Stick THAT In Your Jackass Roll & Smoke It

JACKASS ROLL REDUX

Seems last week's discussion of Food Network personality Guy Fieri (creator of the Tex Wasabi restaurant's Jackass sushi roll) as a white-hot brand touched a nerve.

Voiceover guy extraordinaire Bob Souer asked to republish it on his blog.

Somehow, the editor of the blog Fans of Guy Fieri got wind of it and asked to republish it in part.

But most interesting was the feedback from people who complained that too often, you go through the work of trying to figure out a client's brand--only to find out there wasn't any.

This is where I start turning into my high-school English teacher and say, "There's no brand because you're not working hard enough."


IT'S OUR JOB TO CREATE THE BRAND

Yes, it's nice when you can peel away the layers of the onion and suddenly, there it is, right in the center like a little shiny jewel.

But most of the time, that doesn't happen.

That's when the hard work of marketing begins.

That's when, instead of saying, "I can't help you" and kissing the client goodbye, we're obligated to figure out what to do about it.

I've told this story before, and it bears repeating: we had an interiors guy whose advertising wasn't working.

And really, the final answer could have been, "You just don't have any brand essence. There's nothing we can do for you."

But the solution came in talking to him about actually doing business. We sat him down, opened the mic, and asked him about why he loves his work, and if he had any crazy stories about re-upholstery or drapes.

And what eventually came out were stories about the ridiculous things that he'd had to do or things that had happened to him in the course of the job. Like struggling off a 7th story balcony over the ocean with a cheap sofa bed. Or being willing to tackle with a broken ottoman caster--only to have it blossom into $35,000 worth of billings. Or reupholstering red velvet dining room chairs for Santa Claus.

And his brand became The Guy Who Would Do Whatever It Takes, No Matter The Size Of The Job.

It came about not because we listened to him say, "I want to sell upholstery and drapes." It came about because we listened to him talk about HOW he treats his customers for upholstery and drapes and WHY he loves what he does.

We don't explicitly say, "The guy who does whatever it takes" in his advertising, any more than Southwest explicitly says, "We're the low cost airline with a sense of humor, fly us."

But every piece of advertising conveys some version of that message.


SILVER-PLATTER BRANDS

Sometimes, the brand is handed to you on a silver platter, like Guy Fieri. Other times, it's buried deep inside a bundle of client demands and expectations and nonsense about what advertising is supposed to be.

That's when the real challenge presents itself. The nonsense has to be stripped away to get to the essence.

This is also some of the hardest work we're ever going to do as marketers.

I've never said it was easy. On the contrary--it often seems impossible.

But it's work that has to be done.

Transmission repair shops are all alike, right?

Well, that's why it's so difficult to advertise transmission repair--until you start to realize the owner of the business you're advertising is kind of a geek about transmissions.

And then, you realize you can harness every car owner's fear & loathing of transmission repair. You can turn it to your advantage by telling the client, he should have no interest in being around this man because he's dull and boring and you're absolutely not going to enjoy him--unless you have a transmission problem. That's when his particular brand of geek genius makes you a very happy person.

And you end up with with a white-hot brand that has transmission customers flocking in from as far away as 40 miles to have their transmissions repaired.

If you've somehow never heard this commercial go to...

http://www.radiomercuryawards.com/rma2009/searchResults.cfm


MANY SMALL BUSINESSMEN ARE GEEKS AT WHAT THEY DO

Marvin the Transmission Geek is a solid, useable brand. And it didn't arrive wrapped up in a bow with a tag that said, "Brand!" It required a lot of conversation, and an account rep who was astute enough to recognize that his client was this guy.

We were once asked if we had any suggestions about how to fix a commercial that was tanking. It was for a guy who built custom closets. And the commercial was dull, dull, dull, dull, dull. The set-up was this closet guy having an insincere and uninteresting conversation with an announcer about what goes into building a custom closet.

It wasn't very difficult to listen to this and know that (a) it was tanking because there was no reason to care, and (b) if the content were only examined from the standpoint of, "Where's the brand?" it became a no-brainer.

This guy was closet obsessed.

We pulled apart the original commercial and selected some golden nuggets, phrases like, "How many purses ya got, how many shoes?"

And we turned everything on its ear.


WE HAD A BUSINESS OWNER WHO WAS "COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET"

But not just any closet--it was your closet.

And every statement the announcer made about him was backed up with some oddly comic non-sequitur from the client about closets--completely changing the context of what he'd been saying in the original message, and proving the ultimate brand point: there was no better guy to have doing your closets because he was obsessed with this stuff. It made him sound like a character, and definitely established a brand of closet geekdom.

This isn't to say you can turn every client into a geek brand.

But it is one viable and much more common brand methodology than you might realize.

Guy Fieri's brand is fun, crazy food geek.

Richard Branson's brand is adventurous airline geek.

Herb Kelleher's brand at Southwest is fun, low-cost airline geek.

Bob Souer's voiceover brand is storytelling geek.

Blaine Parker's brand is small business marketing geek.


AT ITS CORE, "GOOD ADVERTISING IS OFTEN GOOD STORYTELLING"

I've borrowed that quote from Dick Orkin more than once.

That's because it crystallizes the challenge quite well.

Every business owner has a story.

And if approached that way, the brand becomes almost instantly visible where before it was obscured by nonsense.

Building a brand is not easy by any stretch.

And for small, "me-too" businesses, it can be even more difficult--they don't understand and they don't help you.

But when you start talking to the business owner like a person about himself, instead of trying to talk about "advertising" and "marketing" and "branding," you're more likely to get to the heart of the matter--the business owner's heart, and why he puts it into what he does.

And when we stop using just our heads, and start listening to client's with our hearts, the brand often begins to take shape before our very eyes.