With last week’s news that Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, and his Downtown Project have pledged $1 million to Venture for America to help revitalize downtown Las Vegas (full disclosure: My agency helped spread the word through pro bono media outreach), I got to thinking about the role of character in branding.
I recently heard from branding and strategic marketing consultant Noah Fleming, CEO of Fleming Consulting and co-author of a forthcoming book about customer retention and loyalty. In his view, the secret to success in terms of personal branding is character, and a compelling—and generally positive and respectable—personal narrative is the “key to massive success” in 2013, in his words.
He’s got a point. We want to do business with people we like. And even when we’re talking about a huge company, we still want a human element.
The example Fleming used in a blog post earlier this year for Fast Company was Amazon.com. In it, he asked, “Why is Jeff Bezos always talking to me?” and posited some answers about why the monolithic retailer’s website often has a personal-seeming letter from the CEO.
Fleming’s formula as a consultant is the three C’s: content, community and character, by which he means positioning and determining what exactly it is people will remember about you, rather than letting them determine it for themselves. It’s a matter of taking a personality-driven brand, whether a company or an individual, and adding congruency and consistency to that brand’s communication.
As Fleming explains about the letters on Amazon, “Bezos is helping to build a set of expectations about Amazon by engaging me through character. He’s using a mechanism that allows him to communicate almost personally with millions of users, to constantly drill home the points that he wants them to always have at the top of their minds about Amazon. It’s one form of authentic communication, and it’s something that we can all learn a lot from.”
Another example is Hsieh, whose many fans praise Zappos’ generous return policy and exceedingly friendly customer service. Hsieh doesn’t have a presence on the home page, but anyone who has paid any attention to the business or popular press knows that a lot of Zappos’ shiny, happy image has to do with the corporate culture Hsieh installs.
In turn, he has spun that into his own personal brand with a big dose of modesty. First came his best-selling book Delivering Happiness, then a community at DeliveringHappiness.com designed to “nudge the world to a happier place.”
At the opposite end of the spectrum is Timothy Ferriss, who has used his contrarian—some would say self-entitled—character to sell millions of books and draw scads of fans among young men who want to work less, earn more, outsource their lives and “join the new rich,” as he partly subtitled his first manifesto, The 4-Hour Workweek.
He’s still milking the bad-boy personal narrative for all it’s worth, whether suggesting you carry a starter pistol in your checked luggage to make sure baggage handlers don’t lose it, or thumbing his nose at traditional publishing models to promote his latest book on BitTorrent. Ferriss gets away with it because being a rebel is part of his persona, something that appeals to his unique set of fans.
But for the most part, the good guy is a safer role to play; in most instances of personal branding, character has more to do with open communication and old-fashioned values.
