I was watching Morgan Spurlock on TED.com this morning. If you don’t remember him, he’s the guy who ate nothing but McDonald’s food for 30 days and lived to not only tell about it, but make a movie, Supersize Me.
Anyway, he was talking about his latest project, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. The entire movie is paid for by the companies that are in it. It is a movie about brands, paid for by the brands themselves.
The most poignant part of the story about the making of this movie was that his pitch fell flat on all the advertising agencies he had visited. They simply didn’t want to involve the brands they represented in a project where they couldn’t control the message. So he went directly to the brands themselves, and 12 of them went behind their agency’s backs to be involved in the project.
Now, this RobZerrvation isn’t about branding or selling out to advertisers Things go better with Coke. Rather, it’s about the idea of a brand and what our own brand is.
My own conceptualization of branding started in high school, it seems. I only know this because I was dumb enough to write about it in a high school yearbook. Without embarrassing myself too much, I can say that it involved jungle hats, a suede western hat and three casual suits. Hey, it was the mid 70s, and I was, and perhaps still am, a dork. My brand was very shy back then and I was only fixated on the packaging, not was inside the package Plop! Plop! Fizz, Fizz, Oh, what a relief it is.
If you don’t know a lot about branding, here’s a quick tutorial. Basically, it’s the sum of the experience that others have with you, from the moment they first lay eyes on you to the time you take your last breath (or they tell you to go to hell). Everything in between either adds or subtracts from your brand.
Pretty basic in concept, but daunting to describe, isn’t it? It’s especially hard when you have to pin it down to a single word or sentence I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.
Businesses spend millions trying to get their brand down to this one thought – this one concept that describes what the product or service is all about. If you want to get a little scared, they are even using MRI’s now to peer inside your brain to see what messages will get you to buy something they are selling.
Now, I’ve never had the advantage of being able to MRI the heads of friends, family and casual acquaintances to see how they perceive me. Given some of the things that have happened over the years, I’m not sure I would want to know.
But the whole idea of knowing what your brand is has really come to intrigue me recently. I can thank Morgan for that. And I can also thank a book I’m reading called “Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination,” which also touches on this subject.
To make a long story short, we all have something unique we offer the world. It’s the sum of our experiences, our talents, our interests, our thoughts, our fears and our beliefs. It is what makes us, well, us. It is, in fact, our brand.
No one else has it on the earth. It’s unique to you. And if you can find that one unique thing that you can offer the world, you have the market to yourself. There is no competition for what you offer.
The trick, of course, is to figure out what it is. It’s easy to dismiss the things you know how to do or the things that make your soul sing, thinking instead that you’re just like everyone else out there. Businesses do the same thing. When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight. That’s why they never make it big like the Apples and Facebooks of the world. They just can’t find their niche and drive their brand home.
I have been guilty of the same thing. For as long as I can remember, I have been a writer. I wrote for grades and accolades in high school and college. I have done it professionally since 1985.
And yet, I have refused to embrace the fact that I am a writer, a good writer at that. Instead, I have diluted my brand by taking on marketing projects, web design, graphic design, event planning — you name it, thinking that was the way to pay the bills. It wasn’t. Instead, it just kept me from refining my message — I am a great writer, hiring anyone else will be a disappointment.
I have had the same trouble with my personal life. I have been loathe to figure out what makes me, me. What is it that I can do better than anyone else, at least in a way that is unique to me? And what is its value to the world?
Tough one, huh ? I know it is for me. I’ve only begun to finally figure out what my brand is. What I have found out is that I can make people laugh. My mind is whirring along on creative pursuits, virtually 24 hours a day it seems. For instance, I woke up this morning with a new word top of mind: liquoriosity, which is what teens have when the beging to get curious about alcohol.
So, who knows how this will all play out and how I can turn my unique brand into big bucks. My Evil Plan is only just coming into focus now. We’ll see how it plays to the marketplace.
Out on the Treasure Coast, thinking this slogan down my side was not a good thing even though it worked for the Goodyear Blimp,
– Robb