Peahens love 'em.

The feathers signal to the female bird that this fella can protect himself well enough and find enough food to afford those huge feathers. That makes him a good prospect as a provider for her chicks.

Why You Should Care About Peacock Feathers

Your branding efforts don’t make your services more effective, less expensive, faster, stronger, or able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

But they signal something about you to your prospects and suspects.

They signal that you’re a professional who understands the impact of a great logo, a usable website, quick responses to emails and phone calls, quality service, and ethical behavior: all the things your peacock feathers don’t intrinsically add.

Who Controls Your Brand?

You're responsible for your brand, but you don't own it and you don't control it. That's because your brand is the sum total of what clients, prospects, suspects, employees, vendors, and competitors think about you: their opinion based on their interactions with you in real life, in business, on the web, through your services.

Your brand is like your reputation, like trust, like respect: you can earn it by what you say and do, but you don't control it, others do.

The best you can do is influence their perception by how you look to them. That's what branding is.