Marty Neumeier - Minding the Brand Gap and Beyond

hi my name is marty Neumayer I'm the author of eight books on branding and innovation and you're watching behind the brand with Brian Elliott I mean we were just sitting back you know chopping it up reminiscing about the good ol days and not a track of my roots where I came from where I'm going hi I'm Brian Elliott welcome to another edition of behind the brand today I'm here with best-selling author Martin Neumayer are you welcome to the show thanks Brian I usually ask my guest how did you get this job it's a long story I was born in Burbank California you probably don't want me to go back that far well actually I don't mind let's go back in the chronology as far as you want to go for for relevance and I'm also curious unusually asks I usually ask what you want to be when you when you grow up when you you know when you're a kid it starts what were you thinking about I decided what I wanted to do when I was seven so became pretty easy after that I didn't have to worry about that part I just had to worry about how he's gonna get where I wanted to go you know when you're in the second grade or something you know the whole class gets asked the question what do you want to be when you grow up and some kids will say like little boys to say I'm gonna be a fire truck or whatever it is I want to be a nurse I said I want to be a commercial artist and everyone went what's that and you know not too many kids would even know that's a an option but my mother went to art school so I learned how to draw from her she knew how to keep us busy on rainy days and taught us how to draw on so you knew what a commercial artist was you were being groomed from an early age and I and I could draw a little bit and so you know at that age if you show some talent at anything you get known for it really quickly and so I became Mario you know the artist right and I bring little drawings in the class and things like that and then I thought well that's what I am so that's my identity and I'm gonna go for it and you know from seven years old to whatever it was 18 when I went to art school that was so clear to me that's what I was going to work on so it was hard for me to pay attention to anything that didn't contribute to that goal makes sense I mean wonderful though to have that clear path yes no I mean you know I don't know if it's good but definitely was my path so you did the elementary school middle school high school got to college got your art degree I would assume I went to Art Center College in Los Angeles which was amazing and I dropped out because it was the 60s and that's what you did which was you know so so I had a period of maybe four years of floundering around you know trying to get my bearings and be what then was called a graphic designer so things changed between being a commercial artist and you know and then in the 60s it was graphic designer and you know got out there and just found some clients and did advertising and trademark design and all the stuff you can do and became what I was hoping to be I'm having these visions of Mad Men the the TV series and you toiling away maybe you have one of these standup desks because it's a at an angle and doing anything making your pitches and you know if it was after the Mad Men days you know Mad Men was that was the days when you had three martini lunches and everything was about getting the client and making the pitch my life was not so much about that it was about doing really good work and then there was a lot of handwork in those days she did a lot with your hands it wasn't on there's no computers yeah I just want to give maybe the younger people who are watching some context that it wasn't just like you know ctrl alt print you know it was like we had something called rub down type and so this was like for headlines in ads you would get these translucent sheets of paper and they cost five dollars or something you had all these alphabets on them and you'd place them over a sheet and you'd rub the type off of that and peel it up and there would be a letter that's your font that is your font and and you would like maybe do the whole headline with that yeah and how many fonts did you have to choose from was it oh maybe not as much as now but probably a couple dozen good ones you know yeah so yeah a gothic but that's the kind of stuff you'd be doing a lot of handwork which was you know time-consuming and silly so computer really helped that but also that I think in those days when you were drawing or your compositions would be better because you took more time you're thinking you're using your hand and your brain together to make things look beautiful now it's a bit different but I'm seeing a lot of really good work coming out today too so the one thing that the computer did was teach everybody about typography like five times as fast hi Fargo fee is a very at the time nobody even knew what the word font meant right that was the public didn't know that was in fact designers didn't use that word font they use typeface so you learn your typefaces you learn what characters look good together what sizes work and it's all very fiddly sensitive stuff and you really need to train your brain it took me maybe 10 years to get to be expert at typography and now people can learn it in a couple of years because they can try so many things so quickly and if they're if they have good guidance good mentoring they can learn how to make beautiful typography very quickly in the old days you have to pay for every bit of type that you bought for your clients so it could be you know $30 for a little paragraph and if it didn't look good you had to pay it again yeah it's like Lexington licensing music right yeah that's right so much easier now you know things things change though and a lot of the talents that that I had would be probably better used today working in oh I would say Web Design maybe or or maybe maybe video video with a lot of graphics in it that would be probably what I would be doing today let me ask you a bit more about typography cuz it's so interesting to me it's it is an art form and probably you know as I kind of dream back into the different eras some typefaces are very distinctive right like you know 20s 30s 40s every period sort of has its typeface right in yeah there are styles that you use so stylistic periods you go through but in in in most typography it hasn't really changed since the Renaissance interest I mean if you open a novel it'll probably be set in Garamond or something which was probably 1600s something like that but in the 1500s is when most of the reader typefaces that we like to read were invented and we're still using them today nothing has changed yeah I think about ads billboard headlines and yes books magazines there's always a fashion to that so along those lines because I know a lot of people watching they're they're either you know managing a brand or maybe they're helping they're on the design team talk to us about what designer what do we get wrong about choosing the right type face the right font mm-hmm for our brand how do we how do we figure that out well work with good people yeah and be humble about it how do they know I think it's something you start learning when you're in school if you go to a good school and it takes a real eye for it is it about symmetry is it about what is it about it's about restraint it's like good acting right I mean good acting is so subtle doesn't look like acting typography is the same way it shouldn't get in front of the message it shouldn't be between you and the message you shouldn't look at it and go wow I love that typeface that's really cool it should just be oh I get it or hey I'm excited about that information so anything that gets in in between you and the the outcome that the designer wanted is a problem so it's usually restraint so that's hard to learn because it's really easy to say oh I want a feeling of a Fiesta on this headline ya know resist that is totally resistant ya know very understated more confetti here that's not about the typeface you cannot use typography to be a flamboyantly creative it's not a good idea unless that's the whole idea of whatever you dis you're doing so let me say a recent example of maybe an example of this we recently lost Kobe Bryant we noon Kennedy did an amazing tribute just this last week in this Nike ad which was very very understated no graphics all audio did you see it we'll always be that kid tanti amici local chef Anita lo Jakarta who uses until mode to be arranged [Applause] this guy right here like my words is gonna be unbelievable [Applause] four o'clock in the morning five o'clock good morning taking 500 shots [Applause] back-to-back titles for the Los Angeles Lakers three-peat and sweep your fourth NBA championship [Applause] one of the first time I knew of your greatness you would think about what should I do to motivate this guy this guy this guy [Applause] [Music] sound and his but the Lakers heat up at the free [Applause] [Applause] and the Oscar goes to deer basketball tennis kicked of AHA Tyler here biases failure he didn't just show up at game he was deeply involved in coaching young kids is the most important thing we can do [Music] [Applause] being small and having a lot of space around it it seems momentous right it seems very important that's something that a lot of people don't get whitespace makes things important it makes things serious it also makes them friendlier putting more on a page or on a screen does not help usually usually makes it worse yeah because there's there's nothing else to focus on just the words yeah it's just that and it just seems so important so a lot of that um got sort of figured out in the 30s 40s 50s 60s where the people really good designers would use understatement a lot of understatement a lot of white space and it just blew people away so do you think most design then just going the other side is too garish yeah it's always too garish yeah most design is too much it's not organized well it's not thoughtful it's not restrained it looks messy you know that's the worst thing is messiness messiness unless that's your whole idea is to be messy it's not good how about color how much does color influence that's a good question a lot of people think colors super important for design it can be but color is very personal to people like you can't just say oh red is gonna be the best thing for this well some people like red some people hate red so you know it has it has its place but I would say it takes a backseat to form the form of something the shape of things is way more powerful than color and so what do you mean by the shape of things out the shape determines what it is like a letter the letter B right so how do I know that's a letter B because it has a form that I recognize it has a line in two half circles that goes right into our brains whether that be is in red or yellow or blue or some you know gray hardly matters to our understanding of it it may affect the emotion we feel but controlling that for a whole audience is difficult and I learned this from test sting designs with audiences so I was one of the few designers in my generation to actually test things and this happened when I was doing a lot of packaging I was doing packaging for software packaging for software products in the in the 90s and Apple was one of my clients and we had a big job of redoing all their software packaging so very important to them in there they wanted to get this right oh yeah and when you bring up Apple I can't think of anyone who was more attention to detail on fonts than Steve Jobs Steve Jobs had that calligraphy class when he was going to college and it like stuck with him I have lots of stories about Steve Jobs in typography but we won't go there now but yeah I mean it's important to them this is an imperial when Steve Jobs was out of Apple he was in exile and they were struggling with what is Apple we're not doing really well anymore we don't know who our audience is we don't know what our place is in the world and we think that we need to be more corporate because we're losing out to companies like Microsoft you're selling tons of software to corporations we need to be look a little more serious and so they had done a lot of packaging packages for their software that looked corporate and not in a good way and it wasn't working so we got the job to redo it all 15 products so it was really important to them it was all their product line so they said whatever we do we need to test this we can't just like take a guess we're we're not gonna go with your gut feeling we're not gonna go with our gut feeling I said great this is super so we put in a budget for testing what you focus grips in no you know people say focus groups a lot when they think testing this is something to really be careful of focus groups are a bunch of people sitting around a round table where they get to express their opinions and it's not a good venue for deciding what's good and you know in the marketplace because what happens is first of all you're not experts second of all they don't even know their own lines they usually don't know what they really think or how they actually behave when they're shopping right and they may be just telling you what they think you want to hear exactly they want to be you know critics and and what happens is one person at each table every time you do one of these will take over the conversation and that'll be the answer for the whole group and it'll be different from each one will be different she's the lead juror so here's the secret about focus groups they were designed to focus the research that's all if you don't know what to research you get a focus group together to find out what to focus on it's not a it's not a way to judge work before it goes into the marketplace if you want to do that you have to judge it you know what we call a near life situation this would be like you know like in their in our case in a store on the shelf with actual customers shopping for that sort of product like experiential experience real test again you're doing it right and so what you do is you take you get two or three different options and you put them on a shelf they look like they're finished they're in a situation exactly like the one where customers are going to experience so and then you talk to them and you never ever ask them which one do you like that is like that you're right back in the focus group syndrome you say which one did you see first good right because this competition on there's a lot of clutter in the in the store which one did you see first why do you think you saw that well because it the bright yellow just popped out well this one's yellow - why didn't you see that oh yeah it's not that it's because of the yellow and the blue together they look great and then okay so that one that you you like what do you think that does was it four and if they can't figure that out really quickly you've got a problem right so you have questions like that and if you ask twenty thirty people and you start getting the same answers you it gets through to you right so uh what we would do like with Apple is we go to the store talk to a bunch of people and have our clients hanging around pretending to be shopping and listening and we'd be taking notes too and at the end of that session we would know really clearly what we had to do and once we learn how to do that for Apple and other companies we were able to increase sales by three to five times over the previous packaging just by you know paying attention to the right things and then asking people like talking to them huge and and I learned a lot about typography in the real world from that setting to I'll give you an example Kodak was in desperate shapes you know they're just about gone now but they knew that their future was not in film they knew it they just couldn't get out of that you know I mean they're making money at it so it's a but they did start doing a digital imaging and we got the job to do all their software packaging and they were like Apple saying look this is really important we need to get everything right including you know typefaces and imagery and all that because it's do or die for us and I said right so let's let's just take this slowly and so we we worked on a bunch of ideas and we tested those idea being kind of a graphic that would get your attention and express something about the software and we got down to where that we knew which image was going to work but they said it's it's the logo though of the the way we treat the name of the product how do we know that that typeface is going to be the best typeface like in a sales situation I said you know that's that's getting pretty nitpicky but let's let's look into that so well so let me just pause and ask you had that logo been in existing there's like a hundred-year-old company right well the logo in this case I'm using logo in its original meaning which is a logo type it's a product or a company's name that's done in typography and not as a symbol not the mark not the mark it's just type logo type logo is Greek for word so it's just a tie you're just taking the name of the product and making it you know choosing a typeface right that's all that's all we really but they wanted to make sure it was completely correct and was going to really work in the marketplace and I applaud that so we said I said why don't we just start with a very simple test will do the same package and we'll have the name of the product in Times Rome and everybody knows Times Roman no thanks to Steve Jobs the seraphs the little feet and we'll do one in Helvetica bold right so no serifs very modern machine like easy to read complete opposites right both easy to read complete opposites type typographically and we tested those and this is where I got my sort of come to Jesus moment talked to a lot of people and we'd show them those two packages and which one did you notice the same routine like which one feels right to you and they we had people like saying I don't see the difference and we're talking about the name of the product being I don't know an inch and a half high significant difference so and really different typefaces yeah none of the nuances that we typographers designers care about like subtle differences between Carolyn's and you know the times and bodoni and all these sort of typefaces just like the most contrast you could get and people would look at the packages and go I I don't see any difference and then I say okay I'm gonna put them right next to each other here okay now which one I don't see any difference okay look at the name of the product yeah it's the same look at the typeface look at the font new word in in the in the culture look at the font oh oh a person would say this one has this one has little feet on it like that was a big revelation to people and I'm just thinking why did I go to art school you know if if the typeface hardly matters to people that like looking straight through it they're not even seeing the typeface why are we caring so much about this so all they want is the name of it they're trying to get information from it because you know they have to make a decision just the facts ma'am yeah and so that was like a wake-up call for me in you know really trying to learn what people care about as far as graphics and how they understand communication you know print communication because we all thought it was all about nuance and obviously we were wrong there's important stuff to care about but that the differences in typefaces is probably not the main thing yeah I mean it's like a Maslow's hierarchy of needs kind of thing like typography not at the top yeah I just want to know what it is what am i lucky guy does it do what am i responding to and we we are as designers we were never taught to go back to first principles like what's the psychology of understanding current communication and what do people have to whether they going through what's important what's not important what sells what they'll you know all that stuff I had to kind of relearn so I was probably 40 years old at this point you know been been in doing this for 20 years and and decided just to kind of look at it fresh and and and we learn all this stuff and in doing that I got a lot of great insights into design I started a magazine called critique and we started looking at things more objectively for designers and we did that for five years and put out a premium magazine called critique and at that stage after five years of that a big shift happened in the economy and everything collapsed for me and a lot of people around me so we had the dot-com bust we had 9/11 and recession in rapid order and you know I lost two companies a magazine and a design company and had to reinvent myself and that's why I started thinking about you know I've been the dressing designers a lot trying to help them understand business and it's been rough they resist right they want to be artists so I decided to just do a sort of George Costanza I'll do the opposite I will not talked about talk to designers I'll talk to business people about design and that worked that worked beautifully so I wrote a book called the brand gap and that was the beginning of what I'm doing now so I wrote that book about the the the the gulf between what companies think they're doing and what customers think they're doing right and that's a big gap and companies can fall into that gap and I so it was about how do you get your strategy and customer experience to match up to link up so that you're actually doing what your say you're doing and everyone understands you because it makes a huge difference in how you're perceived and how successful you are so that became the start of the eight books that I've written so far and then that will continue so you broke this book you literally wrote the book on brand I have a lot of brand questions the show is called behind the brand so the whole intention was to pull back the curtain and kind of reveal the people the strategies the ideas in the execution behind some of these iconic brands and people who in my opinion are brands personal branding has become a big thing especially in the last few years wasn't that big when we first started the show what I want to know is first can you break down the definition of what branding is a brand is I want to talk about marketing and advertising let's start was brand first well how do you define what a brand is this is important this is where people go wrong right away they they misunderstand what a brand is here in the in the 21st century it's more than a logo see this is what people don't get they think of you know a brand is something you stick on like like branding a cow or something and we did start there you know ten thousand years ago but now a brand is much more so the way I define it is a brand is a person's gut feeling about a product service or company and I'm choosing all those words carefully so it's a gut feeling because we don't make our purchase decisions in a logical way even though we think we do mostly it's we use intuition we use our emotions come into play we try to be as logical as we can but it's a gut feeling and we don't understand everything about the products that were buying we're just going with our gut it's so built into that sounds like there's an assumption of an awareness so you have to be yeah there's no brand without awareness right so you have to see the ad basically if the product you have to hear the name those are all touch points we call touch points any way you come into contact with the brand is part of your understanding part of your gut feeling about that product and that can be negative or positive it can be negative it can go from positive to negative so yeah I mean you know Warren Buffett said it takes you know 20 years to build a reputation five minutes to lose it and applies to branding to you can you live by the brand but you can die by the brand so if you do something pretty horrible some company behavior that that goes viral and I mean you can you can lose millions maybe billions of dollars of brand value which is this sort of imaginary number but it's definitely it's it's something it's a number maybe you can't understand it but it's really important to the company well you started telling that Apple story so now I'm just replaying that Apple movie in my mind where they started you know or Stephen waze waze is very focused on Apple 2 and that was everything and then Steve left and they had a really hard time branding themselves as the computer for students or young people or a computer on every desk whatever they're trying to do and it wasn't until Steve came back that he sort of rebranded well I think they had something more than that even in the beginning which was this is the computer for the rest of us that was the idea so they were possessed really smart helped by their advertising agency shiet day in figuring this out they found an enemy was IBM IBM yeah so iBM is you know there were people at IBM that said we there's probably only need for five computers in the world and of course nobody can really use those except for those sort of high high priests of the computing world well these are white guys let's face it white shirts red ties yeah blue coats under that but you know because there are IBM so you had this very corporate idea of what a computer was and they're saying no everyone should have one of these and so you had the 1984 commercial where the woman who runs up and throws a hammer into the screen and Big Brother iconic breaks into shards really positioning great so that's great start for a grant and they just went with that now then they had problems like figuring out well which way should we go with this should it be the Macintosh should it be the Apple two should it be students I mean they had to figure all that out is it for businesses is it just for personal use so that's not branding though and you tell me what you think to me that sounds like segmentation well they're struggling with the brand because they're trying to figure out what their their position is who's it for who's the audience and of course that they can't know all that in the beginning they have to figure that out but they knew they got the big thing right which is our purpose is to bring computing to everyone huge nobody else had that so mostly did it they did a great job they paid attention to the quality of all the communications they put out they paid attention to the quality of the products they had Steve Jobs who was who could be the spokesperson it was willing to do it and did a pretty good job and kind of created a religion around there really well that's positive because I have questions about that if you are an outspoken founder or face of the company I think of someone like Richard Branson and virgin or Steve Jobs or even someone like Mark Cuban who owns the Mavs you know he's sort of the face of the Mavs right he's out in front how do you make that decision whether or not you should have a mark a logo mark you should have Branson's face front chances now either or but I think if you have a founder I think it works especially well with a founder rather than a corporate CEO that's you know who's been hired to come into a company later it could happen that way too but if you still have a founder and the founder is fairly charismatic and likes to do this kind of work it can be really powerful so then you've got a situation where you have a two level brand because you have the company brand more than two level ski a company brand you have product brands and at the top you have the CEO brand that's actually a new thing to try to control what that brand is that's something I'm involved in now so I'm the director of CEO branding at liquid agency so we're just sort of banging through all the options and like how do you how do you make that work for CEOs what has to happen what's what's the process what's the framework for something like that because most of the star CEOs are we yeah but they need to be careful because they represent the brand not just themselves so those the CEO brand and the company brand have to connect yeah well Elon Musk comes to mind yes he goes and he's made a few mistakes yeah let's talk about that so and you know are we judging the mistakes based on the when the stock price just follows well that's that's major yeah yeah he says things that he doesn't realize how important they are or he goes on Joe Rogan is you know smokes a joint or something yeah so that's all reflects on the company brand as well as his own brand so now he's got that problem to deal with how do I make those things work together and if there's no framework for that it's it could be a problem it could end up causing a lot of problems so I think that's a new area that it's going to start forming up it's like that understanding of what a CEO brand is because you need to have CEOs need to be real people - they have to be authentic maybe they do have to light up a joint yeah well let's stay on the lawn for a second so you know alongs involved in three different businesses generally speaking I'm sure he has many others but he has the whole Solar City you know he's got Tesla and then he's got his space X company that's got the battery company - but maybe that's part of Tesla yeah I think that's part of the solar city or somehow I think his evil plan is to give the hardware away and then become the new supplier electricity for the world yeah but is he what is he doing right he's enthusiastically presenting the company to her health you know he's taking he's taking the risks and he's out there unabashed yeah unabashed and so he comes off as authentic so yeah that's really important so he's got that sometimes he's just a bit too brad loose with it you know careless let's say with with his reputation but I think he'll learn but couldn't you argue then like say like you know Tesla owners of course it's now valued the number one valued car company in the world which is amazing well the Germans are like thinking they're they're having this existential moment they're realizing like if they don't do something they're gonna lose their monopoly on car manufacturing yeah I mean everything it's like wet sand under the feet right but I guess where I was going with this is here's this guy who is unabashedly you know out there on Twitter saying stuff he shouldn't you know having these personal relationships romantic relationships he does basically whatever he wants this rogue mentality appeals to these early adopters who have bought it does Tesla I think it'll serve him well in the beginning and it's kind of this idea of this you know I would rather have a hundred people who would fall on their sword for me than a million people that would do nothing mentality right we're and that's he's building the brand around this same kind of almost Apple asked sort of rogue rabid totally totally Apple asked loyal followers right mm-hmm that's it so I would say mostly he's doing things well I'd love what I was if you were sitting here from him you say well would you like to do them a little bit better what can we do to improve your batting average because you've got the basics you've got the basic skills to make his basic impulses you got the vision how can we make that how can we bump that up like five times ten times but you know in bowling they have those little railings you put up for your eight-year-old yeah we need those for him but Ken but would he allow those to go up I mean would that ruin his brand I don't know speculate a little bit could yeah depends where you put those those guardrails if you put them in too tight yeah it becomes boring and people sense when someone is being real and that's very important to a founder brands you have to be real would you censor him and just say quit spouting off about you know things that are so polarizing I mean what is it and is it like I think we would have long talks yeah about it because no you don't want a sense or someone because it shows right shows if they're being too careful yeah but maybe it's more like you have to be able to bounce back from something that you say you have to be able to correct for it in a way that makes it even better sometimes making mistakes is your best road to being successful right so stay on that I love talking about Elon and on Tesla so did you see the cyber truck launch did you see any of them no I didn't see that okay so here's what happened yeah well maybe that was a little too hard [Laughter] it didn't go through prove it the cyber truck is the ugliest design thing you've ever seen and many people made fun of it for like being something you'd like some high school or design and some like old quark Express esque kind of software programs just like the ugliest thing you've ever seen really bad CG yeah the design is interesting but it's it's very awkward bulky and not attractive at all is that on purpose that's the question so is Elon a genius because that was done deliberately to sort of really polarize people or was it just like I'm doing so when I was at the studios I heard anecdotally the story about Spongebob Squarepants do you know the cartoon I've seen it but I don't know the story you're talking about as the story goes some of the production people and artists were saying you know what kids will watch just about anything that's if it's a cartoon they could watch a sponge they would watch a sponge that talked and so they designed it and launched this incredibly successful franchise SpongeBob SquarePants on that premise at least that's the lower-right but the premise isn't the reason it's successful that just happened to be how they got to it right what's successful is it's just so surprising yeah right it's so odd that it stands out so you're onto something super important with the truck I haven't seen it but I can tell you from you know okay so think about it like this I think more people are familiar with the Prius yes also very ugly yeah but not as ugly as it was and definitely not as ugly as a cyber truck right however it didn't start being ugly it started looking like a Corolla or something like the first iteration of a Prius was really ordinary and boring it's like carpet potato up or maybe a bar soap it was simple the problem is is you're trying to say that this car that looks like every other car you've seen is special right so you don't want that you want something that's really different and I would say that if it's super different maybe it needs to be a bit ugly or at least challenging to your tastes right and then people will say that's weird why is it like that and then you have the opening to say it's like that because it has to be right it has to be like that and then people go oh oh because oh yeah its hybrid and maybe I don't know something to do with aerodynamics who knows they don't doesn't matter the main thing is is they see something that stands out and they connected with something good and then that ugliness turns into beauty in a kind of weird way is it like the concept of anchoring or you know like you something's establishing you know it relative to everything else yeah could even be a price price is the same it's it's more just it's branding is all about differentiation like it's built on differentiation if you don't have something different to offer who cares it doesn't matter if it looks like everything else or it acts like everything else then the only way you can win is on price really and that's that's just you know you're just competing away your profits with other companies so you want to be completely unique and win on that basis like we're unique now judges based on what we are what we want to be not on you know but other people so he launched the cyber truck and then during the whole launch which is the tada moment he touted the fact that these windows were virtually indestructible and had his designer friend throw a steel ball which they had previously determined you know I was not going to break the window because of physics or whatever he hooks this thing at the window and it shatters and you know you talked about CEOs being able to react well Elon you didn't miss a beat he's like well we're gonna have to fix that and tell you know every test that again yeah but it's sort of a classic moment and you don't know exactly whether it was rehearsed that way it doesn't seem like it people don't like perfection and they love to see elite athletes great products you know they love high quality things but they don't necessarily feel close to them unless there's a flaw when there's a flaw in it they suddenly get yeah I really feel warm towards that person or that product so they're you know you don't want to be too perfect you want to be like striving for perfection and make a mistake and and how you correct for that mistake or how you deal with it can make you really human whether it's a product or a person or a company so is that one way the brands could build trust is relatability or vulnerability yeah I think if you you know if you had a continuum between horrible messy ugly thing and a perfect thing you want to be almost to the perfect pull back a little bit I think that's where you want to be it's called the pratfall effect just came to me the pratfall effect when somebody who's like a dancer Falls you you laugh or maybe you like feel horrified but then you really like that person because they're striving for something perfect and they fell short everyone loves that so Elon is striving to make this perfect truck that can't be broken and it breaks and he goes oops and suddenly you like them yeah you know what I struck a chord with me as you were saying it that I mean this country at least was built on this underdog spirit yes right and we love an underdog we're root for the underdog because I think we can all relate with it we've been the underdog at one point where we are right now and when they're a little bit fallible value no vulnerable we see them believe Superman bleed maybe I could do that I mean I make mistakes maybe I could be that person you know it's that but you also trust him a little bit more I think you know you think well you trust people who are willing to show their you know fallible side yeah it's it's a very interesting thing to think about right now because there's so many brands competing and everyone's trying to appear perfect yeah there's not a fronting going on I think fronting yeah and I think as a result people really value authenticity well so let's let's do the good kind of indictment let's indict those who are doing it right who do you like because I can think of a half-dozen examples that we get thrown under the bus right now but we won't will let's go positives who throw under the bus yes let's let's take the high road so who's doing it well you think oh I think let's see well you know they did they come and go right they have moments where they're really doing well I - the first time I saw maybe a perfect bright well the first perfect brand was probably the introduction of the Volkswagen to the United States before most people's times but also featured in a Mad Men episode was it should be so I vaguely remember that well that was the turning point in advertising from the Mad Men days to the modern with the creative era as it was called Doyle Dane Bernbach was the advertising agency that pioneered this and they were the first agency to pair an art director and a copywriter together to do ads at the same time simultaneously to work it out as a team because up to this point the writer was totally in charge so the writer would write the ad and be a lot of words because the writers hand it off to an art department who would work up work up some illustrations and ways to make that graphic and that was that was the process and Geraldine said no you can do way better work if the the graphics and the words are happening at the same time and they're interactive and it he'd create something super simple and powerful from doing that and so they had bill Bernbach and one of the partners working with Paul Rand an outside famous famous graphic designer who did really simple powerful work those two guys had work together and this led ultimately to the Volkswagen account where it would be just a lot of white space a little car and they would say lemon yeah you have to read that and then the copy I mean that's how I learned to write the copy is I I just read those and they were so spare so beautiful witty gorgeous writing less is more less is more because you have to every word counts its poetry basically but it's poetry with a purpose you could you start with this you've learned some things at the end you're convinced and it's like man so they you know they took this car this German car that was called Hitler's car after World War two introduced it into the US and they used the pratfall effect they said it's ugly it's cheap you wouldn't to be in an accident and there's no engine in the front to protect you it's just a trunk hey how are we going to sell this they sold it because it was ugly so they just basically said you know ugly is skin-deep is what they said yeah fun fun fact 69 beetle was my first car no really 69 so it was a little bit that was with the bigger taillights getting really refined and bigger taillights weren't till 70 so they were still smaller yeah but bigger window 1,500 cc engine hardly anything changed it was the same car right so so the car itself was not an amazing piece of machinery right it was really simple but it was cheap to buy and cheap to maintain cheap to run and you lift it up the back and there's the engine and everything is right there so if you want to fix it you can fix it yourself really easily without taking anything out to get to anything it's all right there so I bought mine yeah so that was the first one and then later the next car that was introduced really well I think was the many so that more recent everything about that car including the design of the car I think was just about perfect and the way they they masterminded this thing I mean they they they had they hired a great designer to do the car they had a really good up-and-coming agency that created ad campaigns that were like none others so they didn't do any TV advertising because that's fake basically that's what the other guys do all they did was they pulled stunts with the car so they wouldn't do things like they'd drive the car to a shopping mall and put it in the middle of a plaza and then they'd put a giant trashcan next to it or something that would show the scale like the tascam would be way bigger than the car and you'd see this little car the biggest and there's a lot of product placement for that car like in the Italian Job with Mark Wahlberg I think was that movie you know they they drove it in and out of they use sort of guerrilla advertising which was really cool these billboards can I ask you about product for a second so one of the ongoing debates and this is what Seth kind of also helped me think about he wrote that book this is marketing and one of the debates we had was do you have a logo or do you have a brand and so sort of been an ongoing debate I asked people who you know manager run brands what they think how do you evolve from a single product do you watch that show shark tank at all I saw once I thought was kind of dumb but my mother loved it interestingly that's right they care about business at all popular show it's been on for like ten years and sort of a common thing that the Sharks will say is you don't have a company you know you have a product right and so it's just like a single product line they invented something it's not a brand so that that was my that's that was sort of my claim to fame as I introduced that concept of your logo isn't your brand you got to think way bigger than that you your logo is a symbol for your brand and it should bring up a lot of feelings about the brand but well so how do you get there so how do you know so let's say I invented something it's it's easy to go to a big Brantly Starbucks or a Nike or an apple or you know one of these other bigger established brands go oh yeah that's a brand but like let's say I invented something tomorrow how do I know that I have a brand or if I just have a product okay so as I said the brand exists in the minds of customers they determine what your brand is you give them the raw materials that they build the brand out of but it's their brand so I need to have some sort of awareness so it's out in the market okay well presumably you've built that product or that service with a group of customers in mind and they were involved with you somehow and then if you're if you're just doing it alone in your garage then you still have to get through that step if I have to introduce this to people who might be my loyal customers and and get them on my side but it's much easier if they're involved in creating that thing like you're talking with them the whole time you're trying it out with them you're testing and they're telling other people and you're building a tribe how do i how do I determine what my brand is I mean I have a lot of my own ideas what I'd like to hear it from the Godfather kiss the ring that way so yeah so you know that you do have to come up with a name for it but it starts with understanding like how you're different really that's your name really should be based on your idea for your difference your differentiation so if you've built something that's a me-too product you're kind of dead in the water you're just never really going to get there you have to go back to square one you need a product or a service that from the get-go is different and serves a different audience or different needs for the same audience all right and if you don't have that you don't have a place to stand you're gonna be just competing with everybody else so you could have a great logo great name great packaging great product design whatever it is service design but if you're competing with other people and customers can't really see the difference between them except for those surfacey details how are you gonna win you're basically gonna have to work twice as hard and probably lower your price can we case study a little bit so I'm a fan of this fan of this brand but I think they are struggling and will stay in the automotive category Acura Tamiya Acura is a struggling brand I don't know who they are I don't understand what they stand for as a marketer as a brand guy I think I understand what they're trying to do oh they're trying to compete with Mercedes and with Lexus and with BMW sort of that high higher yeah it's a luxury car luxury but it's a luxury car that belongs to a non luxury company right and it's also performance so they even have this you know supercar called the NSX which is like a Lamborghini or so Honda Accord is the highest end of the you know the regular Honda line people say just get that it's much less money than an Acura and you're getting almost the same car and a lot of the same parts yeah so when that kind of news gets around to people even if it's not true they go yeah I'm not gonna pay extra it's just a Honda everyone knows it so that's interesting you just kind of set it you know I'm are you willing or not to pay extra for it does that go into you know the brand because when I think about Acura and what Seth told me do you have a logo or a brand I think Acura has a logo Acura has just yeah method like you said a muddled brand it's just it lost its original meaning it probably wasn't a very strong idea to begin with is to say are this company with cheap cars now has a more expensive one do you want that let's contrast that with BMW which you know drilled into our minds the ultimate driving machine and Mercedes is what like nothing but the best yeah they're they're similar brands but different enough to exist in the same market because Mercedes is kind of a solid more conservative car let's say it's solid it's not high-performance it's not a sports car BMW started out being the sports car that doesn't look like a sports car yeah well Mercedes Mercedes started the whole thing like that the first automobile right and I think BMW has lost its way I think they started to lose it when they came out with a sports car that looked like a sports car stay lost to me what was the unspoken unspoken truth about them was that they had sedans that looked very conservative and sedate that were really sports cars so I was like a wolf in sheep's clothing that was a pretty cool idea so you could people in the know knew that that car was hot even though it just looks like in the when they started making him look hot then they're like getting into Porsche territory and well I do that Mercedes started out as being kind of just a solid car you know take a middle-class car in Germany but it sort of got a higher in higher class and then they realized they're leaving out part of the market so they started introducing cheaper versions of a Mercedes that people could afford instead of 60,000 it's $30,000 well that just brings down the whole brand when you do that the same thing with Honda Acura they had the cheap cars and then they they're gonna add you know a luxury version on top of that that they're not really disguising as a different everyone knows it's Honda so that's it that you know it's the low end that determines the price for everything so here's the secret about what branding is for branding is to get more people to buy more stuff for more years at a higher price that's what it is it's not doing that why are you spending all the effort and money doing it has to do those things so it's for the long term it's if you're having to sell by lowering your price or having a lot of sales you've got you know that's a tax on bad branding you got to get your brand to be more unique you ideally you know the ideal situation is you don't have any competitors nobody can touch you you're in a class by yourself so that's what you have to shoot for and that takes some pretty radical engineering and you have to be willing to really be different and a lot of companies are really afraid of being different different is risk to them but that's the secret how different can you be so Tesla very different right remember Elon Musk says they didn't even have a car they had some drawings of a car he said do I think I could sell a car that doesn't use any gas during an energy crisis I don't know the prices are really high because yeah I think I could probably do that and you know and everybody went yeah it makes sense right so he just established himself as the first all-electric cool car and all he had to do then is get people to say I'll try that I'll take a chance on that if you don't start there you're just battling everybody it's just gonna be a slog so branding is about finding that unique powerful position and then making that work somehow really making it work so many did that mini position the car against all those SUVs like like you know let's just go right back through the history that we were talking about Volkswagen was against the American car the cars that had fins and metal and chrome and everything is the opposite right and it was a cheap price and so they had that market to themselves many said everybody has an SUV we're not gonna do that that's for those people right in Ohio we're gonna go low you're gonna go low and then we got Tesla saying all those gas guzzlers we're not going to do that so and that can happen in any industry you can do that same thing you can disrupt it by doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing you still have to make it work I mean we were just sitting back you know chopping it up reminiscing about the good old days another track of my roots where I came from but like I say always it's not about the destination it's all about the journey ain't nothing change whether the dangling carrot it hang from the river your dreams in the past ain't no where did you backseat drivers got nothi purchases shotgun rounds to buyers they all liars I should get a cave

Channel: Behind the Brand

Views: 8,463

Rating: 4.6449704 out of 5

Keywords: Bryan Elliott, Behind the Brand, entrepreneur

Id: ApRrkjpReQU

Length: 59min 37sec (3577 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 08 2020