Chapter 12

Everything You Need to Know about Making Yourself Famous (in about an Hour)

TO BE A BUSINESS, YOU HAVE to have customers. To get customers, they have to know about you. What they know has to make them want to buy.

It’s that simple.

This is what we mean by making yourself famous. We mean getting seen and heard in your marketplace—whether it’s the local community or a global one—standing for an idea of value, and being talked about by others. If you do this, you’ll end up with a name that has a specific reputation attached, commonly known as a brand.

When you discover what your brand is, you’ll know that it will always be the center of what makes and keeps you famous. That’s why it’s the focus of this chapter. Along with True Teams, crafting a unique selling brand is one of the biggest multipliers of entrepreneurial success, and it’s doable by anyone who takes a few simple steps to find a great selling brand and control it.

All your marketing and sales communications should beat from the same heart: one strong brand foundation, the one big selling idea that sets you apart. The process that comes later on—advertising, free media, events, and PR—is more tactical and technical. It can be read about, learned in classrooms, or hired.

Every business can use the following brand tools for free to help make themselves famous. They’ve been honed for decades by brand titans who put these principles to the test, turning tiny start-ups into global giants. The power behind your brand will always be your Unique Difference—what we’ve already termed a DSI, the first key element in the Strategic Three. You’ll find that most of the rules that apply to differences and brands are identical because their essential mission is the same: to set you apart in the fastest, most memorable way.

No advice we can give you is more important than this: As a leader, you have to think about your brand and the Unique Difference behind it from day one—and every day you show up for work thereafter. Think of it this way: Your brand is just your Unique Difference, turned into your reputation.

Understanding how this works is essential.

CAUTION: FAMOUS WORKS BOTH WAYS

The world is full of awesome products that no one has ever heard of because they are sitting on a bench in an inventor’s garage. The inventor did nothing to make them famous. It’s also full of not-the-best-but-good-enough products that have made entrepreneurs hugely successful because those entrepreneurs were the best at telling others about their products, getting famous in their markets, getting distribution, and becoming the standard that everybody bought.

The world is also full of people, places, and things that are universally famous but that no one would buy or buy from in a million years because they represent something terrible. Every American adult and child knows about Bernie Madoff and Lance Armstrong, but we wouldn’t elect either one president. You must be famous for value and trust—good things, not bad—if you want someone to buy from you and if you want to become a selling brand.

The entrepreneur’s job is thus to execute not only on a prototype-building plan, but also on a fame-building plan.

BRANDING 101

It’s Not Optional

Picture this scene:1 You walk into a party. There’s a woman in a police uniform, a young man with blue spiked hair, and three other people in casual clothes. Okay, so there’s a female cop and a punked-out computer geek. Who are the other three? The hostess comes over. “Let me introduce you to Dr. Harwood, head of neurosurgery at Stanford; Bob Boyd, the attorney who just won the big class action case against wearing your pants down around your ass in public; and my friend, Bob.” Based on his nerdy-looking eyeglasses, you figure Bob is an accountant. Then you see his diamond-accented Rolex. Bob moves up to hedge fund guy.

Between the uniforms, your hostess, and your preconceived notions, you’ve just judged, valued, and categorized—in other words, branded—six people in 15 seconds. And guess what?—They’ve just branded you.

We don’t think about it, we just do it. We’re wired that way. It’s our single-minded caveman urge to simplify.

The fact is, we can’t not form these instantaneous brand impressions. We can’t not make these judgments. Our primitive brains want us to form snap judgments on the least amount of information, so they give us automatic mental rules of thumb to help us do it, like “The one I know is the one that’s safe,” and “Familiar is better.”

The human proclivity for snap judgments means that if you’re going to have a business, branding is not optional. The only choice you have is to shape your brand and control it yourself. Otherwise, your customers and competitors will do it for you. And you won’t like the tagline when they do.2

Brands are more important than ever these days, for two reasons. First, because there used to be just one kind of everything—one kind of soup, one kind of soap—but now there are 350,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs) at the supermarket. We need help telling them apart.

Second, we live in a digital word-of-mouth age in which every customer can broadcast impressions and likes or dislikes to a thousand friends in a second. UnStoppable marketers develop brands that are distinctive from others so that customers will talk about them in colorful (and positive) ways.

What Kind of Brand Must You Be?

If a brand is your name attached to a specific reputation in the customer’s mind, then Wheaties, BMW, Red Bull, and the NFL are all brands. But so are North Korea and Al Qaeda. They’re just not positive ones. They are names attached to reputations that most of us find repellent. We wouldn’t buy them—but they’re brands just the same.

The only kind of brand we want is a selling brand: a name attached to an idea that’s a powerful reason to buy.

Entrepreneurs must build their brands on a Unique Difference that has the five elements that make it a DSI—elements that are always worth repeating. It’s a difference that’s:

A DSI is at the center of all great and famous brands. It’s the one big idea you want to stand for above all others in the customer’s mind—the “one idea” as you’ll recall from the One Item of Carry-on Rule. Make sure your brand can stand up to the DSI test. Here are some examples of brands known around the world because they do:

The one, the only, the biggest, the best—these brands are all DSIs in their categories. What makes you the number one choice every day? What do you give the customer that nobody else does? What’s the one biggest advantage that would make people buy if they knew about it? What sets you apart in your market area? Why the heck are you here?

Find and nail this idea. If you can’t, you need to adjust your product, your business model, your market, or your mission until you do.

Notice we did not say to adjust your words. If you don’t have an idea of the distinct value that you deliver, your brand is worthless and no amount of slick words can help. Brands are not made from words, only suggested by them. Brands are made from promises kept and real performance—what you do in return for the customer’s money and trust, over and over again.

When you figure out what your DSI is and find a way to deliver it reliably over and over again, then by all means put that in the words and use the tools that help you get famous, faster. Use nothing but UnStoppable language whenever you can—language that is specific, vivid, concise, and story-centered. Just don’t forget the classic advertising principle: “Great advertising for a lousy product just makes it die faster.”

How to Brand: Name It, Frame It, and Claim It

Name It

If you can dream it, then name it.

A great politician once said, when asked why he remembered so many voters’ names, “The sweetest sound to any man’s ears is the sound of his own name.” Names are the first words we learn and say. Even a pet parakeet can learn its own name. Likewise, there is no more powerful branding and getting-famous tool than a great name.

This is why the movie studios took a charming young actor named Archie Leach and turned him into Cary Grant—and why little Ralphie Lifshitz from the Bronx gave himself a name tweak to become Ralph Lauren. What’s in a name? Everything.

The greatest names are (1) easy to say, (2) colorful or descriptive, and (3) set up your DSI. In fact, they launch your selling idea in the minds of customers every time they are heard or seen. Every time they are uttered, a unique reason to buy comes right along with it. A great name is the branding gift that keeps on giving!

Whenever possible, give yourself a descriptive name in real words. One of our new all-time favorites is 5-hour ENERGY, the liquid energy shot found on the counter of every convenience store in America. (Yes, the name is printed just like that, capital letters and all, on every product label and in every advertisement.) It’s like an elevator pitch in three words, describing precisely what the customer will get every time he or she buys and downs a bottle of the stuff.

Other great examples include Diehard Batteries, Invisible Fence, Facebook, Head & Shoulders shampoo, LinkedIn, 3 Day Startup, and Air Blade hand dryers.

Budget car rental, Sleep Eze, StairMaster, FOCUS Factor memory pills, Krazy Glue, Roach Motel, 8 Minute Abs, and Omaha Steaks. In each case the name captures the product’s DSI and thereby starts the selling process immediately.

Because so many dictionary words are already reserved as names and websites these days, you can often make up descriptive-sounding names by combining them. The best are the ones where the derivative words are pretty obvious to anyone: Groupon (group + coupon), Jumbotron, Netflix, CarMax, Wikipedia (wiki + encyclopedia), Duracell, Entelligence, and Compaq (which started out by making the first compact, portable personal computer).

Other great names may violate the above rules but work nonetheless because they are fun to say, easy to remember, and slide off the tongue. If they perform and become popular with customers, they become new words all by themselves, like Swiffer, Google, and Twitter. Amazon is another great example. The name says nothing about what they do. They succeeded because they were a monopoly in a brand-new category. Their colorful name eventually became its own descriptive word and a category.

Most entrepreneurs can’t afford to take that kind of gamble. Why would you name your energy drink Bambaloosie when you could call it 5-hour ENERGY—a name that customers hear and think, “Hey, I want that!” If at all possible, avoid saddling yourself with a name that’s inherently meaningless—empty initials like GRX Inc., or a nonsense name like iFloozient. A name like that is simply a wasted opportunity. You’re opting to start from a brand hole: no one has any idea what you do or why they should care. Then you have to teach them from scratch.

The best entrepreneurs have an instinctive urge to name their business as soon as they’ve got an exciting idea, because that’s the first step to making an idea more tangible and visible in their own minds, let alone in the minds of others. A movie producer’s first question always is: what’s it called? They know that an evocative title like Animal House, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Back to the Future excites the senses and launches the whole pitch in the right direction. A generic movie name like Playing for Keeps, People Like Us, The Day, or Any Day Now (all real movies that were released in 2012 and promptly forgotten) just allows you to be invisible.

Brand Names Galvanize the Troops and Focus Your Mission

We never stop being impressed as we see this effect happen again and again: just coming up with a good, sharp, or provocative brand name works like magic to fire up and refocus founders and followers.

A friend of ours was retiring from the Navy and starting up a handyman services business backed by a do-it-yourself website. He was hoping to systematize, grow, and eventually replicate the business through myriad local franchises. He had come a long way, but still didn’t have a name that excited him—one that would really click with customers. Every form of “Mr. Handyman Do-It-Yourself” was taken. We applied naming principle number one: build on your unique selling idea. His was: Count on us to get there fast, and fix it for the fairest price, always.

We came up with Fixit Express. Boom! It launched his proposition, and even set up taglines like “Fix it for less with Fixit Express.” It was like lighting a fuse for this founder and his team. They created a new logo and graphics for their trucks, and started selling with new confidence and excitement.

Graham Weston and his colleagues at Rackspace have seen the same magic happen when naming everything from the new open-source cloud operating system called OpenStack (“The Operating System of the Open Cloud”) to San Antonio’s first 24/7 collaborative workspace for innovators and entrepreneurs, Geekdom.

And just in case you still don’t think names are important, there’s this classic naming story. A few years ago, fresh ocean fish from New England’s legendary Grand Banks was getting scarcer and more expensive. So some South American entrepreneurs discovered they could farm-raise an incredible, edible white fish that would be a hit in the American market. Its meat was mild, firm, and flavorful, perfect for restaurant chefs to work with. It was plentiful and inexpensive. And it had one horrible problem.

It was called the Patagonian toothfish. Food preferences are famously subjective and psychological. A Patagonian toothfish sounded like something boney, sharp-fanged, and ugly, right out of a nightmare. You didn’t want to be in the same room with a toothfish, let alone eat one. Compared to elegantly named species like salmon, branzino, tilapia, and mahi-mahi, its popularity was nil.

Until someone simply changed the name.

The new name was Chilean sea bass.

How charming, a fish with real class. Hadn’t we already been eating that one for years? Chilean sea bass became a restaurant staple overnight. We won’t tell anyone.

This name did something especially powerful—it reframed the whole idea, from an ugly, toothy derelict from a sketchy place to an Ivy League graduate—a sea bass—from the lovely, exotic nation of Chile. It was a new name and a new frame at the same time.

Framing is the next bit of branding magic you can do to make yourself famous faster and more consistently. What works for Chilean sea bass works for just about anything.

Frame It

You’ve heard of political candidates putting a “spin” on an issue, also known as “defining the opponent’s identity with voters,” or marketers creating a “position” for their brands. They’re all doing the same thing: framing. Framing is simply helping others to think about an idea, a product, or a person in the positive way you want them to, so they form an impression and attach a value that advances your cause. If you frame a product or business right, you control what people think about your brand. And you always frame around your DSI—the idea that makes your business the number one choice.

The Simplest Way to Frame: Give Them a Box to Put You in

Customers instinctively form an impression of us whether we ask them to or not, then they file us in a mental box that occupies a unique place in the brain. Once you’re in that box, it’s very hard to get out of it.

So the simplest and most direct way of framing is to give them the box to put you in. That is, declare in the fewest, most specific, and most vivid terms the answer to the most basic buying questions.

First, tell them in what area you are the number one choice.

Second, if it’s not already obvious or implied (because you’re a new kind of product, like a Swiffer), tell them the best thing you do to make their life better—that is, what problem you solve or new opportunity you bring.

For example, “We are the number one choice because we are . . .”

Every one of the above statements tells the customer unmistakably what you do, that you are best in it, and why they should care. That’s a lot of information for any seller to give a buyer in an instant, and is an excellent starting frame.

It is remarkable how many good companies fail to give customers any kind of frame at all to start with. They leave us wondering about what they do and why, forcing us to make it up on their own. How many websites do you see where you have no idea what they are selling or what they are expert in until you dig into the third paragraph of “About Us”? How many TV commercials seem to keep the product a mystery until the last two seconds, baffling us and wasting our time by selling us nothing?

Giving customers a frame that tells them immediately what you’re offering will put you ahead of the majority of your competitors, and well on your way to getting famous.

The Only Way to Change a Mind: Replace the Box

Many products fall into categories where there is already an established leader and a big general frame that customers put them in. In these cases you need to reframe—essentially replace the old box with a new one—just like we did with fear in Chapter 4. As we saw, the universal frame for fear is that it’s bad, painful, and must be avoided. But the SEALs taught us that the trick is to reframe it:

Fear is your friend. Fear gives you a winning edge. Don’t fear it, steer it.

When you hear the common expression “think outside the box,” it essentially means replacing an old frame with a new one. Reframing takes something we thought we knew and shows us how it’s really something else. It gives us a whole new box to replace the old one. And it doesn’t ask us to come up with the new box ourselves, it just hands it to us.

For instance, a Snickers Bar is traditionally framed as candy. And candy for most of us is framed as frivolous, forbidden food that makes you fat and rots your teeth. To get us to think outside the box about a candy bar, the Snickers people were smart enough to furnish a nifty new frame: “Snickers is packed with peanuts so it really satisfies.” In other words, “Don’t think of Snickers as candy, think of it as a nutritious snack.” Millions of people who wanted permission to eat a candy bar suddenly got it and they gratefully snapped up this new frame. Snickers sales soared.

Likewise with Guinness. Beer is framed as an alcoholic beverage, an historic vice far more serious than candy bars. But Guinness famously changed the frame. What you didn’t know, they said, is that “Guinness is good for you.” Then they told you the story about all the vitamins and minerals in it, and how it’s the only brew in the world served in hospitals (in Dublin, of course). Having another Guinness was no longer just another irresponsible indulgence. Guinness was good food. Eat up!

Once an idea is framed in our heads, it is very hard to dislodge. We love the frames we’ve already got, which makes thinking outside the box extremely difficult. That’s why we entrepreneurs must replace our customers’ old mental boxes if we’re ever going to get them to try our new product and tell others about it. And that’s why the reframing technique is so important for innovators and entrepreneurs and why it’s done every day.

Framing the Easy Way—with Simple Metaphors

Specific metaphors are the framer’s power tool. A metaphor creates a word picture in the mind. It says that one thing—often something familiar—is just like something else. As a result, it can deliver a surprising twist:

Framing with Famous Comparisons

This is such a simple and effective reframing trick that it’s worth a special mention. If you can compare your unknown product to something already liked, trusted, and famous, you’ll get an instant trusted frame every time.

Claim It

Once you’ve figured out your DSI and framed it effectively, you’ve got to launch it into the marketplace. You’ve got to speak up and have people hear you. You’ve got to put it into a claim that you can shout, sing, text, or otherwise have people repeat to make you famous for one consistent, positive selling idea.

A claim is your sales proposition put into words: “Use this product, get this unique benefit.” It’s an invitation to think about your brand the way you want customers to if they will simply try it.

What you claim is what you want to become famous for. It’s a call to the customer to pay attention and realize you’re here to solve their problem better than anyone else. Only make claims you can prove with performance. You can make the most dramatic, provocative, challenging claims to get the most attention as long as you pay them off with performance.

A claim that doesn’t come true is an empty claim. Such a claim that misleads your customers with advertising speak, that sugar-coats but has no real substance (like “Quality, selection, and price!”) is called puffery. If you are going to step out of the batter’s box the way Babe Ruth did and point beyond the center field fence, you better hit the next pitch out of the park. The fans will then tell your story and make you famous. Unfortunately, they’ll also tell it if you whiff.

The Best Kinds of Claims

The best kinds of claims are specific, dramatic, and challenging, stated in the fewest number of words that people can easily repeat to others. That means a claim put into a Micro-Script will almost always bring your highest yield because people are more likely to talk about it, tweet it, or text it. There is no better way to become famous than to have other people talk about you via word of mouth—not just because it’s free, but because it derives trust from a customer’s accepted source, a friend or a peer. Nothing is more important for your success than establishing trust in everything you do.

We defined a Micro-Script earlier as short phrase that tells a story in a way that people like to remember or repeat. Micro-Scripts almost always contain a metaphor, often have rhythm or rhyme in the language, and are specific and descriptive. Look again at the examples of famous phrases and taglines we listed above. Virtually every one is written as a Micro-Script.

Having a Great Tagline

After brand names, taglines are the second most powerful branding element—when you follow the rules that make them right. That means they are written as Micro-Scripts, they are specific, and they advance one idea—your Dominant Selling Idea. Empty strings of sugary fluff like “A Passion for Excellence” and “Driven to Perform,” which tell us nothing and could be stamped on any package, are not what we mean. We mean taglines written in UnStoppable Language: specific, visual, brief, easy to remember, and repetitive, like:

Name, Frame, and Claim—All in One

By now, you may have noticed that these keys to making yourself famous often overlap because they’re all working toward the same goal: to plant your DSI in the customer’s mind. The more you make these branding tools support and reinforce one another, the more powerful they’ll be in making you famous. The framing lines we listed a few pages back are often great claims as well, used in famous taglines. The great names we cited, like Diehard batteries and Invisible Fence, also give you the frame and imply the claim all in one.

In fact, if you combine a great name and a tagline that both frame and claim at the same time, you’ll have the most powerful brand and fame-building tool there is—a one-line elevator pitch that the customer repeats, every time she says it!

THE FOUR-LINE ELEVATOR PITCH

If you can describe your company or product in about four succinct lines, your pitch will be worth its weight in gold, because not only can you and all your people remember it, all your customers can, too. You’ll be ahead of 90 percent of your competitors who can’t succinctly explain what they do. Here’s a pitch for a product we named a few years ago called Home ATM:

• It’s called Home ATM;
• It’s home banking on your computer that works just like an ATM;
• It’s so easy to use, like an ATM, it doesn’t need a manual; and
• Eight top banks have found they can now have an ATM in every home.

The four-line elevator pitch answers these questions for the customer: What’s it called? What does it do? Why do I need it? Why should I believe you?

The four-line elevator pitch is a favorite of the world’s best salespeople, and we’ll talk about it some more in our next chapter.

HOW NAME, FRAME, AND CLAIM MADE RACKSPACE A MULTIBILLION-DOLLAR COMPANY

It took a host of factors to enable Rackspace to rise from nowhere to overtake its early competitors and grow to its current market-leading status. But none was more important than its founders’ decision to think about the unique difference they would stand for, and how they could build a selling brand from that difference, starting on day one.

They started with a good descriptive name. In those days, computer servers were lined up in metal racks. Indeed, the company’s business was to sell its customers “rack space” on their professionally configured, maintained, and secure racks.

So the name Rackspace described “what” their service was, but it didn’t say “why” a customer should make them their number one choice. It wasn’t a unique frame for a DSI that customers could use to set them apart in the category—especially since, in 1998, there were lots of competitors offering a similar “what.”

Fortunately, the Rackspace team made defining the ultimate “why” a big priority, even traveling en masse to meet Jack Trout, the renowned positioning expert. They experimented with a range of DSIs until they found the difference their customers were desperate to have—the best 24/7 service and support the industry had ever seen. They framed it as so awesome and extreme, it was Fanatical Support. They told customers, “This is the only thing we make, the only thing we do, and the only thing you’ll get, whether you have one server or 10,000.”

The frame, worded as a Micro-Script, helped Rackspace get famous on the outside. But just as important, it made them feel famous on the inside. As Graham Weston explains, “Once we came up with the phrase Fanatical Service, we had a rallying cry, a set of words to stand for, an identity that every teammate could be a part of. Every Racker could tell you in two words what our mission was and why we came to work every single day: we were here to bring our customers Fanatical Support and all the good things it implied.”

Graham adds, “Everything we did over the next 10 years arose from that single core. The best thing we did after finding that two-word phrase was to stick with it—not change it every time a new marketing director came on board like so many companies do—so it could grow from a seedling into a big oak tree. In the process, it helped make us famous, all as a natural outgrowth of doing what we do best for our customers.”

If you dream of creating your own multibillion-dollar empire, follow the example of Rackspace. Find the one big thing you want to be famous for with customers, a difference that will make their lives better in the most obvious way—then name it, frame it, and claim it.

1 Scene courtesy of Bill Schley and Carl Nichols Jr., Why Johnny Can’t Brand: Rediscovering the Lost Art of the Big Idea (Kindle edition, 2010).

2 Ibid.