Brand Story

Where's The Sausage? The Brandstory Review.

One of my favorite web logs is David Taylor's BrandGymBlog. David's no-nonsense approach to marketing is one that really appeals to me, so I'm a regular visitor to his site. A couple of months ago I got a copy of David's latest book, Where's the Sausage: Branding based on substance not spin. It's a serious marketing book wrapped in a short parable.

Though I really like David's thinking, I'm generally not a fan of business parables. Too often they use silly characters, absurd situations, and overly simple solutions that don't always transfer well to real business situations--like this book. Books like this include a lot of "what", but not a lot of "how". And when I heard that WTS? was a parable, that's what I expected to get. But then, you can't judge a book by it's cover.

To be sure, the story isn't high literature. But this book contains a generous helping of useful marketing ideas, ways to get insights from your customers, and smart thinking (the how in addition to the what). And the characters ring true more often than not.

It's the story of Bob Jones, salesman at Simpton's Sausages who is asked to spend a year as a brand consultant before being promoted to Sales Director. He's unenthusiastic about the opportunity and immediately sees through the typical marketing BS that comes from his boss and agency contacts. Rejecting their approach to branding (and rebranding), he finds his own way as he manages the neglected sausage brand. He records his feelings several times a month (in a blog or journal) and includes much of what he is learning from his experience. The story is okay, but the real power of the book is in the chapter summaries and ideas Bob uses to rethink his product—all of which (I assume) come from the BrandGym play book.

Among the observations Bob makes:

• A brand should drive the whole business, not just the image wrapper of communication    
    and brand identity.
• A new logo can't cover up the shortcomings of a poor product.
• Many brand extensions are brand ego trips offering nothing new.
• True insight doesn't come from focus groups, it comes from immersing yourself in your
    consumer's world.
• Having little or no funds for conventional marketing can be a great stimulus for creativity.
• Communication that has only emotional sizzle and not product sausage is 'sponsored
    entertainment'.

Add to that the simple exercises and processes that Bob takes his brand through (and that the reader can do with their own brand) and you have a decent little marketing book. Thanks David.

If you're looking for a quick read peppered with smart thinking, you'll like Where's the Sausage.

More Where's the Sausage? Links:
Other reviews of the book can be found here and here.
David's description of the book is here.
Buy it at Amazon.
Read the BrandGym blog.
Video of Hugo Gaines (the book's star marketing,um, expert).
Video of David talking about the book.
Buy David's other books here, here, and here.

Made to Stick—A Few Story-related Thoughts

I recently finished reading Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath (I know, I'm a little late to this party). Anyone involved in telling brand stories (marketers, advertisers, customer service agents, CEOs, PR people, bloggers) should not only read, but ingest, what the Heaths have to say about communicating messages in a way that makes them "sticky".

They retell a variety of stories to make their points: from urban legends to familiar advertising tales like Subway's Jared and The American Legacy Foundation's Truth campaign.

In crafting stories that stick, the authors recommend that you create messages that are Simple (not dumb, but the core of the idea), Unexpected, Concrete (using details to hook the message into memory), Credible, Emotional (the need for analysis is the enemy of stickiness), and follow a Story line. The use the acronym SUCCESS to help you remember the steps.

From the book:

"[Stories] ...naturally embody most of the SUCCESSs framework. Stories are almost always Concrete. Most of them have Emotional and Unexpected elements. The hardest part of using stories effectively is making sure that they're Simple—that they reflect your core message. It's not enough to tell a great story; the story has to reflect your agenda... Stories have the amazing dual power to simulate and to inspire. And most of the time we don't even have to use much creativity to harness these powers—we just need to be ready to spot the good ones that life generates every day."

Chip and Dan note three types of story plots that resonate best. They are: 1. The Challenge Plot (underdog, rags to riches, willpower): think Southwest Airlines, Pepsi Challenge, or Richard Branson. 2. The Connection Plot: think Coke's Mean Joe Green or Hallmark. 3. The Creativity Plot (solving problems in new ways): think ZipCar or Post-its.

Great stuff. I highly recommend this book.

From a branding standpoint, don't miss what the Heaths have to say about the curse of knowledge and how to overcome it. Hint: well-told stories can help.

Check out these other Made to Stick links:
1. Good PDF summary of the main points of the book.
2. Chip and Dan's Blog.
3. You can read a book excerpt here.
4. Reviews from Brand Autopsy, Time, USNews, BusinessPundit. One more here.
5. Podcasts from HBR, Ducttape Marketing, and 800-CEOREAD.
6. An interviews from Guy Kawasaki. Another interview here.
7. The Made to Stick Change This manifesto.
8. The Made to Stick SlideShare.
9. And of course, you can buy the book here (recommended).

Lessons from The Rural Utah Business Conference

Earlier today I spoke to a small group of rural business owners who were participating in the Rural Utah Business Conference. In many cases, these business owners face an enormous challenge—building a business and communicating a great brand story in a small town (or no town at all). Often they have few local customers, few resources, and a very small support network.

While there, I had the opportunity to see a presentation by Kendall Card from Backcountry.com about how they have used blogs to build traffic to their main site. Kendall is at least partly responsible for the content posted to the various Backcountry.com blogs, including Backcountry and The Goat.

And while I tend to shy away from blogging about blogging, two things Kendall said caught my attention. Backcountry invites its customers to post on company blogs about their outdoor experiences. By opening up the posts (and not just the comments) to their most engaged customers, Backcountry builds a lot of content (including photos and video) and attracts lots of new page views from potential customers. And every post is a micro-brand story featuring gear available from Backcountry.com. It's tough to read this post about a trip to Madagascar without thinking, I could use a set of these and one of these the next time I go trekking off to Ranomafana (or the Uintas or Moab)—better stock up now. Even if readers don't buy immediately, they know exactly where they can get their gear when they need it. It's a great way to share a brand story.

Perhaps most importantly, Backcountry can attribute sales north of six figures  back to links from its blogs (sorry, I don't remember the exact number). That may not be a lot to some, but to many small businesses that's a difference maker.

Hmmm... sharing relevant brand stories and making money at the same time. No wonder Liberty Media was so interested in these guys.

Disruption and Blue Nile

A short follow-up to my last post on Blue Nile...

Another reason I love Blue Nile is their disruptive business model.

When CEO Mark Vadon was looking for an engagement ring, he went to Tiffany's to find what he was looking for. In the store he was largely ignored by the presumably snooty staff who must have thought that the Birkenstock and t-shirt clad guy wasn't a likely buyer. Miffed, Vadon left the store without spending a dime.

More importantly, he had just identified a part of the market that diamond retailers were ignoring—regular guys who don't understand diamonds, but need rings. They have money to spend, but need to be walked through the process, instead of being sneered at. Predictably the people with a vested interest in the status quo have fought Vadon from the beginning, refusing to do business with his suppliers and encouraging his competition to sell at a loss to hurt Blue Nile's profitability. You can read the whole story here. It's a classic tale of disruption.

Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen defines disruptive innovations:

"A disruptive innovation is a new product or service or a new business model that doesn't attack the core market by bringing a better product to established users in direct competition with the leaders in an industry, but rather it comes into the low end of the market, either through a business model that can compete at much lower costs, can compete profitably at lower costs, or it brings to the market a product or service that is so much more convenient and simple to use and affordable, that a whole new population of people who previously couldn't afford or didn't have the skill to own and use a product can now own one."

Blue Nile clearly fits the definition. Business 2.0 listed a bunch of future disruptors here (sadly they left out this one, but then they can't write about us all the time). I love this quote from Erick Schonfeld, the author of the Business 2.0 article:

"The most disruptive businesses, though, don't replace existing products. They compete against non-consumption by opening up new markets that were never before possible. Think of the airplane, the cell phone, or the Internet. Sure, some industries might get trampled by these new technologies—but only if those industries are not giving consumers what they really want. If you think about it, disruption is just another name for the age-old economic concept of creative destruction."

If you've got the bug to learn more, Christensen's books on disruption, The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution, and Seeing What's Next are great resources on the power of disruption. This short article is a pretty good preview of the thinking outlined in the books. Still more good stuff can be found here.

The Secrets of Selling

Today's Weekend Wall Street Journal features a short article by Steve Cohn called the Secrets of Selling (this week's installment of the Five Best series). It's a list of Cohn's choice of five best books about selling. Here's the list:

1. "Understanding Media" by Marshall McLuhan (MIT Press, 1964).
2. "Brand Sense" by Martin Lindstrom (Free Press, 2005).
3. "Reality in Advertising" by Rosser Reeves (Knopf, 1961).
4. "Why We Buy" by Paco Underhill (Simon & Schuster, 1999).
5. "Branded Nation" by James B. Twitchell (Simon & Schuster, 2004).

Interesting that the list doesn't feature a single Zig Ziglar or Tony Robbins type sales book. Nothing here about cold calling or other sales techniques. They're all about branding, unique selling positions, how brands attract interest and sales, and marketing. So sales is marketing.... hmmm.

If that's the case (and I believe it is), why is so little advertising designed to sell?

The Value of a Good Story

On Tuesday Apple's CEO and master storyteller, Steve Jobs, announced a "revolutionary" new mobile phone with a wide screen touch pad, Internet browser, built-in iPod, visual voice mail, Google maps feature, and much more. The reviews so far have been very good. Time writes: "Apple's new iPhone could do to the cell phone market what the iPod did to the portable music player market: crush it pitilessly beneath the weight of its own superiority. This is unfortunate for anybody else who makes cell phones, but it's good news for those of us who use them."

It's even better news for Apple's share holders. On the day of the announcement, Apple's share price increased more than 8% or $7.10 a share. And shares of both Palm (maker of the Treo) and Research in Motion (maker of blackberry) fell, 5.69% and 7.85% respectively (a collective loss of more than 2 billion dollars).

But here's the kicker. Apple doesn't even have a completely functional model yet. Those lucky few who have seen it report that some features are not yet ready for prime time. The demos are cool. The pictures are cool. But Apple won't have a phone ready to deliver for almost 5 months.

So all Apple really has is a well-designed model and a terrific story, worth more than 6 billion dollars. True, Apple is very good at delivering products that change categories. And that's what investors are betting on. Given their track record, it's a pretty safe bet.

But until the iPhone starts shipping, all Apple has is a very impressive, very well-told story.

What's your story worth?

Hat tip: tuaw.com.

The Best Business Books of 2006

I'm a sucker for books. Spy novels. Detective stories. Short story anthologies. Histories. Politics. Religion. And, best of all, business books. I read as many as I can, and I buy more than that.

So I look forward to seeing which books will make the "best of" lists at the end of the year. My favorite list is published by Strategy & Business. Check out their list here (free registration required).

Of course there are lots of other "best" lists, including BusinessWeek, Amazon, Financial Times, and the guys at CEO-READ (Todd, Jack, and Kate).

My list of 2006 books isn't necessarily a "best" list, but rather a list of this year's business book concepts that interested me most:

Mavericks at Work by William Taylor and Polly LaBarre
Success Built to Last by Jerry Porras, Stewart Emery, and Mark Thompson
Citizen Marketers by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba
Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies by Nikos Mourkogiannis,
L.L.Bean: The Making of an American Icon by Leon Gorman
Tribal Knowledge by John Moore

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got some reading to do.

UPDATE: Does this book scare anyone else as much as it does me?

Goodbye Fast Company

Well, it finally came.

My last issue of Fast Company, wrapped with a special cover warning in capital letters: THIS IS YOUR LAST ISSUE!

Good bye Fast Company. What we shared was good. Really good.

As a subscriber since issue #5, we had a great thing going. But you changed. And not for the better. At first I thought it was the dot com bubble. That threw us all for a loop. But while businesses recovered, you didn't. Maybe it was the acquisition. Your style and focus definitely changed. But two editors later, you still haven't found your way. 

You used to be about unique ideas like "Built to Last," "A Brand Called You," "The Wow Project" and "Permission Marketing." Now you focus on light bulbs? And horse tracks? Interesting articles, but not the kind of stuff you were printing when we first met. It's not like there aren't great ideas, new business ideas, and unique business approaches to write about.

I could go on. But why? You're different now. And you're not going to change back. I've been waiting for nearly two years for you to come around. In the words of Bob Marley, "I don't wanna wait in vain." So it's time for me to move on.

We'll always have our memories. It was good while it lasted. Good bye.

Way Worthy Read—Tribal Knowledge

I've been waiting anxiously for the publication of John Moore's Tribal Knowledge for several months. His blog is the first I began reading regularly—nearly 4 years ago. I don't have my copy of the book yet, but to whet my appetite, John released a short ChangeThis manifesto with a few of the ideas he shares in his book. It's a very worthy read. Check it out here.

The fundamental principle of the manifesto (with which I wholly agree): "A business can't sustain itself on image, no matter how much money is dumped into sporadic, heavy-up advertising campaigns. Companies that put their money behind their brand and not their business fail to realize that the business is the brand. And to realize the full potential of the brand, one must work on and work in the business every day of every year. You cannot create a brand before you create a business—the process is simultaneous. As you build your business, you create your brand."

You can learn more about the book at John's Tribal Knowledge site.

And, in case you can't get enough Starbuck's lore, another terrific book about the genesis of Starbuck is Howard Shultz's Pour Your Heart Into It. It's one of my favorite Brand Stories. But be careful, reading it may infect you with an entrepreneurial bug. Let's hope John's book has the same effect.

The Blogosphere—Open Discussion or Affirmation and Argument?

Over the past 7 days, I’ve been called a few less-than-friendly names in a series of blog posts and forum discussions. According to the post comments, I am a:

Racist. Liar (in a backhanded way). Drone.

I have character flaws. But I am not a racist. I do not lie. And I’m not a corporate drone.

The story:
I work for a company called Logoworks. We specialize in the creation of high-quality logos, websites, brochures, and other design. Our business model uses a combination of in-house designers and a dispersed workforce to create the art we provide for our customers. Our clients receive a wide variety of art and a very competitive price. It’s a disruptive business model that has affected pricing and expectations in the marketplace.

And we had a hiccup along the way. Without going into too much detail (details here), we inadvertently placed 3 logos in our gallery that were not original. When this was brought to our attention, we admitted our mistake and immediately removed the artwork from our website. More importantly, we terminated our relationship with the designers who provided the artwork. None of the artwork was sold to a client. We also strengthened our oversight policies to help ensure it wouldn’t happen again. And so far, it hasn’t.

At the time we also engaged in the “conversation” on the forum where our mistake was first reported to try to explain what happened. But rather than an open discussion about how we were addressing the issue, we found that most of the participants were only interested in affirming their previously held, negative opinions about us. We even invited a couple of critics to visit Logoworks’ headquarters, at our expense, to meet our design team, but were rebuffed, then mocked.

More recently, we created a corporate blog to share the truth about some of these issues, which still come up from time to time. This has apparently stirred up the hornet’s nest again. As a company, we welcome honest feedback, debate, even criticism of our business model. But rather than engaging in a conversation, the critics accuse us of being racist and lying about our intentions. And now I’ve been called a corporate drone for trying to share the other side of the story.

I don’t intend to discuss the good/bad of Logoworks’ business model or design practices here. That debate is raging elsewhere. Instead, this is a comment on the state of the blogosphere. We live in an age of rage. But it strikes me that criticism and feedback is more acceptable when it’s not laced with name-calling, vitriol, or worse.

For the record:
#1: Logoworks does not pursue racist outsourcing policies as we have been accused of doing. Yes we have a dispersed work force. But we pay our designers in Sweden, New Zealand, Canada, and elsewhere exactly the same amount we pay our designers in the United States. We are one of the few companies in the world with a dispersed work force that does this. Most people would call this egalitarian, not racist.

#2: I did not lie or dissemble when I wrote in a blog comment that our inspiration for the myths came from various sources. They did. I was involved in the process.

#3: I believe deeply in Logoworks’ mission to help small businesses look great. We’ve created a company that is unique in its ability to help small businesses that couldn’t afford design services in the past. It’s a model that has worked for hundreds of talented designers and thousands of happy customers. I also believe that no one in the design industry has addressed the issues of plagiarism as well as we have. Are we perfect? No. Will we make mistakes in the future? Possibly. Will we address any problems in the future and make it right for our customers? Absolutely.

Trying to defend a company against disinformation and other inaccuracies does not make one a drone. Repeating the same tired criticisms in forums and blogs without regard for the truth or open discussion, well, THAT might.

Ironically, in one of the forums, a designer wrote about finding a Logoworks ad link on a website. She wrote the webmaster to share the above story (although I assume from a less than neutral angle) and the website took our link down. Fair enough. Another designer wrote in response to that post: “Wow, I'm impressed. I really respect people who listen to the advice/complaints of others...and really consider whether it might be valid.” Apparently that only applies to those who listen to and believe our detractors. Others, who listen, then agree with us, are denigrated and harassed.

So why are people so upset? As I said above, Logoworks is a disruptive company. Because we can create a high-quality product that customers appreciate at a lower price, we are helping to change an industry. Some designers (not all) who can’t offer a better value to their customers are threatened by this. So, they lash out, rather than adapt to the new reality. As a highly visible, well-funded company, we take the brunt of the criticism.

Last thing: I understand that not all designers feel this way about Logoworks. Some have been fair in their assessments and criticism. Some have even approached us, after reading the criticism, and asked to work for us. These few generally seem interested in a real discussion. Unfortunately, their voices are often drowned out by the shrill criticisms of the mob.

We listened to criticisms and made improvements to our system. Will our detractors notice? Only if they’re interested in a real discussion, rather than a flame war. In the mean time, let’s keep the debate rational, the volume low, and the personal attacks to a minimum.