The Art of Branding

Atkins ruled the low carb diet world until Dr. Arthur Agatson came along. (His name may not be as familiar as Atkins, but his diet sure is.)

At first, Agatson named his diet, “The Modified Carbohydrate Diet.” He first promoted it with a booklet in 1996 among a relatively small group of overweight clients in Miami, Florida who started losing weight.

What propelled the Miami diet doctor to great success was a sexy name and packaging.  Of course, he had a good “product” – a good diet – but there are a lot of good diets out there.

The doctor didn’t use his own name, Agatson, which is a bit hard to remember and spell.  The diet doctor piggy-backed on the name and imagery of a hot part of Miami Beach when he launched his book, The South Beach Diet in 2003. The book went on to top the best seller list, spawned two spin-off books and sold 14.5 million books in two years. It was a phenomenal success, blowing apart the diet book category.

Would the diet have done as well if he kept the first name, The Modified Carbohydrate Diet?  Unlikely.  Or if he had used his own name and called it, The Agatson Diet?  Again, unlikely.

South Beach gave the diet a memorable handle like the Scarsdale Diet developed by Dr. Heman Tarnower.  Only the South Beach name had a sexier cache and imagery than Scarsdale.

An interesting byproduct of the South Beach phenomenon was that the label “low carb” also took off.  Soon food companies started putting the words “low carb” on thousands of products, both foods low in carbohydrates and new low-carb versions of high-carb products. And sales took off.

Often the best place to start is with your own name. You make the history books if you can get your name to stick on your idea like “Moore’s Law” or “The Peter Principle.”  Or your name becomes an adjective to describe your intellectual contributions like “Darwinism,” “Pavlovian” or “Freudian.”

Look at the diet book category.  Dr. Robert Atkins didn’t invent the no carb or low carb diet.  Others came before him.  He used his own name for his diet, and in 1972 came out with a book, Dr. Atkins Diet Revolution.

Atkins had a fresh USP:  if you cut out carbohydrates, the body will react by eating body fat. The USP and branding resonated with the public. Soon the name Atkins became synonymous with the “no carbs” and “skinny.” In the 33 years since the book came out, Atkins’ books have sold a whopping 21 million copies.

You don’t have to invent the “big idea” either when you’re creating intellectual capital. (Though you should put your own spin on all ideas.) If you give an existing idea a great name and spread the word, you’ll end up “owning” it in the mind of others.

For example, the concept of ideas and trends spreading like an epidemic originally came out of the worlds of science and social science. One scientist, Richard Dawkins, called the discovery “memes,” probably not the best name if you want your discovery to spread.

Malcolm Gladwell elegantly wrote about the concept coining “the tipping point” to describe ideas and trends at first building slowly, then dramatically “tipping” like epidemics and becoming a mass phenomenon. When his book The Tipping Point made the best seller list, the concept entered the national consciousness.

Seth Godin put his own spin on the concept.  He came up with the name “idea virus” and wrote a book about it too called Unleashing the Idea Virus. (Creating an idea virus is what you are trying to do with the names you give your ideas.) Godin took the idea one step further and came up with the concept of packaging your ideas to make them spread faster.

Give your idea or point an unusual or quirky name. Quirky words are sticky – they stick in the mind so people remember them.

In the 2004 presidential campaign, President George W. Bush used the sticky expression “flip-flopper” to brand John Kerry.  If Bush had simply said that Kerry changes his position a lot, it wouldn’t have had the same impact with the media or with voters.  Flip-flopper was sticky.

Give your idea a particularly memorable name or one with emotional content, and you can create a company rallying cry.  Jack Welch used the strange word “boundarylessness” at GE for the idea of employees getting good ideas from anywhere and sharing them everywhere in the company. Welch could have simply said “idea sharing” but it wouldn’t have the same impact. Though awkward and a bit of a tongue twister,  boundarylessness is a name that was unusual and unexpected. It was sticky.

You can also persuade people to your point of view by the names you give things, particularly options in a series that are under consideration.  Kissinger talked about “coloring the options” when he would present various alternatives to President Nixon to consider.

Business doesn’t have to be just about facts and statistics. And it’s not smart branding if that is the way you approach it. You have to create interest, not bore people. That’s why smart business people, like smart brand managers, brand their ideas by packaging them with a name.

The poet’s pen …gives to airy nothingness a local habitation and a name.

William Shakespeare

A Midsummer’s Night Dream (V,1)

Naming is a good way to create assets for your self brand – intangible assets. Naming an important idea or project has enormous advantages. When you give something a name, you make a tangible thing out of an intangible. A name will help people visualize your idea or the point you are making so that they understand it better.

Names make your ideas and points more memorable. When you name something, you are branding it and giving it the potential to be a “big idea.”  Names can help you sell your project to your clients, whether they are external or in your organization.

Coining your own word or expression can be a marvelous branding device for your idea, point of view or recommendation (and, of course, yourself). Saying your key message in an interesting way in memos, letters and meetings can persuade people to your point of view (and cause people to remember its author).

Self Brand Keyword: A “signature word” is a word that is closely identified with you that defines you in an important way to help catapult your self brand.

You can own a word that is an important attribute you believe in as Ferdinand did with “accountability.”  Ferdinand used “accountability” in talking about his vision for the company in internal meetings, memos and on the company website.

But Ferdinand also did tangible actions to embed “accountability” into the culture and associate the word with his leadership. He introduced new sales reporting metrics, performance reviews and instituted client feedback mechanisms and the like that tangibly demonstrated accountability in action.

Brands try to own a word or short phrase in the minds of consumers. When people hear the word, they think of the brand. For example, Fed Ex owns “overnight,” Coke owns “cola” and Volvo owns “safety.”

Owning a word is important because it means that your brand is positioned in the mind of prospects with an important attribute. Your brand has meaning to people in a world where there are so many brands and messages that most do not stand for anything. It’s like being the dominant response that comes up when a key word is entered on a search engine.

Owning a word can help self brands, too.  Your word can be a positive attribute that defines you.  It could be a niche in the market that you dominate. It could even be an idea or point of view that you are known for.

Many people end up owning a word through writing a book like Larry Bossidy did with “execution,” Tom Peters did with “excellence,” Al Ries and Jack Trout did with “positioning,” and Conrad-Levinson did with “guerrilla.

Jack Welch didn’t need to increase his well-knowness as a celebrity CEO by writing a book (though he may have wanted to do some brand polishing after a messy divorce). But with his successful book, he has laid claim to the word “winning.”

Whether you get the boss to change the job label on our business card or not, you should think about it.

Don’t think a job title is cast in stone, either.

Often, clients have suggested a job title change that better reflects their responsibilities and it was agreed to.  When I worked on Wall Street, my title initially was SVP, Director of Advertising. During a downturn in the market (and consequently the firm’s ad budget), I created a community-based, cause-related marketing program that created a lot of impact with a relatively small budget compared to TV ads. I also approached my boss about changing my title to Director of Advertising and Community Affairs.  Now I had a label that offered a bigger brand footprint than the narrower title potentially opening up more options in the future.

The other big label in business that ranks you as succinctly as the number of stars on an army general’s shoulder is the corporate title. Whether you are branded a VP or a SVP or an EVP or have no corporate title whatsoever matters. It matters in terms of the assumptions people make about you. Your title will affect the perceptions people have about how you perform on the job and what you are worth.

So, as long as you are in a company or line of work where there is title branding of that sort, you have to fight for the best brand label you can get.  Or, you have to move into an area where merit is measured in other ways.

Here’s a brainstormer to get you thinking about the impact of your label on your identity.

Brainstormer

What’s Your Line?

Directions:  Write down your job title. Is there a better way to label what you do or who you are?  Write it down in cursive.

A number of research studies bear this out. The Tufts University psychologist Nalini Ambady did a study showing students a two-second video of a professor. One group was given the label “statistics professor.”  The other was given the label, “humanistic psychology professor.”

Students described the statistics professor as “cold,” “rigid,” and “picky.” They called the humanistic psychologist “warm” and “concerned with students.” Both groups of students saw the same professor in the same video, only the job title was different.

So it’s not surprising that more and more people have started looking at how they label themselves. To get out of the confines or poor image contained in their label, stockbrokers changed their title to “financial consultants,” used car salesman became “pre-owned vehicle consultants” and computer programmers became “e-business solutions experts.”