt the experience from scratch. Not the sport. The experience of watching it.

Most brand builders only focus on the product and ignore the feelings around the product.

Consumers do not remember your fabric composition or your ingredient deck. They remember how you made them feel. They remember the unboxing. They remember how easy it was to buy. They remember that you replied to their DM in thirty minutes.

Put your customer first in ways your competitors would never even think about. It is the cleanest competitive advantage you will ever get.

Jesse writes ten ideas every day. Most are bad. Some are ridiculous. A few are brilliant. And those few are the ones that change the business.

Brand builders often wait until they have the perfect idea. Which means they never ship anything new.

The brands that win in 2026 will be the ones that treat innovation like a volume game. New packaging. New content formats. New moments of delight. New product variants. New creator partnerships.

The more at bats you create the more home runs you hit.

My favorite part of Jesse’s talk. He studies Disneyland, MrBeast, Amazon, Taylor Swift, Marvel, and the Grateful Dead.

A baseball team studying the Grateful Dead should not make sense. Yet it does. The Dead built a movement around belonging and live experience. Jesse applied that idea to baseball.

This is the magic of what he calls parallel thinking.

Consumer goods founders need more parallel thinking. Study music festivals. Study theme parks. Study viral YouTubers. Study hospitality brands. Study anyone who creates loyalty and emotional experience at scale.

You will never find your next breakthrough by copying the brand across the aisle. You find it by studying the worlds your customers already love.

When the Savannah Bananas launched, people booed them. Locals told them to get out. The name was mocked. Traditionalists hated everything about the concept.

They kept going because they believed in the vision and had no choice. They were drowning in debt and had to make it work.

Founders love to talk about innovation but hate to live through the part where everyone thinks they are crazy. The hard truth. If no one thinks you are crazy, you are probably building something too safe.

The Savannah Bananas do not sell baseball games. They sell two hours of joy. They sell shared moments. They sell memories.

Their tickets include everything. Their show includes a band. Their players dance. Everything is designed as entertainment.

This is the part consumer brands consistently ignore.

You are not selling clothing. You are selling identity. You are not selling cosmetics. You are selling confidence. You are not selling supplements. You are selling transformation.

Design the experience around your product with intention.
Create an unboxing moment that people film.
Create a community that people want to join.
Create rituals that elevate the mundane.

Products are forgettable. Experiences last.

Play bigger. Think stranger. Serve customers harder. Seek attention without shame. Test ideas nonstop. Learn from worlds outside your own. Ignore the critics. And create experiences that feel unlike anything your customers have ever seen.

That is how Banana Ball became a phenomenon.

And it is exactly how the next generation of consumer brands will win.