There's no such thing as a small detail.

Ad agencies used to tell you that brands were built through advertising. Made sense — that's what they were selling.

But an ad can only spark curiosity. What people remember is how you treat them.

Marty Neumeier puts it this way: "A brand is not what you say it is. It's what they say it is." Every customer sees their own version of your business. What they see, hear, and feel shapes their picture of you. A tone. An experience. A detail.

You can't control that picture. But you can influence it. Not just through communication — through everything you do. How you email. How you deliver. How you respond when things go wrong.

Say you've got everything dialed in. Your visual identity, your website, your team. Then some customer torches your service on Facebook over something trivial. How you respond in that moment says more about your business than a thousand ads ever could. That's what sticks. That's what gets retold.

Because people don't remember logos. They remember behavior.

That's why IKEA lets you return anything, no questions asked. Why Coolblue sells the "Jiskefet Hidden Sound System" in their webshop. (Really — look it up.) Why Lexus drives you home while your car is being serviced.

These aren't marketing tricks. This is who they are. And that's why a strong brand doesn't start with your logo. It starts with the question: what do we stand for? Everything else follows from there.

So next time you're wondering whether some small detail matters or not:

There's no such thing as a small detail.