Love what you do (and the people will pay)

Al Ries and Jack Trout have warned us all for decades about the dangers of brand extensions, but that hasn’t stopped or even seemingly slowed down this particular genre of folly, has it? Why it still happens, I’ll leave to people smarter than myself, though if I had to guess, I’d posit that driven by the at-times suicidal pursuit of growth that is now an unquestioned fundamental of late-stage capitalism.

Whatever the cause, it’s hard not to take a little bit of smug satisfaction when you see the theory become practice in the real world.

To wit, I bring you the real-life example of Barnes & Noble, a company that seemed on the verge of collapse during the 2010s, yet somehow came out stronger during and after the pandemic.

Ted Gioia has the full story of the Barnes & Noble turnaround, replete with a misguided pivot to digital, food service in the stores, and pay-to-play schemes with publishers that brought in revenue but absolutely watered down the in-store experience.

At the core of it all is something so stupidly simple and obvious that it seems like it can’t be real or right or that there must be more to the story: Barnes & Noble put a book-lover in charge:

In the case of Barnes & Noble, the new boss was named James Daunt. And he had already turned around Waterstones, a struggling book retailing chain in Britain.

Back when he was 26, Daunt had started out running a single bookstore in London—and it was a beautiful store. He had to borrow the money to do it, but he wanted a store that was a showplace for books. And he succeeded despite breaking all the rules.

For a start, he refused to discount his books, despite intense price competition in the market. If you asked him why, he had a simple answer: “I don’t think books are overpriced.”

Daunt’s first bookstore was a beautiful showplace for books

After taking over Waterstones, he did something similar. He stopped all the “buy-two-books-and-get-one-free” promotions. He had a simple explanation for this too: When you give something away for free, it devalues it.

But the most amazing thing Daunt did at Waterstones was this: He refused to take any promotional money from publishers.

This seemed stark raving mad. But Daunt had a reason. Publishers give you promotional money in exchange for purchase commitments and prominent placement—but once you take the cash, you’ve made your deal with the devil. You now must put stacks of the promoted books in the most visible parts of the store, and sell them like they’re the holy script of some new cure-all creed.

Those promoted books are the first things you see when you walk by the window. They welcome you when you step inside the front door. They wink at you again next to the checkout counter.

Leaked emails show ridiculous deals. Publishers give discounts and thousands of dollars in marketing support, but the store must buy a boatload of copies—even if the book sucks and demand is weak—and push them as aggressively as possible.

Publishers do this in order to force-feed a book on to the bestseller list, using the brute force of marketing money to drive sales. If you flog that bad boy ruthlessly enough, it might compensate for the inferiority of the book itself. Booksellers, for their part, sweep up the promo cash, and maybe even get a discount that allows them to under-price Amazon.

Everybody wins. Except maybe the reader.

Daunt refused to play this game. He wanted to put the best books in the window. He wanted to display the most exciting books by the front door. Even more amazing, he let the people working in the stores make these decisions.

This is James Daunt’s super power: He loves books.

There’s a pseudo-paradox at play here. Doing the simple, obvious thing at the enterprise level is so, so difficult.

We have this example. We have, most famously, Steve Jobs’ maniacal pursuit of tech that the average person could use - with aesthetically beautiful, elegantly simple design at its core - and yet these feel like the exceptions to the rule. They are remarkable because, despite the success this approach breeds, it still happens so rarely at organizations of this kind of scale.

It takes a certain kind of courage to do what Daunt has done or what Jobs did during his second stint at Apple. You have to rid yourself of short-term thinking and not buckle if and when things don’t go that great in the short-term.

But it’s not as simple as being brave. You have to be a true believer too. True belief is what will get people behind you, whether that’s customers or the oft-forgotten staff - you know, the people who make a difference at the experience level on day-to-day, location-by-location basis. Abandoning short-term thinking is great, but it only resets your timescales. True belief, on the other hand, gives you something else: a sort-of moral code around which to organize. It tells you what to be uncompromising about and makes it far easier to decide what not to do from moment to moment. It’s a priceless thing, and it’s what the most enduring brands have figured out that the rest have not.

The big red bag

As sports go, pro tennis ranks right up there with auto racing for bringing a sort-of branding bonanza in to its everyday existence. Almost everything is sponsored - from the nets to the timepieces to the apparel and equipment each player wears - and that’s probably a function of the fact that each player is a brand unto themselves, free to make deals with outfitters and racquet-makers as their game and their fame commands.

If you’re a brand person and a tennis fan - as I am - then there is this ongoing branding-related subplot to the tour, one which reaches its apex at the Australian Open, the first major tournament of the calendar year, and thus the one where offseason branding changes are most noticeable.

The Australian Open reaches it conclusion this weekend, and while there was, as always, some interesting movement (Frances Tiafoe from Nike to Lululemon!), the thing I’m most hung up on is the lumbering, bright red bags any player who uses a Wilson racquet carries on to court.

Wilson, as a brand, has been around for more than a century. It is probably most famous for supplying game balls to the National Football League and then for its volleyballs, thanks to a memorable “cameo” in the film Cast Away, but right behind that somewhere must be its association with tennis, which dates back to just after World War II and stretches right to the present. Serena Williams and Roger Federer both played with Wilson racquets, so if you’ve watched any high-level tennis at all over the last two decades, that iconic, curly red “W” is probably emblazoned in your mind.

Serena and Roger are, of course, retired now, but if I were to do some sort of ranking based on overall brand presence in tennis, I think I’d have to go with Wilson over all other comers (Nike and Rolex are close behind), and it’s all down to those big red bags being lugged around by players sponsored by Wilson.

This is branding at its best. Wilson is leaning in to its heritage hard. Both the color and the script in its logotype possess a timeless and classic quality, which is especially important in a sport like tennis that is obsessed with and reverential toward its own traditions.

But the bags themselves are at once bold - the color jumps off the screen - and astonishingly simple relative to the lines of other competitors. There are just the two colors - red and white - and that familiar script.

Those bags might look quite simple, but they are no simple feat. They tap in to a century of history - the kind of positive brand associations that many of us pick up when we’re kids - but also zag against a field of zigging competitors.

It’s almost enough to make me think about ditching my Head racquet.

Trail maintenance

There are loads of books about what it takes to craft a great brand identity. Start with Marty Neuemeier or Ries and Trout and go from there.

Those works will get you started and give you something to aspire to, but they will not get you through the day-to-day of working on a brand. Indeed, there isn’t much in my experience that’s geared toward the more practical drudgery. So, if you’re like me, you end up finding inspiration in odd corners.

For example, you might be listening to a design podcast about trails - as in trails through nature - and hear something that tracks closely with the life of a brand person.

“I think that the key aspect of a trail is that a trail is a line that evolves. It’s something that we follow–where each time you walk, you’re leaving a slight bit of yourself behind. And the next person who comes picks up on those signals that you’re leaving, and they leave their own signals. And over time, it keeps changing subtly. So, let’s say there’s a big curve in the trail, we’ll take the inside of that curve, and we’ll shave it down and shave it down until it’s a straight line. In a curious way, a trail is something that’s both terrestrial and liquid–and that’s what I find beautiful about them. Unlike roads, you know, or especially railways, which are so fixed–they’re laid down in an almost authoritarian way–a trail is very collaborative and organic.”

That’s author Robert Moore on the podcast 99 Percent Invisible. And over here is me - a dyed-in-the-wool, experienced brand person - trying to think of a better metaphor for what it is to work on a brand every day, and coming up with blanks.

We talk a lot about guidelines in the brand world, but the reality is that most people hear the word guidelines and interpret it as rules. Rules, in turn, mean rigidity - things you can’t do without getting your hand slapped. And sure, that is a component of establishing brand guidelines. There have to be red lines, otherwise you have no brand identity at all.

But I’d encourage my colleagues across the broader enterprise to think of brand identity and the guidelines underpinning them as akin to a trail through the wilderness.

As a mental model, it might help you think a bit differently about what brand teams are trying to achieve and how to anticipate where their work will go next.

A trail, after all, is a path through the wilderness. It shuttles you toward a destination. There are sights you’ll want to stop and see along the way, and it’s almost never a good idea to stray from the path. But there’s also no one dictating every step you take. You might even be able to go off the trail and still get to where you are meant to go. And, as Moore says about trails, they “keep changing subtly.” A brand is never in stasis.

A brand is ever-changing, and it is so because of all of the people who interact with it, and in so doing shape and reshape it ad infinitum. Neuemeier is famous for saying that “a brand isn’t what you say it is, it’s what they think it is.” That sentiment captures the way that a brand can’t really be “owned” by a person or team. There are mindful, deliberate stewards to be sure, but there are hundreds or thousands of people changing its contours on a minute-by-minute basis.

One other metaphor I’ve used with my team comes from my avid tennis playing, and is usually brought up in moments of exasperation. When people cross one of those red lines of ours, I’ll compare it to someone changing the dimensions of a tennis court.

The thing about tennis - and most of our favorite sports - is that there aren’t actually as many rules as you think that pertain to what happens in between the lines. Sure, there’s a ton when it comes to scoring. There are even rules around what happens outside the lines - for example the amount of time you can sit down during a changeover. The actual gameplay, though, is quite simple.

The server has two chances to get the ball within the opponent’s service box. If successful, the opposing players hit the ball back and forth over a net and inside the lines, allowing for one bounce of the ball before it is returned. The person who fails first in their assignment loses the point.

The magic in tennis is in how the players accomplish their task. The constraints of the are few in number but critical to there being any magic at all. If you suddenly change the dimensions of the court or let people hit the ball after two bounces, you’re conjuring a different kind of magic and one that can no longer be described as “tennis.”

So it is with the brand guidelines you should probably go and reread now in a slightly different light. As you’re re-acquainting yourself with them, think of bucolic paths through the forest, waterfalls and vistas dotting the way to your final destination.

Be a Kevin

Kevin Fahrman’s infamous red heart, seen around Portland, Maine for the last few decades.

You probably aren’t building a legacy, professionally or otherwise, that will register at all with anyone other than those with whom you have direct and regular contact. On the off chance that you are building something that will extend beyond your own circle, there’s a decent chance you won’t be alive to fully appreciate your impact.

That might sound like the most dour possible message, but this Valentine’s Day, I’m thinking of it in the exact opposite light.

Last April, Kevin Fahrman died. He was 67. His name didn’t mean much to me before then. But it took on great meaning starting last April because that’s when Kevin was revealed as the infamous Valentine’s Day Bandit here in Portland, Maine. Suddenly, us locals had a name to go with the red hearts that materialized across the city in stores and shop windows and everywhere else in between on the morning of Valentine’s Day for decades running.

Kevin Fahrman left a considerable legacy behind, and his tradition is set to carry on this year, the first without him. There’s a stark contrast between the reach and emotional resonance of his gesture and the complexity and ambition behind it. Put another way, Kevin’s particular brand of banditry had a narrow, simple, good-hearted focus and execution, which is probably why it was so wildly successful.

Take it from Kevin’s family, who is carrying on his tradition by encouraging us all to “Be A Kevin”:

“Every year for decades, all over the little town of Portland, Maine, he secretly put up bright red hearts just in time for Valentine’s Day, delighting everyone. His gesture of pure love was stealthy and mysterious. Totally anonymous. Tireless. Genuine. Heartfelt.”

If you’re wondering why I brought up the legacy word at the beginning of this post, there’s your explanation. For almost all of us here on Planet Earth, all we can really control is how we show up.

People might remember something we make or do - they might map a symbol like a red heart to us in their memory. But that symbol is just a shorthand for all of the emotion tied up in it. If we’re tireless and genuine and heartfelt, and we’re that way year after year, we’ll leave a lasting impact. The tangible things we build - the triumphs and failures - fade from memory quickly. The way you show up isn’t so temporal.

“It’s that process that is the magic”

“Any idiot can have an idea.”

A trusted mentor/colleague/friend blurted this out in a meeting some time ago. He’s Italian, so the bombast of sentiment coupled with his distinctive accent must have made it that much more likely to be seared in my memory. Anyway, I can’t remember what we were discussing specifically, but I know that the general context was the ceaseless drumbeat of “input” you receive when you work on brand identity and in experience design.

It’s part of the deal when you create. You have to be brave enough to go through the act itself and then courageous enough after to hear what everyone else thinks about your brainchild. Some of what you hear will be valuable. A lot of it will not be. Even the good stuff might not be good in the way that someone articulates it to you. Sifting through it all and (hopefully) ending up somewhere even better is part of the work.

Last week, a very old interview with Steve Jobs crossed my LinkedIn feed and brought idiots and their ideas back to the top of my mind. You’ll grasp why in the first minute or so of the clip.

As a culture, we tend to celebrate ideas - that spark or moment of divine inspiration that started everything off. Who doesn’t love a good origin story that explains and imbues with deeper meaning subsequent exploits and achievements in a way that makes it all seem meant to be.

What both Jobs and my friend are saying in their own way is that ideas are wildly overrated. An idea is worth absolutely nothing without the ability to make it real and make it good. There are a lot of people who understand this either because they’ve actually made an idea real themselves or because they’ve worked with and respect people who can. But there are a lot of other people who think, as Jobs says, “that the idea is 90 percent of the work.”

Later on in the interview, Jobs speaks with the perspective of someone who has made an idea real before. “It’s that process that is the magic,” he says.

He’s right, of course. The big idea is vastly more simple to grasp and relate to, but there’s really no “magic” in the idea. That only comes when you close your mouth and roll up your sleeves.

If it’s a device, just wait for Apple

In just a few days, you or me or anyone can pre-order the new Vision Pro from Apple. By the time the Super Bowl is being played, people will be walking around wearing them.

Look, it seems to me that Apple is a different company under Tim Cook than it was under Steve Jobs. It is hegemonic, not an upstart. It’s not quite as groundbreaking. Even for a brand with premium pricing, the Vision Pro has an - ahem - eye-watering price tag ($3,500 compared to, say, $600-$700 for the Oculus). And the marketing for it leans on product features and appeals to authority that probably offends Jobs-ian purists.

As a final caveat, I’m not an expert in this stuff. I’m sure Apple has had some flops that I am forgetting, and I have always been skeptical of VR/AR headsets. People have been talking about this stuff for literally decades and it has not come to fruition in the way forecasted.

But if I had to guess, I would guess that we’re entering a new era of computing - yet another ushered in by Apple.

Late last year, I watched the film BlackBerry, which is great for a lot of reasons, most especially for giving us a bald Glenn Howerton doing a CEO version of Dennis from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The film climaxes with the announcement of an iPhone, which, of course, destroyed Research in Motion’s market share in quite short order. RIM made many mistakes on the road to oblivion, and, at least according to the film, arrogance was its biggest sin.

But, you know, this stuff is also hard. The first-mover’s advantage, if indeed it is an advantage at all, just buys you time. And Apple seems to put pressure on the market like no other - not just from a time-based perspective, but also in the seeming inevitability of it shifting the paradigm.

I’m reminded of this every time I have to turn on the television in my basement and am disappointed to see the Roku interface pop up. No touchpad. No easy connection to my AirPods. Might have to sign in to a streaming service I’ve signed in to scores of times already. Roku was a nice bit of technology when it first arrived, but as usual Apple did the trick of making it simultaneously less conspicuous in my life and also more integral. It won’t surprise me if the Vision Pro turns out the same way.

Authenticity itself

Last week, I finished Matt Singer’s book on Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, titled Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever. If you’re not a film geek of a certain age, I’m not sure I can recommend it. If you are, it’s absolutely worth your time.

I covered the cinephile part of it on my other website, but I think there’s also a lesson in their audacious, unlikely success that can be traced to the power of brand.

Consider only the superficial stuff and it becomes hard to believe that anyone ever heard of these two, much less that millions tuned in to watch them every week at the height of their fame. Ebert was fat. Siskel was bald. Neither had a TV background or were particularly charming. Both were from Chicago - not a backwater exactly, but also not the first (or even second) American city anyone thinks of when they think of film. They never had celebrity guests. They rose to prominence on public television, barely a step above public access. They were a lot more Wayne and Garth than, I dunno, Sonny and Cher.

Why?

Well, as Singer illustrates, Siskel and Ebert were relentlessly authentic. They weren’t particularly good at television at first, and even after they figured that piece out, they never made a show with a lot of sizzle or high production value. Indeed, their would-be successors had much more of those and washed out almost immediately.

What they always brought to the table was rigor and ethic in how they evaluated and talked about films and a real relationship - one forged by the fact that they were rival critics in the same town competing for the same audience. Yes, that relationship evolved over the years, but it never lost its originating spark.

Siskel and Ebert were true to themselves and true to each other. Sometimes that meant they found common ground, and other times that meant confrontational fireworks. But if you watched the show enough - listened to them talk - it was never remotely possible to think that it was all an act, which is the exact opposite of the many, many crosstalk imitators that have fanned out across cable news in the years since this pair pioneered the format. Neither ever gave a good or bad review to play to the audience.

When I talk to people about the underlying philosophy behind building brand well, I spend a lot of time on the twin pillars of authenticity and consistency. Those two words are ripe for misinterpretation. In the wrong hands, authenticity can become just the opposite - an inflexible, one-note worldview. Consistency, similarly, can turn in to rigidity and rule-following.

Get those two things right, though, and you go from having a set of rules that reinforce a single thing to having a framework for making the right decision at any given moment, even if the right decision is to change your rules or branch out.

Siskel and Ebert had no right to be as successful as they were other than the fact that they were their authentic selves every time you tuned in to their show. That, of course, means they had every right to be successful.

Be yourself, and people might pay you millions just for the privilege of watching you talk.