Bigger Than This

by Fabian Geyrhalter

  For the first time in history, it is more difficult for big brands to gain unconditional consumer trust than it is for a startup brand. We are experiencing a remarkable moment in marketing and branding when brands that either don’t have the resources to “put on costumes” or, more likely, don’t want to do so have an edge. In response to brands’ honesty in the social media age, today’s consumers in turn show significant trust and regularly share products solely based on an enticing video, great packaging design or a meaningful story – sometimes before ever having tried the actual product. This allows brands to build tremendous reach without spending a lot on marketing. Still, there’s a catch: the initial delight experienced by customers who share a product turns up their expectations – expectations that will backfire tenfold if the product does not live up to them or the values that excited fans are not being actively demonstrated by the brand. Their disappointment gets personal: Here I am sharing the offering of a brand I naively trusted just to be cheated. That disappointment will quickly become clear via social sharing, typically through a nasty review to be seen by thousands and maybe even through comments in traditional media.

  Consider the well-documented 2017 FYRE Festival debacle, where promises of a star-studded luxury weekend concert in the Bahamas were met with a less-than-luxurious, bare-bones reality under the stars. Attendees were quick to share their disappointment online and elsewhere, and the festival is now facing lawsuits related to its handling of the event. As Carina Chocano wrote in the The New York Times, “We’ve moved from an industrial economy to a consumer economy to a service economy to an information economy to what you might call a flagrant-exploitation economy — one in which branding and ‘storytelling’ have replaced advertising and possibly even reality. It’s not just that we’re being sold the sizzle more than the steak. It’s that we’re being sold the sizzle instead of and at the expense of the steak.” This environment gives brands that have a physical steak in order to sell the sizzle an edge. It’s OK if it’s just a simple steak, or commodity product, as long as you’re actually delivering what customers anticipated based on your marketing.

  As a startup entrepreneur or as a new brand entering today’s marketplace, one can gain traction much faster than ever before with the right mix of brand strategy and behaviors but can go down in flames much more quickly, too, as the FYRE Festival’s name seems to hint in retrospect. I like to call it “the age of c(r)ash and burn.” It is being fueled by the many products and services that enable social reach and a swift launch on the one hand and the easy ability to test products on real customers on the other. Often missing is a fully realized product and a deeper story that connects the products to their users long term. Only those who clearly define their values and their story and embody their passion can strive to surpass that high risk, which can either kill a startup instantaneously or disable long-term growth.

  “We are now

  expected to favor the

  story over reality, to

  accept that saying a

  thing makes it so.”

  | Carina Chocano, New York Times

  Branding is just as important to any company today as it was in the past. Customized Snap-chat filters have replaced brand logo tattoos, but the actual brand icon remains iconically at the heart of the brand’s tribe, often for the lifespan of both the consumer and the brand. How brands are being crafted has shifted radically, though – away from fake image creation toward intrinsic brand strategy, as I will outline in the commandments to come. Clearly,

  the

  ‘why’

  and

  the

  ‘how’

  are winning over

  the

  ‘what’

  for commodity brands such as TOMS and are turning into a tangible prized asset for consumers, employees and investors alike. Values are now driving brand creation. “Venture capitalists increasingly prize clearly stated values, ethical decision-making and transparency among staff,” noted Erin Griffith in Fortune in May 2017. Empathy has become the new norm for any brand.

  Although I have labeled the brands in the upcoming case studies as commodities, it is not to belittle their products for lacking in innovation. We can, in fact, learn a tremendous amount from their brilliant brand thinking, from the talk all the way to the walk. When you base a venture on a commodity product, branding is at the core of your offering, and it clearly has to be much better, much deeper and much more intrinsic to your audience than when you launch an innovative brand such as Tesla or Uber. That, to me, is something that deserves our attention as marketers and founders. If these commodity brands can pull it off, how much could their branding knowledge help us in connecting more deeply with our own audience?

  When writing this book, I stayed away from commodity brands that found their way to fame and brand glory solely by means of digital technology. You will not read about the rise of Daniel Wellington, which sells its inexpensive watches through social media, or mattress company Purple, which has won followers through the ease and simplicity of its online ordering and delivery. As far as I am aware, there is no big underlying story to these brands, just a great product-market-Zeitgeist fit. It’s a phenomenon that repeats itself almost yearly throughout modern history. The Swiss “fast-fashion” watchmaker Swatch was an example from the 1980s.

  I also refrained from including companies that have ingenious approaches to branding common offerings but actually did innovate. Top-golf, for instance, didn’t make it in, even though the golf entertainment complex almost flipped the otherwise slowly declining sport of golf around. Topgolf innovates on experience in such a disruptive manner that, to me, it is an innovation brand and not a commodity-based brand. Focusing on the experience component, the founders broke away from the sport’s country club image and turned it into an accessible and truly social thing to do, along the lines of bowling. No need to perfect the right stance when you can meet friends over a craft cocktail in the Instagram-friendly lighting and have fun in a slightly competitive environment.

  In this book, I focus on brands selling true commodities: products and services that have remained widely unchanged. The primary thing that I believe has turned them into successful brands is their unique positioning and associated story. Their approaches can easily be adapted and applied by any entrepreneur who is acting outside of the world of innovation and disruption.

  THE 8

  COMMODITY

  BRAND TRAITS

  AND THEIR

  COMMANDMENTS

  When someone recommends a business book to me, I always ask, “What was the biggest takeaway for you?” When they tell me, I usually nod and feel grateful for having learned something. Then they add that I should really check it out. I don’t, and here is why: if a book has one big takeaway, I usually feel that my time is better spent learning about another 20 books’ key takeaways and start implementing them in my business or my personal life. That possibly superficial, possibly negligent and very short-of-attention attitude of mine now comes full circle by turning into a definite benefit to you, the reader, as I am distilling my recommendations into as few pages and clearly labeled points as possible to make this book enjoyable and actionable for you.

  Here are the eight traits and their commandments that your brand can obey to win (more) hearts. Adopt one; adopt many. As you will learn, today’s commodity ventures that understand branding at the root level (of unique positioning) rarely stick to only one of these; they connect in many of the following ways with their tribe.

  If you intrinsically believe in some of these commandments, if you are ready to fully embody them, then they are not marketing techniques anymore. They will turn into your unique brand positioning within your industry, allowing you to connect on a deeper level with your audience and subsequently stand out in a sea of sameness.

  | 1 |

  STORY

  When the background story is

  bigger than the product

  Most of us bu
y brand stories all the time. These stories are often attached to a commodity product. You can find many examples in today’s biggest brands, from Dove owning genuine beauty to Starbucks coining a coffee lingo its customers actually use. As Revlon founder Charles Revson famously said about his cosmetics brand,

  “In the factory we make cosmetics;

  in the store we sell hope.”

  Today’s startups continue this tradition in both their internal and external branding efforts. Airbnb hired an artist from famed animation studio Pixar to help align its team around its customer service goals and plans to expand its mobile presence, creating stories of the experiences of the host, guest and a hiring manager. The stories exemplified the brand in action and influenced the way the organization worked, as Fast Company detailed at the time.i

  Stories about a brand are also a powerful way to align consumers around its message. A recent study by the research firm Origin found that consumers are 5% more likely to pick a wine if it features written notes by the winemaker, and they are willing to pay 6% more for it. That is powerful storytelling with immediate return on investment. Another study by PR firm MWWPRii found that more than a third of the U.S. population ages 18–80 belongs to a group of “brand activists” who think a company’s actions and reputation are just as important as the product it makes. “Brands and marketers that are thinking about product features and attributes and neglecting to tell their company story are leaving money and market share on the table. Give consumers a reason to believe in your company, and they will give you their loyalty and their activism,” states MWWPR chief strategy officer Careen Winters in Adweek.

  Storytelling works just as well in the education sector, as Adam Grant, a professor at The Wharton School, illustrates in his book Give And Take. Grant tells the story of alumni working at a university call center and how they approached potential donors. Group A made the usual cold calls asking other alumni to donate to scholarship funds. These fundraisers saw few rewards for their calls, with most prospects expressing a lack of interest within the first seconds of the call. Another group started sharing stories on how scholarships changed past recipients’ lives. By simply reading these recipients’ letters, this group tripled donations. The letters were essentially stories and flipped the intangible into something tangible, the unrelatable into something emotional. As Grant shows,

  stories can

  change

  perspectives

  more than any

  data analysis ever

  could, and they

  can even

  transform a

  commodity

  product into a

  meaningful brand.

  Luggage manufacturer Away launched successfully in 2015 by creating a beautiful hardcover book titled The Places We Return To that featured interviews with “really interesting people from the creative community – writers, artists and photographers.”iii The company printed 1,200 books. They came with a gift card for a piece of luggage, which was released four months later. Indeed, there was no luggage yet, solely a book about traveling. Every copy of the book sold out. The success of the book triggered stories mentioning the luggage brand throughout the media landscape, including content by the creative contributors, many considered social media influencers themselves.

  “You don’t push your product.

  You create

  things that are fun to

  talk about,

  to write about,

  to share,”

  co-founder Jen Rubio (both co-founders are Warby Parker alums) told Inc. Today, the book has become a full-fledged magazine titled Here “for travelers, by travelers,” as well as the Airplane Mode podcast “exploring the reasons we travel and places we find ourselves.” As Rubio added in Fast Company, “It’s insane to me how many luggage companies never talk about travel.” The unique factor did not stop there as Away took advantage of the popularity of customization (more about customization on page 156). Allowing future luggage owners to personalize their product, the startup hired artists to hand-paint the customer’s initials onto the suitcase.

  As Shonda Rhimes, creator of television series Grey’s Anatomy (among many others), stated in Forbes,iv “In a world of unlimited voices and choices, those who can bring people together and tell a good story have power.” Leading with story to make a brand stand out can be summed up as the art of story branding. Anyone who has taken a marketing class in college or received an MBA has probably learned about the “unique selling proposition,” or USP. Jim Signorelli, author of Storybranding, says the new USP is the “Unique Story Proposition.” Making your brand the hero of the story creates deep emotional connections, the same way as when you read about a hero in a book or as you binge-watch your favorite cable TV series. Through the assistance of social sharing and predominantly online product research and subsequent purchases, brand stories quickly turn into brand gold. They are now the “unique brand story proposition” that turns a brand story into a brand purchase.

  Matthew Griffin, the founder of Combat Flip Flops, understands this well. While on duty in Afghanistan, Griffin, then a U.S. Army Ranger, stumbled upon an Afghan combat boot factory that also created flip flops for soldiers for when they were taking off their boots to pray.v Feeling empathy for the people he met (“such honorable hosts; an amazing experience,” he told Inc. magazine), he immediately knew he wanted to bring those flip flop designs home with the goal of creating jobs and funding education in wartorn countries such as Afghanistan. Griffin took the saying “Borders frequented by merchants seldom need soldiers” and inspired his tribe to help that cause. The website now features lines such as “bad for combat, perfect for peacemaking” to describe the flip flops offered. There is no big product or service innovation in the case of Combat Flip Flops, but there is a story that is so much bigger than flip flops – a story that leads to sales. For consumers, the draw is, “If I can pick any flip flops, I might as well pick Combat because I want to be part of their story.”

  Identifying your unique story can propel your commodity product into a brand. It is the absolute best way to launch a brand that is not based on innovation.

  CASE STUDY

  FISHPEOPLE SEAFOOD

  COMMODITY PRODUCT: Fish

  Portland, Oregon–based Fish–people Seafood sells fish for human consumption, as the name suggests. Although fish is by nature a commodity, Fishpeople Seafood stands out by focusing on “high quality, environmentally & socially conscious products.” The startup, founded in 2012 to “re-imagine North America’s relationship to the sea,” has differentiated itself further by becoming a certified B Corp, thereby doing what the B Corporation website describes as “meeting rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency.” Fishpeople seems to intrinsically have made “story” its main brand ingredient. Based on a mix of deep passion and decades of past work experience by its founder(s) in startups, venture capital, and fashion, and powered by co-founder Michael Baratoff’s MBA, it seems to be the perfect ingredient for a brand-forward organization.

  But Fishpeople’s brand is not just built on socially responsible sizzle. What makes its story authentic is its simple “trace your fish” functionality, which allows consumers to “meet the fishermen who put people in Fishpeople” via a code on the product package that, plugged into its website, reveals all you ever wanted to know about the origin of the piece of fish you are about to enjoy. Consumers can find out for themselves the exact place a fish was caught, by whom and on what boat – all information that creates peace of mind and a vivid story about the food on their plates. “People want to know where their food is coming from,” CEO Ken Plasse told me in an e-mail interview for this book. “They want to know how it was handled and what effect raising, catching, processing, packaging and delivering that food has on the environment. We see this across the country from people who go to their local farmers’ markets and in those who spend an increasing amount of time readi
ng product labels at the grocery store. This heightened awareness among consumers tells us not only that traceability is an important tool that provides them with a link to the source of their food, but also that complete transparency is at the true heart of what has enabled our success at Fishpeople. When you have nothing to hide about where your fish comes from and how it’s caught and handled, consumers don’t just appreciate and value that – even more importantly, they opt in to become a part of your larger story and mission, too.”

  Of course the “trace your fish” gesture also drives consumers to the brand’s website, where (most) brand stories fully unfold. The site includes a blog focusing on “the people behind your food,” recipes and cooking tips and the “SO FISH TICATED” T-shirt you can purchase. Once you plug in your “trace your fish” code, you are basically hooked on the brand.

  Leading with the story of connecting to your food in deeper ways, Fishpeople is also leading my case studies in this book by not only representing a commodity brand that stands out through the power of story, but further by touching on every single other brand trait I believe can turn even a commodity-based startup into a meaningful brand and subsequently a successful business. Reading the “About Us” area of Fishpeople’s website reveals the power of Fish-people’s understanding of all eight Bigger Than This brand traits. (To read how Fishpeople embodies every single one of the brand traits discussed in this book, head over to the Appendix on page 174.)

  THE STORY

  COMMANDMENTS

  Go back to the roots of your company or the way the founders met. More often than not, the sheer determination that fueled the launch has a unique story already hidden within it. All you have to do is voice it in a clear and accessible manner.