The Art of the Start

CHAPTER 9 The Art of Branding

The best brands never start out with the intent of building a great brand. They focus on building a great—and profitable—product or service and an organization that can sustain it.

—Scott Bedbury

GIST

There are two major schools of thought regarding branding: The first holds that it’s incomprehensible voodoo that marketers practice. I belong to the second, which contends that it’s a simple matter of applying the classic Ps of marketing: product, place, price, and promotion.

To this list, some people have added another P: prayer. They are not far off—but instead of prayer, I prefer proselytization, which is the process of converting others to your belief, doctrine, or cause.

Proselytization, or evangelism, represents the core of branding for startups in today’s highly competitive world, in which information is free, ubiquitous, and instantaneous. The art of branding requires creating something contagious that infects people with enthusiasm, making it easy for them to try it, asking them for help in spreading the word, and building a community around it.

Though I love marketing, great brands start with a great product or service, so that’s where we’ll start, too.

CREATE A CONTAGION

I call it “Guy’s Golden Touch.” It’s not the vainglorious concept that whatever I touch turns to gold, but rather, simply and more humbly, “Whatever is gold, Guy touches.”

Herein lies the secret to branding: Align with a product or service that’s gold—or enhance it until it is gold. Then successful branding is easy if not unavoidable. How hard do you think it was to brand Macintosh in 1984 when the competition was butt-ugly and boring?

If you have something that’s gold, you can make a lot of mistakes with it and still succeed. If you don’t, you have to do almost everything right. So make it easy on yourself and create or find products and services that are inherently contagious. These are the key elements of contagiousness:

COOL. Cool is beautiful. Cool is hip. Cool is idiosyncratic. And cool is contagious. Few companies purposely design products and services that aren’t cool, but we continue to see hundreds of eye-numbing efforts. Why did it take Apple to ship an MP3 player as cool as the iPod?
EFFECTIVE. You can’t brand crap. You can’t brand something that doesn’t work. No one would have heard of TiVo if it didn’t almost effortlessly record the television shows you wanted.
DISTINCTIVE. A contagious product is easy to notice and advertises itself. It leaves no doubt that it is different from the competition. Does anyone confuse a Hummer with other vehicles?
DISRUPTIVE. Contagious products are disruptive. They either upset the status quo (“Oh, hell, this is better. We’re in trouble.”) or make them go into denial (“Why would anyone want a graphical user interface?”). But they do not leave people unaffected.
EMOTIVE. A contagious product or service exceeds expectations, and by exceeding expectations, it makes you joyful. This is how I feel about our Miele vacuum cleaner—I’m amazed that it can suck so hard yet make so little noise. *
DEEP. A contagious product or service “has legs.” The more you use it, the more you discover it is capable of. Going back to TiVo, if you want to skip through advertising, enter this keystroke sequence: Select, Play, Select, 30, Select. Then, pressing the key that takes you to the end of a recorded program (––>|) will now make you jump ahead in thirty-second intervals.
INDULGENT. Purchasing a contagious product or service makes you feel as if you’ve indulged yourself. This may be because it costs more than the alternatives, it’s cooler, or it’s more than you really need. Thus, it enables you to escape the mundane. The tag line for Miele, for example, is “Anything else is a compromise.”
SUPPORTED. Providing exemplary service makes a product or service contagious. I once broke a medical device that treats my ear problems. The manufacturer, Medtronic Xomed, sent me a loaner via overnight delivery at no charge. It also repaired and shipped out my unit on the same day that the unit was received—also at no charge. And that day was a national holiday. Finally, in a bold stroke of accountability and personal touches, Medtronic provided the name, e-mail address, and digital photo of the technician who fixed it on the packing slip. Do you think I recommend this product to others with similar ear problems?

EXERCISE

The next time you get technical support from a company, ask the person for his name, e-mail address, and photo.

LOWER THE BARRIERS TO ADOPTION

An innovation, to be effective, has to be simple and it has to be focused. It should do only one thing, otherwise, it confuses. If it is not simple, it won’t work.

—Peter Drucker

Lowering the barriers to adoption is a theme that has been repeated often in this book. It applies to making it rain as well as to branding. The more prevalent your product or service, the more likely you’ll build a big brand.

A Chinese pharmaceutical company named Kunming illustrates what not to do. This company was determined to make a childproof aspirin bottle, so it created one that had thirteen moving parts and took thirty-nine steps to open. For added safety, the company changed the design every six months. The problem was that its intended customers couldn’t open the bottle. Ironically, the company discovered that adults were buying the pills and giving the bottles to kids as puzzles. *

The most common barrier that startups erect, however unintentionally, is complexity. Sure, if 1 percent of the people in China bought your aspirin because of the safety feature in the bottle, you’d achieve a lot of sales. But if it takes too long to learn how to use your product (or to open its bottle) or service, you’re making it harder to build a brand.

Few companies set out to create a complex and difficult-to-use product or service, but you have to wonder why so many products have such an incomprehensible interface. Almost anything from Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers, for example, illustrates this point. (They then compound the problem with an unreadable, broken-English manual printed in four-point gray type.) Here are ways to reduce complexity:

FLATTEN THE LEARNING CURVE. A customer should be able to get basic functionality right “out of the box” without having to turn to a manual. Imagine if you bought a car and had to read the manual to turn on its radio, change the station, and increase the volume. Mandate this to your designers: Customers must get immediate gratification without opening a manual.
WRITE A GOOD MANUAL AND INDEX IT THOROUGHLY. Typically, an underpaid person down in the bowels of an organization writes a product’s or service’s manual at the last possible moment. The manual isn’t tested, and it’s laid out in a tiny font with out-of-date illustrations.
Your manual is a marketing opportunity. It is a window onto the soul of your product or service! The better the manual, the more people will enjoy using your product or service. This in turn fosters more good word-of-mouth branding.
If manual writing is at the bottom of the totem pole, manual indexing is under the ground. Have you ever tried to determine the correct tire pressure for your car, and been unable to find “tire pressure” listed in the manual’s index?
Think of every possible thing a customer will want to do with your product and make sure there’s an entry for it in the index. If you want to see an example of a great index, look at the index in The Chicago Manual of Style. It contains approximately forty page references to the topic of dashes! Hold your organization to this standard. (FYI: I indexed The Art of the Start.)
INCLUDE PICTURES. One more thing about manuals: Add pictures and diagrams. This might increase the cost of your manuals, but it’s well worth it. Not every user is text-centric. Pictures do count for a thousand words.

EXERCISE

Run a contest asking your customers to write the best manual for your product or service. You’ll have a handful of good manuals, and you’ll uncover some evangelists.

TEST IT ON YOUR MOTHER OR FATHER. Ageist as this may seem, the ultimate test of a new product or service is seeing if your parents can use it. If your mother and father are no longer alive, try it on anyone over forty-five years old.
Do not, however, attempt this with teenagers—they can figure out anything, so their feedback is irrelevant. If you want free, word-of-mouth brand building, spend the time and energy to create a user interface that a mere mortal can comprehend.

In addition to complexity, a high price is also a barrier to building a brand. To avoid this, when Toyota introduced its Lexus line of luxury cars, it priced them far lower than the German competition. Because the cars were less expensive, there were more owners out there. Since there were more owners, it was easy to find someone to talk to about them and learn how great they were.

I hate competing on price and leaving money on the table. However, squeezing every penny out of your customer is usually not the right philosophy, either. A reasonable price that fosters the creation of a brand can produce larger returns later.

EXERCISE

Which company would you rather own: Toyota or Rolls-Royce?

The final common barrier to adoption is the cost of converting (measured in money, time, or effort) from an existing product or service to your new one. Your product or service can be cheap, and it can be easy to use, but if it’s painful to switch to, you’re making branding more difficult.

Branding aside, it makes good sense to make converting as easy as possible. Few companies would make it difficult to convert from an existing product to their product on purpose, but few companies seem to realize that a lower conversion cost is good marketing.

Finally, you might think that making it hard to switch from your product is a good idea. This is a way to lock in your customer, but exit barriers are also entry barriers. If you make it hard to switch from your product, you’ll also scare people from trying your product in the first place.

RECRUIT EVANGELISTS

Evangelists believe in your product or service as much as you do, and they want to carry the battle forward for you and with you. Recruiting evangelists can help you achieve critical mass through sustained, continuous, and low-cost proselytization and branding. If you are involved in politics, not-for-profits, schools, and churches, evangelism is an especially powerful tool to achieve success.

When it comes to evangelism, it’s not true that “if you don’t ask, you don’t get.” When your product, service, or idea is contagious and there are low barriers around it, you often “get” without asking. But if you do ask, you can get much more, much faster. However, many companies hesitate to ask because of thinking like this:

“If we ask for help, people will think we’re weak. A strong company like Microsoft never asks its customers for help.”
“The people we ask will expect something in return: discounts, special treatment, etc. Then what will we do?”
“Our customers, much as we love them, can’t help us. We know what to do, and we can do it ourselves.”
“It will cost too much to maintain special support programs. They’ll defocus our efforts.”

These reasons are bogus. When customers want to help you, you should rejoice, not restrain them, so stifle your paranoia and accept the help. The customers will turn into evangelists who spread your good news.

Following are the keys principles of recruiting evangelists. You’ll notice several similarities to concepts in Chapter 6 (“The Art of Recruiting”), which is no accident. In a sense, you are recruiting “employees”—you just don’t need to pay these folks.

ASK! Go to your early and best customers and ask for help. Tell them you want to achieve critical mass, and that you need to spread the word. This isn’t a sign of weakness—it is a sign of openness and aggressiveness. You’ll be amazed at the number of people who are willing to help, and who have been waiting to be asked.
IGNORE ACADEMIC BACKGROUND AND WORK EXPERIENCE. (Very) theoretically, the best evangelist for a software product might be someone with a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT. Avoid this type of thinking. Track records mean little when it comes to evangelism. The greatest Macintosh evangelists never used a computer before they bought one.
FOCUS ON WHAT’S IMPORTANT: DO THEY BELIEVE, AND DO THEY WANT TO HELP? Take someone (me, for example) who twenty years ago had never had a computer class in his life and whose then-current job was schlepping diamonds. Would he be the ideal candidate to evangelize a new operating system? Looking back, what mattered most was that I loved Macintosh and wanted to change the world with it.
LET A HUNDRED EVANGELISTS BLOSSOM. This is another recurring theme of this book: Don’t be picky about how evangelists help you. Show them your product or service and let them work for you in any way they can. They will show you ways to market your product and services that you never would have developed yourself.
ASSIGN TASKS AND EXPECT THEM TO GET DONE.* Have you ever volunteered to help an organization and then never been called to action? If there’s anything worse than being asked to do something you don’t want to, it’s not being asked to do something you do. If you’ve gotten this far with evangelists, they’ve signed up for the cause. Now it’s your obligation to make good use of them.
CONTINUE “FELLOWSHIP.”† The model for effective evangelism is the relationship between a good parent and child. As any parent will tell you, your kids will always be your kids. They never truly leave the nest, and you certainly don’t push them out of it. Evangelists are the same—they need frequent and perpetual lovin’.
GIVE THEM THE TOOLS TO EVANGELIZE. Make it easy for believers to help you by providing stacks of information and promotional material. For example, Bose includes ten “courtesy cards” in the Bose QuietComfort 2 Acoustic Noise Cancelling Headphones case for owners to pass out to people who ask them about the product. The card explains how to find out more about the product, purchase it, and get more cards by calling a toll-free number!

RESPOND TO THEIR DESIRES. You should revise your product or service to reflect the wishes of your evangelists for two reasons. First, they will be among the most knowledgeable about what it takes to make it better. Second, and as important, demonstrating that you do listen to them will foster even greater loyalty and enthusiasm for helping you.
GIVE THEM STUFF. You would be amazed at the power of a free T-shirt, coffee mug, pen, or notepad. (At one point, Apple had a $2 million per year T-shirt expense.) Evangelists love these goodies. It makes them feel like they’re part of the team and special. This is money well spent, but never give away anything that costs more than $25. A Montblanc pen, for example, is over the line and will make you look like you’re wasting money.

Let’s assume that you are successful in recruiting customers to be evangelists. What should you ask them to do? That is the topic of the next section.

FOSTER A COMMUNITY

In the late 1990s, a group of business people and community leaders started an organization called the Calgary Flames Ambassadors. They were Flames fans who were alarmed by the prospect that their National Hockey League team might move to another city. According to the chairman of the group, Lyle Edwards, “The Ambassadors ran around Calgary and twisted arms so that people bought more tickets.”

Circa 2004, the group had fifty members, and they don’t have to help sell tickets anymore. To join the Ambassadors, you have to buy a season ticket and pay $100 Canadian to the Ambassadors organization. That’s right: these evangelists pay for the privilege of proselytizing the Flames. They greet fans at games, promote community outreach, and conduct social events.

The goal of recruiting evangelists is to build a community around your product or service. Examples of companies that enjoy well-publicized communities include Apple, Harley-Davidson, Motley Fool, and Saturn. These communities provide customer service, technical support, and social relationships that make owning a product or utilizing a service a better experience—they also twist arms so that people buy more products, services, or tickets.

Surprisingly, most companies react to the formation of communities after they appear, and their reaction is: “Never heard of them…You mean to say that there are groups of customers who get together because of our product?”

This is suboptimal, if not downright stupid. Having seen how some companies have benefited from the spontaneous generation of communities, you should proactively bring one into existence:

IDENTIFY AND RECRUIT THE “THUNDER LIZARDS” OF YOUR PRODUCT OR SERVICE. These are the customers who are the most enthusiastic about what you do and who are willing to serve in leadership positions.
HIRE SOMEONE WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS TO FOSTER A COMMUNITY. This is your internal champion for the needs of the community; he evangelizes evangelists and fights for internal resources. As you achieve success, build a department around this person to institutionalize community support.
CREATE A BUDGET FOR COMMUNITY SUPPORT. You won’t need much, and the intent is not for you to “buy” a community. But you’ll still need a budget for the community to hold meetings, print and circulate newsletters, and maintain an online presence.
INTEGRATE THE PRESENCE OF THE COMMUNITY INTO YOUR SALES AND MARKETING EFFORTS AND YOUR ONLINE PRESENCE. For example, your Web site should provide information about the community, including instructions for joining it.
HOST THE COMMUNITY’S EFFORTS. This means letting members use your building to hold meetings as well as providing digital assistance, such as operating an e-mail listserver, online chat, and bulletin board on your Web site.
HOLD A CONFERENCE. No one loves electronic communication more than I do, but face-to-face meetings are important for communities. At these conferences, community members can meet one another as well as interact with your own employees.

Per dollar, building a community of customers and evangelists is the cheapest method for creating and maintaining a brand, so don’t screw up by waiting for a community to form on its own.

EXERCISE

Look at the back of this book’s dust jacket. Can you figure out why we printed so many cover design entries?

ACHIEVE HUMANNESS

Consider several great brands: Apple, Coca-Cola, Levi Strauss, Nike, and Saturn. They’ve all achieved humanness: the funkiness of Apple, the joy of Coca-Cola, the youthfulness of Levi Strauss, the gutsy determination of Nike, and the buddy-buddy feeling of Saturn.

To be sure, there are great brands that don’t exhibit these qualities—Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM, to name a few. Call me a romantic, but wouldn’t it be better and more fun to have a warm brand? If you agree, here’s how to achieve this:

TARGET THE YOUNG. No matter who actually buys your product or service, targeting young people forces you to build a warm brand. I have no data to back this up, but it seems that lots of old people are buying products that were initially targeted to young people. For example, check out how many bald heads are driving Toyota Scions, PT Cruisers, and Mini Coopers.
MAKE FUN OF YOURSELF. Most companies are incapable of having a sense of humor about themselves, an attitude they view as suicidal: “People won’t take us seriously if we don’t take ourselves seriously.” Or, they are so caught up in their self-image that appearing to lack total control scares them. As the saying goes, “To err is human,” so don’t be afraid to err and to make fun of that error.
FEATURE YOUR CUSTOMERS. Organizations that feature their customers in marketing materials exude humanness. For example, Saturn features the owners of its cars in its marketing materials. Saturn’s Web site even features an area called “My Story,” in which customers discuss their Saturn experiences.
HELP THE UNDERSERVED AND UNDERPRIVILEGED. An organization that supports the underserved and underprivileged communicates humanness. Hallmark Cards, for example, provides money and volunteers to many community programs. There’s an easy-to-find section of their Web site about how to apply for such resources. This is a double win: Not only are you fulfilling a moral obligation to the community, you are also furthering the effectiveness of your brand.

EXERCISE

Go to the Web sites of your favorite companies and try to find information about how to apply for grants and volunteer for the company.

FOCUS ON PUBLICITY

For weeks before the debut of the Ikea store in East Palo Alto, California, residents of the area read story after story about its grand opening. For example, a story by Thaai Walker in the August 14, 2003, edition of the San Jose Mercury News started this way:

CAR-GO HELP FOR IKEA SHOPPERS

CITY BRACES FOR OPENING DAY TRAFFIC

How do you move 16,000 shoppers packed into 8,000 cars through a 2.5-square-mile city on a day when the biggest, bluest store to grace East Palo Alto’s horizon opens to the public?

If you read any local newspaper, listened to the radio, or watched television, it was impossible not to learn that Ikea was opening a new branch in East Palo Alto, and it was going to be a huge event.

Brands such as Ikea are not built on advertising. Advertising may maintain and expand brands, but it’s publicity that establishes them. Here are the key concepts of attracting publicity and press coverage:

CREATE BUZZ, GET INK. Most organizations think that press coverage generates buzz as readers clamor to become customers. This is backward thinking. Here’s how it works: First, you create something grand. Then you lower the barriers to adoption and get it into the hands of people. They, in turn, generate buzz. Then the press will write about it.
MAKE FRIENDS BEFORE YOU NEED THEM. When I worked for Apple, the press always wanted to interview “Apple execs” because it was a hot company. During such heady and flattering times, the temptation is always to focus on the important publications: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, etc.
I gravitated instead toward helping reporters from publications that you would never have heard of. Years later, these reporters are now at the important publications, and they remember how I helped them. The lesson is “Make friends before you need them—and even before they can help you.”
USE A RIFLE, NOT A SHOTGUN. My reporter friends tell me that organizations often “shotgun” their newsrooms—meaning that every reporter in the news department gets a press kit or e-mail about some miraculous new product or service. This approach rarely works because your material will be irrelevant to almost all the recipients.
Instead, first determine if your story is appropriate for the publication. Fascinating as you might find it, it might not be. Mitch Betts, features editor of ComputerWorld, described whom he would recommend contact his publication: “If CIOs of General Motors, Wal-Mart, Amazon would be interested, we’d be interested.” * That’s how relevant you need to be.
Second, determine which reporter covers your specific area—for example, pitching the arts reporter about a new enterprise’s software package isn’t going to bear any fruit.
Third, pitch that particular reporter only if your story can pass an important test: “Is it good and useful for the readers?” The test is not “Is it good for our organization?” Believe it or not, publications exist for their readers, not as vehicles for your marketing.
BE A FOUL-WEATHER FRIEND. Many organizations kiss up to journalists when things are going great and they want coverage. But when things turn bad or busy, they disappear on them by not returning phone calls and e-mails. No matter what the weather, you must maintain good relations with the press.
TELL THE TRUTH. When things go bad, there’s a temptation to lie to the press to get out of a jam. Don’t do it. You establish your credibility during bad times, not good. Anyone can tell the truth when things are going well. If you’ve established a record for being honest when times are bad, the press will believe you when times are good.
BE A SOURCE. Sometimes your story isn’t worth covering, or there is no place to mention your organization in the reporter’s story. That’s OK. At these times, simply be a source and help the journalist write a good story. Your turn will come.

TALK THE WALK

Hidden Villa is a 1,600-acre farm and wilderness preserve in Los Altos, California. The Josephine and Frank Duveneck family gave it to the people of Northern California to foster environmental and multi-cultural awareness. Its programs include summer camps, environmental education, community outreach, hostel accommodations, and organic farming.

In short, Hidden Villa “walks the talk”—that is, it makes enormous meaning for the community and delivers on its goals. (This contrasts sharply to the behavior of many organizations, which talk a good game but do not deliver results.) However, the organization noticed that its employees and directors didn’t have the tools to promote it in a concise and compelling way.

To fix this problem, the organization created a program called “Talk the Walk,” which involved developing one-liners that explain Hidden Villa. Then, at an offsite, members of the Hidden Villa staff and directors role-played using these one-liners. Now they are all able to “talk the walk” whether they are at a Hidden Villa event or bumping into a friend in the supermarket.

The starting point for branding is inside your organization, so make sure that every employee can “talk the walk” and enthusiastically proselytize the organization.

MINICHAPTER: THE ART OF SPEAKING

Why is it that those who have something to say can’t say it, while those who have nothing to say keep saying it?

—anonymous

“Pitching” typically refers to making a presentation to potential investors, customers, and partners in a small, informal meeting at the prospect’s office. In addition to pitching, there will be opportunities to give speeches and to participate on panels at conferences, seminars, and industry events. These are useful vehicles to build awareness for your organization.

The purpose of these appearances is not to raise money (though a good speech can generate interest in investing) but to increase awareness of the organization and build a brand. I’ve seen dozens of executives give speeches and participate on panels, and, with rare exceptions, they suck. This happens for the following reasons:

Executives are surrounded by minions who don’t have the knowledge, courage, or competence to tell the emperor that he has no clothes.
Executives are egomaniacs. They have lofty self-images, so they cannot believe that they are not dynamite speakers right out of the womb.
Executives are busy people who have little time to practice—or, more accurately, who allocate little time to practice. The combination of denying the need to practice and not having the time to do it is the kiss of death.

First, let’s cover the principles of giving an effective speech. This opportunity is a powerful weapon because you have the podium all to yourself. You can, for the most part, control the entire block of time.

SAY SOMETHING INTERESTING. This is an obvious but widely ignored point. If you don’t have something interesting to say, don’t speak. If you don’t speak, people won’t know you’re a loser. If you do speak, you’ll leave no doubt. Better the former than the latter.
OVERDRESS. In contrast to when making a pitch, it is better to be overdressed than underdressed. An audience interprets casual dress as your saying, “You’re not important enough to make any effort.” If you overdress, the worst-case scenario is that you’ll look too professional.
CUT THE SALES PROPAGANDA. People attend a speech because they want information, not to get a blatant sales pitch. Logical or not, an audience tends to think that good speakers have good products and services. If you inform them with a high-content and relevant speech, they might buy. If you sales-pitch them, they won’t.
TELL STORIES. For some people, making an interesting speech is harder than upgrading Microsoft Windows. Great speakers don’t simply make assertions, they tell stories. Make a point, tell a story to illustrate it, make another point, and tell a story to illustrate it.
CIRCULATE WITH THE CROWD BEFORE YOU SPEAK. I give fifty keynotes a year, and I find it tremendously encouraging to see people in the audience whom I’ve already met. A few friendly faces give me the confidence to make a bolder speech. The goal is to recruit some friends who will be the first to laugh at your jokes, nod in agreement with your insights, and applaud your performance.
TALK ABOUT KIDS. If there’s a surefire way to endear yourself to an audience, it’s to talk about your kids. If you don’t have kids, talk about your relative’s kids, your friend’s kids, or when you were a kid. I’ve never seen an audience that doesn’t appreciate a good kid story.
SELF-DEPRECATE. Another good way to win over an audience is to make fun of yourself. If you’re nervous, mention that you’re nervous. Most people in the crowd will empathize with you. If you can’t find one thing to make fun of about yourself, you’re either a total bore or a total orifice.
SPEAK AT THE START OF AN EVENT. If you’re given a choice, speak on the first day of the conference. That’s when attendance and energy are at their highest, and therefore it’s the easiest atmosphere in which to give a good speech. By the last day, many people will have departed, and those who remain are probably out of gas, which means you have to devote some of your time to lifting them out of their lethargy. Giving a good speech is hard enough without this added pressure.
ASK FOR A SMALL ROOM. If you can, speak in a small, crowded room. Audience energy is a function of how full the room is, not the absolute number of people in the audience. For example, 250 people in a 250-capacity room is much better than 500 people in a 1,000-capacity room. If you can’t get a small room, try asking for a classroom-style layout (tables and chairs) rather than theater-style layout (chairs only).
FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED EARLIER AT THE EVENT. This is another reason why it’s good to go on first: You don’t have to learn what happened before you. In fact, you can be the “event” that other speakers have to cope with.
However, if you’re not the first speaker, try to attend the sessions that precede you, or at least ask your hosts if anything dramatically good, bad, or funny has already occurred. Then weave this incident into your speech. This accomplishes two things: First, it increases the perception that you customized your talk; second, it shows that you care enough about the event that you’ve been there for a while.
DON’T DENIGRATE THE COMPETITION. It is a privilege and an honor to give a speech. Your duty is to inform and entertain the audience. This is not an opportunity to slash and burn your competition. Doing so will reflect poorly on you, not on your competition, and will create the opposite effect of what you intended.
PRACTICE. As a rule of thumb, the twenty-fifth time you give a speech is when it gets good. Few people will practice or give the same speech twenty-five times. That’s why there are so few good speakers. Ironically, the more you practice, the more you’ll sound spontaneous.
USE A TOP-TEN LIST FORMAT. I use a top-ten list format so that an audience can track progress through my speeches. Few experts agree with this, but I urge you to try it. If you can’t come up with ten interesting things to say about a subject, then don’t speak.

Next, let’s discuss appearances on panels. Panels are excellent opportunities to build a brand because they allow you to position against others—frequently competitors—on the panel. Here’s how to be a great panelist.

CONTROL YOUR INTRODUCTION. Bring a copy of your bio and hand it to the moderator who will introduce you. Don’t depend on what the moderator comes up with. And, as in speeches, cut the sales pitch about your organization. To make your organization look good, be an informative panelist, not a loudmouth braggart.
ENTERTAIN, DON’T JUST INFORM. Answering the moderator’s or audience’s questions is only half the job of a panelist. The more important task is to entertain the audience. You can do this with penetrating new insight, humor, or controversy. Always ask yourself, Am I being entertaining?
TELL THE TRUTH—ESPECIALLY WHEN THE TRUTH IS OBVIOUS. Most people expect panelists to lie when they encounter a tough question, so if you don’t lie, you establish credibility for your other answers.
ERR ON THE SIDE OF BEING PLAIN AND SIMPLE. Often a moderator will ask a technical question, so the temptation is to respond with a technical answer. This is usually a mistake. Keep it plain and simple: enough to show that you know what you’re talking about but not so much that it makes you incomprehensible to 80 percent of the audience.
NEVER LOOK BORED. You can look happy, sad, angry (at what’s being said, not that you have to be on the panel), or incredulous, but never look bored. Someone in the audience will be looking at you, a photographer will snap a picture, or a videocameraman will focus on you. Unfortunately, you are most likely to be bored when other panelists are talking, so learn how to fake interest.
DON’T LOOK AT THE MODERATOR. Play to the audience, not the moderator; the audience wants to see the front of your face, not its side. A good moderator will purposely not look at you or draw your eye contact.
MAKE CASUAL CONVERSATION. You’re onstage, but act as if you’re not. Simply make conversation with the moderator and other panelists. Don’t pontificate and don’t “make a speech.” Interact with everyone (even the audience) in a casual way.
ANSWER THE QUESTION POSED, BUT NEVER LIMIT YOURSELF TO THE QUESTION POSED. For example, if you’re asked, “Is file intrusion detection an important technology?,” don’t just say no. Say, “No, but let me tell you what is really hot.” Most panelists go to one of two extremes: answering only the question or providing an answer that had nothing to do with the question.
NEVER SAY, “I AGREE WITH WHAT THE OTHER PANELISTS HAVE SAID.” Just say something different or new. If the other panelists have said everything you want to say (which is unlikely), be gracious: “Everything has been said. Let’s move on out of respect for the audience.” It’s usually better to appear considerate rather than stupid.

MINI-MINICHAPTER: THE ART OF DESIGNING T-SHIRTS

The person who is waiting for something to turn up might start with their shirt sleeves.

—Garth Henrichs

Making T-shirts to announce a product or company is a fine Silicon Valley tradition, perfected by Apple back in the mid-eighties. We’d print and distribute the T-shirts, then announce the product, and then start development.

When we launched Garage in 1997, our first product was a T-shirt for kids that said, “I’m a little entrepreneur. My favorite letters are I, P, and O.” We sold hundreds of them—being the e-commerce pioneers that we were.

In an attempt to build a brand and create a desirable tchotchke, many organizations print T-shirts. Unfortunately, many are downright ugly and scream, “We’re dweebs with no sense of design!” Honestly, T-shirts aren’t a big part of building a brand, but if you’re going to do it, do it right.

DON’T USE WHITE SHIRTS. White quickly turns to gray because people don’t segregate their laundry like they should. If you use white, you’ll significantly reduce the chest life of the T-shirt because few people like to wear dingy clothes.
MINIMIZE TEXT. Think of a T-shirt as a moving billboard. People don’t put paragraphs of text on a billboard. Follow the same rules for T-shirts. Use no more than six to ten words. At Garage, we printed a shirt that said, “Startup, kick butt, cash out.”
USE A BIG (SIXTY-POINT) FONT. The purpose of a company T-shirt is to publicize something. If you use a twelve-point font, no one will be able to read the text. If you can’t read a T-shirt from twenty feet, the design is wrong.
SPEND A FEW BUCKS ON DESIGN. T-shirts are an art form. If all you’re going to do is slap on some text, don’t even bother. This is especially true if you want women to wear them. Make your T-shirts bold and beautiful—go for it. It’s only a shirt, after all.
MAKE THEM IN KID’S SIZES. Some adults won’t wear T-shirts—it’s beneath their fashion standards (though you sure couldn’t tell by looking at them). However, they don’t care what their kids wear, and kids prefer them, anyway.

FAQ

Q. Should I advertise or depend exclusively on evangelism, buzz, and word-of-mouth?

A. In his book The Anatomy of Buzz, Emanuel Rosen provides a fine explanation of the relationship between advertising and guerilla marketing techniques. He unequivocally believes that advertising is an important part of branding. His reasons include jump-starting the process of buzz, reaching hubs of opinion leaders, reassuring customers, and providing the facts.* He goes on to discuss how advertising can both stimulate buzz and kill it. His book is well worth buying.

If you have to pick only one set of techniques, use the guerilla ones. But if you have the resources, do both.

Q. Do I need a PR firm? Or a PR department?

A. The answer is the same for a PR firm and an internal PR department. Here’s what they can do: force you to create a solid branding message; open the door for you with members of the press via preexisting relationships; schedule meetings and interviews and make sure that you’re presentable; provide postinterview feedback; and help you improve your meeting and presentation skills. Here’s what they cannot do: take second-rate products and services and generate countless articles about them; make the company always look good; and prevent the company from ever looking bad.

Here’s what they should never do: become the thought police through which external communications and branding must pass for “approval.”

Q. Should I pay evangelists for their help?

A. No. They’re not evangelizing your product or service for the money. They’re doing it as a way to make the world a better place. You might, in fact, insult them by trying to pay them. The three best forms of compensation you can provide are to make your product or service better, to offer stacks of information and documentation, and to honor them publicly.

Q. Is it important to build a brand in our local area or start immediately with international exposure?

A. Generally, you should establish your product and service—and therefore your brand—locally before you venture forth. It’s much better to establish your brand solidly in a small area than to have it almost established in many areas.

However, you may have the type of product or service where customers are spread out around the world, and their commonality isn’t geographic but based on other parameters. This is OK, too. The point is to go deep before you go broad—along whatever parameter “deep” appears.

Q. What if we realize that we have a stinker of a branding concept, or we want to change our direction in the middle of a branding campaign?

A. Here are several thoughts, perhaps conflicting, for you. First, I don’t believe in “branding campaigns,” a term that implies that branding is a short-term project. It’s not. Branding is continuous and perpetual.

Second, how did you decide it’s a stinker? Do you want to change because you’re tired of your logo, look and feel, tag line, mantra…whatever? Because typically it’s about the time that you are getting tired of these things that the public is just getting them into their skulls.

Third, if you’re not achieving revenues, the problem is probably something more fundamental, such as an inferior product or service.

Fourth, if your product or service is fundamentally good, and you truly have a mispositioned brand, do make a change. Ask the people who are buying your product or service what it stands for—this is usually a great start for effective branding.