by Sean Oliver
Your product will help define the personality. You may need to tweak the image you’re creating to be more consistent with what you’re selling, or vice versa—rework your product. But you need to have them both in alignment. If you want to own the place in the consumers mind as “safest” then the place to start is with your product if it isn’t really the safest gizmo of its kind. If you’re looking to own the “coolest” space, ask yourself—is it really the coolest? Actually, screw what you think. Ask a 12-year-old.
If your answer is “no” to any of the branding questions specific to your market, then you need to get back to work on the product. You probably just need to tweak. You’ve created a Business of Blood so you’re not like one of these serial entrepreneurs, grasping at products to justify owning a business as opposed to the other way around. You’re building your business to justify your product born of The Blood, so the product came first and therefore was likely mostly intact. But you may need to make small adjustments. Maybe you have a dynamite product but can’t find its personality or don’t know where to position it in the existing marketplace. You need some help finding out because it’s very important. For some extensive study, Al Ries and Jack Trout are masters of branding and I would start with their book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. After that, you should work your way right through their whole collection of insightful books on this topic. But I do understand how busy you are, running your BOB. Check out just a couple of them.
Design
Now, after your promise and your product are aligned with your vision, you can examine design. Does the design fit that image? From the logo, to your colors, to packaging, to the visual elements in your advertising—you must send the same message. Colors, font type, taglines…there are plenty of things to consider in design. There are great books and online resources available about the physical branding of your company. There are psychological elements to color, shape, texture, and even the name of your product or company. Kayfabe Commentaries is a long name, a bit confusing too. It’s a long URL also. I wish we’d taken more time to consider this years ago. There had to have been a better option out there, though I don’t know what it is. I’m too used to Kayfabe Commentaries and anything else sounds wrong. But I know I hate giving my email address to people over the phone. Learn from my error.
As of this writing, a popular trend in naming businesses seems to be snappy words that have little to no relevance to the product. Seems everyone is designing a name to fit comfortably on an app—Airbnb, Uber, Zillow, Venmo. Out of context, these words do not immediately connect the consumer’s mind to a particular product. But it’s the trend, so Grug may just be the right name for your line of sunglasses.
Once the promise, product, and design are congruent with the personality you are trying to project, you can say you’ve truly established your brand. Now the hard part—maintaining it. Remember, you’re not going to have an entire department dedicated to managing the company’s brand like a big Fortune 500 company. I’ve seen it first hand in my time around big finance. If a firm’s logo is light blue and someone wants to prepare an advertisement in which the logo is dark blue, or any other shade, the branding department is involved, probably panicking, and meetings are being held. Companies are that staunchly protective of it.
The physical branding should be the least of the violations you’ll safeguard against. Your product decisions will do more to reinforce or weaken your branding. It’s a very nebulous thing, but it’s important to monitor. All your product decisions need to be weighed against both financial implications, and also brand. It’s easy to decide to crank out a product line that will make money. But if that product line in some way violates the ethics or the pattern that your company has spent time building, its brand, then that’s a shortsighted decision that should be reworked. Would you forfeit long-term success for a quick hit? Think in the long-term. It’s trading $100 every week for a lifetime, for one payment of $500 today and a gamble on tomorrow.
It happens all the time. Most CEOs don’t consciously do it. Many executives just do not realize the long-term, deleterious effects of muddying a brand. But because there is no immediate price tag attached to it, it doesn’t register on their radars as a cost. Companies that end up diluting the strength of their brand always do so by chasing quick money. They will add a hot, new, product line that is completely inconsistent with their brand. Adding sandwiches to the menu at the cool coffee beanery will make some lunchtime sales but you just cost yourself points in your efforts to become the number one coffeehouse in the consumers’ mind when someone suggests grabbing a cup of Joe.
In my not so fictional example here, those sandwiches replaced the telltale aroma of carefully crafted cups of coffee brewing, with the smell of melted cheese on a grill. See the stupidity? Eventually they did too and Starbucks eventually built a system of heating sandwiches in machines that emitted no residual odor. Might sound silly to you, but it was one of Howard Schultz’s major directives in returning to the company.
If done tactfully, a company can add a product extension without damaging brand. But it’s a very individual, case-by-case consideration. Each company needs to consider its own product lines and make their own decisions. Coca-Cola did not so severely damage their brand by creating Diet Coke did they? Or caffeine free Diet Coke? How about Coke with Lime? Probably not.
But how about adding a line of Coca-Cola doughnuts? It’s still food isn’t it? Who wouldn’t love a tasty doughnut, washed down with a cold glass of Coke? Just like the coffeehouse—who wouldn’t love a tuna melt with your large latte? Do you see the disconnect? You should. Coca-Cola would never step on their brand like that. Nor should the coffee company have done so. It’s all about long-term positioning in the mind of the consumer.
At KC, we are a production house and content provider, with several series-based shows in production. We have a unique branding situation that we share with movie studios and TV networks—there is an overall company brand that must be maintained, but also a bunch of small brands for each of our series. Each program has an identity and a personality that must be considered.
When people bitched and pissed and moaned about new programming—”my God…why Russo, or Cornette, or Nash, or Sullivan, or Dixie?”—I invoked the TV network example, asking if FOX was allowed to produce both NFL programming as well as The Simpsons? One show is for these people over here, one show is for those people over there, and some people will like both.
What was harder for me to understand was that we were stepping on a viewer’s personal brand when they objected to programming. I often use the rock band analogy when talking about what we do, and not just because it makes me feel like I’m cool. Our fans are not the dispassionate fans of the FOX network. Those viewers would watch The Simpsons or the NFL regardless of what channel they were on. How many of you guys give a second thought to what network is airing the show you like?
With us it’s a different ballgame, and fair or not, we are judged on a different scale. So many of our viewers are fans of ours and entrust us with their Blood—the handling of their passion. They take great offense when they feel we’ve mishandled it. Intellectually they may know we have to produce a little something for everyone. But their hearts want what they want, and they kinda want us to cater to their every personal desire.
We’ve strived to touch a couple of markets with our programming—historical, nostalgic, and on the other end of the spectrum we touch a more unpredictable, irreverent, comic-based market. For the historian we have our series Timeline and its subsequent spinoffs, as well as the newer series, Supercard. There’s our series Guest Booker for those interested in the creative aspect of the wrestling business, with a touch of wrestling history thrown in. Our investigative specials probe very specific, individual aspects of wrestling history. And we also have some lighthearted, freewheeling programming like our series Wrestling’s Most that is, in essence, a countdown show of fun topics. We also have the very edgy series call
ed YouShoot that is not for the faint of heart, but always a lot of fun. It’s a fan favorite.
Each of these series is unique in its branding from the standpoint that each episode of a particular series should look alike, sound alike, be lit similarly, and deliver the consistent promise of that series. But each of these series should differ from one another. Timelines can’t look like YouShoots, and so on. The company’s brand is different from the series brand, and each series brand must be different from each other’s. Confusing? It’s really not. For the branding of shows, think of the TV network example and all of the different shows that appear on that network during the week. Here’s a comedy, here’s a news magazine show, here’s a police drama, and here’s a football game.
So what is our company brand? In keeping with the example above, what is that network’s brand? What is the thoroughfare of all of our programming that ties them all together under our banner?
Our programs are united by their production values being the top in our segment of the industry. People expect a KC show to be flawlessly mic’ed, lit, shot, and edited. They expect some post-production graphics to enhance the experience. First and foremost, there is an audio/visual expectation to KC shows.
Our shows are also always uniquely formatted and seek to take the viewer inside the business from an angle never before explored. Is that our brand? Partially, yes.
Remember, brand is more than a singular tagline, despite what some may errantly say. I also consider our rapid, first-class customer service to be part of our brand. Our accessibility to our fans and the invitation for open dialogue with them is also unique component to our company brand. I also realize I am a part of that company brand as frontman. Our viewers are used to seeing me on camera drawing information and secrets out of my guests. In one year we dropped three new series with hosts other than me, and they’re all referenced in the cancellation countdown a few pages back. I’m not saying that’s the reason they didn’t take off, but from what I’ve read online and in my inbox I know it didn’t help.
We offer a lot of emotional ownership to our viewers. Conceptually, our shoot-style programming is innovative and has quite involuntarily been a template for the other shoot-style programmers, the major wrestling federations, and podcasters all over the place.
6. Hire Yourself: Working While You’re Working
THERE’S A DIFFERENCE between going to a job and having a business to run. This book is made for that very marketing director of Fictional Sausage, Inc, provided he or she also has an intense passion for fishing, or quilting, or gaming, or writing, or pro wrestling. Their countless hours spent finding ways to make sausage ads go viral probably gave birth to an idea or two of their own. They may be ready to start a fire and turn that passion into a business.
His or her Business of Blood will be started and operated very much outside of their Monday through Friday sausage world, probably on evenings and weekends. The Business of Blood starts as an ancillary pursuit. Kiss your free time goodbye, but you won’t mind it a bit. You’ll be earning a living at your shoot job, (Dutch Mantell first uttered that term to me and I love it) and pouring your passion and energy into building your Business of Blood.
Use the lessons you’ve learned in your job to help build your business. Is your boss an asshole? Don’t emulate their behavior if you have others working for or with you. Or, maybe you’ll start to understand some of their frustrations from the other side of the aisle. Did you identify something wrong with a business model at your day job? Look for those errors in your business. It’s really more of a life lesson than a business lesson—learn. Learn all the time. Use your day job as a training ground for your Business of Blood.
Use the hours in which you’re stacking boxes at your job to study which packing materials hold up well. Write that box company’s name and number down. Use the hours in which you’re using online business applications for your shoot job to consider which of those programs your Business of Blood will need, or what code you’ll need to build your website. You’ll get a sneak peek into real-world business situations that will preview what works and what doesn’t. Make everything research, provided it’s nothing proprietary or protected by the company you work for. You can’t steal what’s legally protected. But other than that restriction, you should look around. Remember, this is the cold part and it can be learned.
Talk to your bosses. Ask questions. You don’t have to mention your business pursuit, as long as it doesn’t violate any parameters of your job. It’s none of anyone’s business. Chances are your bosses will love talking about their initiatives and brilliant ideas. If they’re in middle management, they’ll enjoy complaining to you. Either way, listen to the decision makers at the top as well as their pawns, the people directly above you. There’s value in both their bravado and misery.
Learn, learn, learn. Do your reconnaissance. Your day job is paying you to go to school.
7. Outside-In vs. Inside-Out
THE WORLD IS populated by lots of businesses that try to manufacture passion. They’re functional, they work, and they’re necessary. I need soap and toothpaste too. But they’re cold, and very much not what we do.
Cold businesses breed a science of sameness, of process. As mentioned earlier, much of what business-for-the-sake-of-business companies do is repeatable and can be sustained by repetition of best practices. “Best practices” is just fancy MBA-speak for a company’s effective procedures. In some cases the business is so cold that you can plug in another product of choice and run the business the same way, from a general procedural standpoint.
Because of this sameness and repeatability, cold businesses allow for what I call CEO-hopping. Initially, it would seem strange that a CEO from one industry could leave their company, jump over to a new industry and assume a CEO spot at a company there. But if you think about the best practices, system-based thinking, it can happen easily, and it does. The rather rote relationship between numbers on financial statements and balance sheets renders the product’s identity almost inconsequential. Whether we’re talking coffee beans or carpeting, the relationships between the numbers is all the same. We’re just talking about growing in Jamaica instead of weaving in Indonesia. Plug in the product, and we still need our margins to be this or that, regardless of what we’re talking about. It’s still supply chains, manufacturing, and retail.
Nowhere is this more evident than in a business that services multiple industries. Let’s look at investment banking, for instance. Within each big firm, you have different industry groups that serve different sectors of the business world. It is possible for an analyst straight out of college to start in the Energy sector, work there for two years, pitching and doing deals with gas and electric providers all over the world. Then perhaps that banker will be promoted to associate in the Aerospace and Defense sector. Before ending their career they may work in several different sectors. The numbers are what he needs to know.
This analytical process of business management is what I call an outside-in business management model. The company is structured in such a fashion that its management is assumable. Real estate is another good example of this. The same model for buying and selling homes is applied in every city in every state. Laws may vary from state to state so you must abide by the specific state’s real estate commission guidelines. But within that state, I guarantee you each brokerage house is training their agents en masse, in the same fashion. It’s turnkey.
Once again, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a model that must serve certain businesses. But it’s important to identify the traits of the cold business and the outside-in management.
Outside-in management style companies confirm their assumable nature in that their operations can be taught according to a model. It’s paint-by-numbers at a higher scale. In an outside-in business, you will be given market information in the form of data. You study it, learn it, and ultimately take a required action upon the data giving you the indicator to do so. Home purchasing is
tanking in town, so says the data. Required action is to reduce prices on your listed homes for sale. Hopefully that will move the inventory. It’s stimulus-response, data-action. If you are a hard worker and somewhat bright you can do fine in an environment like that.
If you’re entrepreneurial, passionate, and wildly creative you’ll be bored to death.
Businesses of Blood are managed with an inside-out model. The kinship between customer and company demands that the thought process between the two be aligned. The customers should feel you’ve read their minds and hearts. At KC’s height, we were producing 16-18 original, full-length titles per year. They must all be conceived, developed, written, shot, edited, and distributed across several platforms to our die-hard but demanding fans’ desires. We were exercising that muscle constantly and it led to that synchronicity.
Our decisions about projects and broader scale issues such as company direction are generated by the inside-out model. We are our market. We don’t generally need much external data to tell us what we need to do. It’s better to use external vision to mine ideas.
The best example of this was our launching the YouShoot series. If you read my first book Kayfabe, then the next few paragraphs will be very familiar to you. But they are the perfect example of the inside-out guidance capitalizing on an idea born out of an external source—another presidential debate no less, but with a much better result than the Bruno/Harley show. The story is worth repeating here.
YouShoot was also a great example of how taking a well-managed risk for your fans can pay off. The show is an interview conducted entirely by the public via Internet videos and email submissions. It was born in the fall of 2007 as the United States was gearing up for a presidential election, and Anthony and I were both watching the same thing, several states away.
