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Despite consistently being one of America’s most popular music genres year after year, it’s still not that cool to say you like country music. It’s sort of like how fast food and porn are wildly successful industries but we all act like we don’t patronize them.

But whatever you tell people you think about country music, George Strait is fucking cool. And he’s even more influential, as documented in this 2017 profile in The New Yorker.

At the height of his career and influence, George Strait was as much a brand as he was a musician. He wasn’t writing songs about his experience and hoping people would dig them, as most country stars do; he was performing songs that would connect with his audience.

As a brand, he established a distinctive asset — a fresh expression of traditional country music — and then slowly expanded his gravitational pull (and appeal) by adding more sounds, taking more market share than any country purist would rightfully take.

Strait realized that, because his identity was so firmly fixed in fans’ minds, he could permit himself some latitude. “People looked at me as a traditional country singer,” he says. “So those songs were thought of as ‘Well, those are traditional, because George did it.’ ”

Astronomy is a useful analogy for brand building. A small brand is a tiny planet, rotating and existing gleefully, Pinocchio aspiring to be a real boy. A powerful brand like Coca-Cola is like Jupiter, with dozens of moons surrounding it. Those moons are the different actions the brand has deployed over time — the color red, the bottle shape, launching Diet Coke, athlete sponsorships, the polar bears, the POV around enjoyment. Those are independent entities that the brand pulls in to make part of a greater, more dynamic whole.

Every brand tries things that don’t quite fit in their orbit, and that don’t land with their target audience and might even be confusing. I think that’s a necessary step toward understanding what a brand’s potential is. Thinking about it another way, those near misses help you understand what work you still need to do on defining what your brand is about before you can make further bets.

The ultimate goal is a brand with a strong center of gravity that, like George Strait’s sound, allows you to add weight (or salience) with each activation, creating the variety of inroads required to connect with a large, heterogeneous audience.