What Disney and Playboy Can Teach You About Branding

Image credit: Playboy

In his book No B.S. Guide to Brand-Building by Direct Response, business coach and consultant Dan S. Kennedy offers a no-holds-barred plan to creating and profiting from a powerful brand. In this edited excerpt, the author discusses two well-known marketing geniuses, who turned their companies into worldwide brands.

Walt Disney frequently reminded everybody that "It all started with a mouse." Hugh Hefner's empire began with a stag as a symbol of maleness, abandoned because it was already taken, and replaced by the symbol of eternal horniness, the rabbit. These are two of the greatest brand-builders around.

You might not think the two should share the same sentence, but they have a lot in common. They both began with virtually no money and built valuable, powerful, iconic brands with little investment in actual brand-building and virtually no brand/image advertising. Both Disney and Hefner grew their brands on the back of direct marketing and sales activity, on free advertising via media partnerships and publicity, and through leverage of the media.

Other shared strategies include:

Creating a world of their own. Disney's line "The Happiest Place On Earth" might have been used by Hefner for the world of Playboy, symbolized by the Playboy Mansion, if Walt hadn't already snagged it. The existential importance of The Playboy Mansion was shown off in a Playboy magazine cartoon, circa 1960, in which a truth-seeker has climbed to a mountain peak to beg wisdom from the wise guru. The guru tells him: "There is a man who lives in a mansion full of beautiful women and wears pajamas all the time. Sit at his feet and learn from him, for he has found the secret of true happiness." Disney also featured a symbolic structure at Disneyland and Disney World: Sleeping Beauty's Castle, where dreams come true and romance flourishes. Both Disney and Playboy feature a profound sense of place--where no one ever need grow up.

Standing for and promoting a philosophy. Hefner even called it "The Playboy Philosophy" and explained it in detail, beginning with a series of essays in his magazine. Hefner argued against censorship, for sexual freedom, for civil rights, even for modern feminism. He also created a series of internal ads titled "What Sort of a Man Reads Playboy?" which presented a profile worthy of aspiration. Walt also stood for certain enunciated principles and values, built into the films and entertainment product, and integrated into projects like Epcot and Celebration. Here's a revealing Disney quote:
"Disneyland would encompass the essence of the things that are good and true in American life ... a place for people to find happiness and new knowledge. The older generation can capture the nostalgia of days gone by, the younger generation can savor the challenge of the future, and it will be a source of hope and inspiration to all the world."

Rather a grandiose way to describe an amusement park, don't you think? But that's the point. Disney and Hefner both saw and spoke of significance and importance in what they were doing that went far beyond the basic products and deliverables of their businesses. Whether you agree with them or not, these men who built great brands believed they were doing something important.ersonality-driven brand. Disney was as much the public face of his enterprises as was Mickey. He began promoting Disneyland by hosting a show on ABC and remained a familiar TV host for many years. He was the company's chief storyteller and salesman. Hefner used his own TV show early on, purportedly a party in his own penthouse, with his celebrity buddies all there having a good time. Very recently, he was again seen starring with his girlfriends in a reality TV series. The two individuals and these two brands, inseparable.

Place. The Disney Parks with Cinderella's Castle as centerpoint. The Playboy Mansion, with its infamous Grotto as its centerpoint. Both sites have a "Fantasyland."

Product as promotion. For Disney, it began with a licensed Mickey Mouse watch and a Disney train and has become a licensing juggernaut, with its characters and iconic images on hundreds of thousands of products. The Playboy bunny logo is one of the most licensed trademarks of all time for apparel, cologne, artwork, etc. All these products not only generate revenue but work at promoting, creating and sustaining interest in the brand.

Media. Walt Disney launched Disneyland with an alliance with ABC--now Disney owns them, along with ESPN and several Disney-branded cable TV channels and Disney radio stations. It still airs Disney specials on ABC, each an infomercial for the parks, current Disney personalities and new movies. Hugh Hefner began with Playboy magazinebut promoted Playboy early with TV. To this day, Hefner still uses such media plays--in recent years, there were reality shows on the E Network, all about the Mansion and his girlfriends.

 There was also a feature film, in 2008, The House Bunny. All these serve as powerful infomercials for the brand, yet Playboy has been paid for them rather than buying advertising. Its own cable TV channel is also both a business itself and continuous, 365-day brand promotion.

Consider how these two men launched and built their brands. They never spent or had to spend on dopey image advertising. Their brands were built by their own media products and businesses, by profitable advertising selling their products, by stealth advertising imbedded in TV programming they were paid to produce and provide or paid licensing fees for, and by an untold variety of merchandise proliferating in the marketplace, for which they were also paid licensing fees.

If you have a small, local business you may too quickly disqualify yourself and think that this is above and beyond you. There are two things to consider about that. One is that everybody started and starts somewhere, often small and local. Disneyland was, after all, a local business, and central Florida was picked as the second location based on the population within one day's driving distance. Hefner began in Chicago, his office in his apartment, his magazine assembled atop his bed, and then with one local Playboy Club.

These days, geographic boundaries have been blurred and expanded by ecommerce and overnight shipping. A local gourmet cupcake store in Hudson, Ohio, has customers in 40 states and 9 countries. A clothier's shop in London mails catalogs throughout the U.S. and ships products worldwide. Why must you think small?

Second, even if you choose to be local and stay small, all the same strategies can and should apply, particularly if you want to be a locally dominant brand. Why shouldn't you dominate your market?

Dan S. Kennedy

Dan S. Kennedy is a strategic advisor, consultant, business coach, and author of the popular No B.S. book series. He directly influences more than one million business owners annually. 

"BRANDAID Food Inc." LAUNCHES FOOD PRODUCT BRANDING/MARKETING/LISTING CONSULTING SERVICE

Peter Andersen Economic Report – February 2014

Incoming economic indicators do not fit with the optimistic forecast for the U.S. economy – data releases have been much weaker than expected. However, this does not mean that another recession is in sight – far from it. Further growth is expected in the spring once extreme weather in North America subsides.

Weaker than expected seasonally-adjusted economic numbers have diverted attention away from an impressive list of positive underlying U.S. economic fundamentals. These figures offer a strong argument against those who believe that the U.S. is in a long-term stagnation. But the key to this positive outlook lies in business investment. It picked up in the 4th quarter and added 0.9% to the revised GDP growth rate, which shows that businesses are confident enough to expand capacity.

In contrast to the U.S., Canada has a shortage of positive economic fundamentals and its economy is out of balance – far too much weight is being put on consumer demand. Exports are in a protracted slump, and as a result, there is not enough business confidence to support business investment plans. The drop of the Canadian dollar will help eventually but results will not be seen immediately.

Recent job growth figures show that growth has been narrowly concentrated to Alberta, where net migration is also estimated at 100,000 last year. The employment trend in the rest of Canada, with some exceptions such as Toronto, has been flat to down. Oil is also an industry to keep under watch in Canada. The dramatic increase in oil production that is expected in the U.S. over the next two years implies an equally big decline in America’s oil import needs. This will have an additional adverse effect on Canada’s outlook. Business investment intentions for 2014 in Canada’s mining sector are also down sharply by 15%.

Internationally, downward pressure on emerging market economy currencies has stabilized in the past month bur at the cost of higher domestic interest rates. A major economic slowdown has been in place for some time in emerging market economies and this is expected to continue. Industrial production has continued to fluctuate around recession-level lows and shows no sign yet of a sustainable recovery. With much of the world facing sub-par economic performance, the U.S. is expected to stand out as its recovery picks up momentum, which should push the USD higher.

The Peter Andersen Report is provided at no cost to TEC Canada members – just another one of the many membership perks. 

Four Traits of Women Who Lead

by Catherine Osler, President of TEC Canada


TEC Canada recognizes the importance of having a more gender-balanced approach to leadership roles. Forbes.com reported that according to studies, firms with women on their boards “outperform their rivals with a 42% higher return on sales, 66% higher return on invested capital and 53% higher return on equity.” Quite simply, women look at problems differently and often take a more empathic approach to leadership.  TEC’s peer groups are designed to challenge the status quo and encourage dynamic, inspiring conversations to process the issues senior executives face on an ongoing basis.  We welcome more women to contribute to this dialogue and this starts with having exceptional Chairs to guide that process.

While all of our Chairs have many awards and accolades, we would be remiss if we didn’t recognize two of our own successful women leaders:

• Joyce Groote, Vancouver Chair is receiving the Influential Women in Business award on March 3, 2014.
• Katherine Crewe from Montreal is one of TEC Canada’s newest Chairs.  She was recognized as one of the Top 100 Businesswomen to Watch by Entreprendre Magazine.

These women, along with all our Chairs, are committed to the relentless pursuit of excellence and providing their members with the tools to achieve success. I invite you to join me in recognizing International Women’s Day on March 8th. It doesn’t matter if you are a successful entrepreneur, a corporate executive, a new manager – or someone who is at a crossroads in her career and wondering “what’s next?” You are part of a sea of change in leadership style and behavior.

Sheryl Sandberg’s bestseller “Lean In” paints a vivid picture of how far women in leadership still have to go:
• Out of 100 global heads of state, only nine are women,
• In the corporate sector, just 15 to 20 per cent of C-suite jobs are held by women, and
• In the non-profit sector, women hold only 20 percent of the top positions.

Helping women to develop their leadership potential has been a passion of mine and a key professional commitment I made many years ago. After more than two decades of executive consulting, study at some of North America’s most recognized leadership institutes, and my role as CEO of TEC, I have found the successful women leaders I have coached and worked with over the years generally all share four particular traits. What follows is a brief look at these four and what some of the world’s most successful women CEOs have to say about them. 

1. Believe in Yourself
Believing in yourself – your vision, your aspirations and dreams – will drive you forward especially on those days when you can’t see the forest for the trees. Author J.K. Rowling, fashion icon Coco Chanel, Body Shop Founder Anita Roddick – these are women with resolute beliefs in themselves despite their many critics and naysayers. Rowling, who was named the “Most Influential Woman in Britain” by leading magazine editors in 2010, achieved publishing success only after several years of constant rejection. “I was convinced the only thing I wanted to do was to write novels. So what’s the worst that could happen? Everyone turned me down; big deal,” she said.

2. Value Perseverance
Building a business, moving forward in your career and leading organizations all require dogged determination. Whatever obstacles may be put in your path, it is essential to move forward, modelling for your employees, colleagues and customers that you will not back down from a challenge. Cosmetic icon Estée Lauder once said, “I didn’t get there by wishing for it or hoping for it, but by working for it.”

3. Stay Focused
The power to set both short- and long-term goals should never be underestimated. Goals are the road-map to success and goal-setting takes place daily, weekly, monthly and annually. Consider what Mary Kay Ash, Founder of global cosmetic company Mary Kay, once said, “We must have a theme, a goal, a purpose in our lives. If you don’t know where you are aiming, you don’t have a goal.My goal is to live my life in such a way that when I die, someone will say ‘she cared.’” Staying focused is about knowing what you want, then mapping your path with the goals and measures to achieve it.

4. Be a Smart Risk-Taker
To truly accomplish great things, you must go outside your comfort zone because that’s where growth happens. As Sandberg says, this is where you need to “lean in,” raising your hand for opportunities and stepping into new challenges.

Never underestimate that quiet inner voice and its ability to lead and guide you forward. Your inner wisdom – something women are generally closer to – can help you to accurately assess risk. Calculated risks can lead to payoffs beyond what you thought possible.

Martha Stewart, who through her savvy, grit and determination created a brand and a business enterprise that has weathered all kinds of difficulties, maintains “it is within everyone’s grasp to be a CEO.” I am committed to making TEC the kind of organization where women business leaders can achieve beyond what they thought possible. 

If you are aiming to move your leadership skills and abilities to a new level contact Richard Peters at rpeters@tec-canada.com

Best Advice: Shut Up and Listen

When I first started out my career as a salesperson for Radio Disney at the age of 22, I was young and foolish (well, even younger and more foolish than I am today). I thought I had a great product to sell and that people would love to listen to me talk about it. I thought I could be charming and persuasive and convince decision-makers why it made sense to use my product to solve their marketing problems. I thought I could talk my way into anything. 

 ,

I thought wrong.

Several weeks into my job, I was failing miserably, despite what I considered to be loads of charm and ability to persuade. My mentor, the Regional Sales Manager for Radio Disney at the time, Peggy Iafrate, said to me, “How well are you listening to what your prospects have to say? How many questions are you asking them to better understand them? How are you showing them that you care about them more than you care about selling them?”

"Dave," she said, "Remember this one thing: Shut up and listen." 

I hadn’t been doing a very good job of listening. In fact, by my very nature, I’m a type-A personality, full of thoughts, running a mile a minute, an impatient New Yorker who always has something to say and rarely slows down. So, it took some real dedication and practice to listen to what Peggy told me about listening and heed her advice. 

I began asking my prospects more questions. Listening to their problems, listening to their

 

interests, listening to their every word became my obsession. I thought very little about how to sell them on advertising with Radio Disney and instead focused on listening attentively to everything they had to say so that I could better understand them as people and better understand their organizational needs and challenges. Once I understood them, I could do a much better job of delivering what they wanted and needed, both in the product I was selling and in the way I sold it. 

Things quickly started to fall into place once I started listening. Within six months, I was the number-one local salesperson in the country, and a year later, Peggy awarded me the “Mickey Award” for sales success. All for shutting up and listening.

Salespeople, leaders, entrepreneurs and business people are full of ideas. Many of you have ideas all day long every day about how to make the world a better place, make money, solve problems and lots more. But the very nature of active listening requires us to put aside our ideas completely, if only for a moment, in order to focus on what someone else has to say.

As difficult as that can be, it’s through listening to customers, prospective customers, colleagues, employees and others that we can better understand what their needs and motivations are, and ultimately make our ideas better and more executable. It’s leaders like you who need to learn to listen better, even more so than the world’s followers.

J.P. McEvoy said, "When you talk, you are repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new." 

So, as Peggy said to me years ago, please, for your own good and the good of the world, shut up and listen. 

Dave KerpenInfluencer

CEO, Likeable Local, NY Times Best-Selling Author & Keynote Speaker

When Crossing Cultures, Don’t Forget Praise

When her first employees quit, Stephanie Muller didn’t think much of it. To Stephanie, a German-born marketing executive for a global engineering company in the U.S., these were underperforming employees, and she was fine to see them go. But when a key sales rep left, and then three weeks later, a marketing manager took off with little warning, Stephanie really started to worry. Was she not paying enough? Were the assignments mundane? Was the competition poaching her best employees?

 

It was none of these things, as it turns out. The compensation was fine, and the assignments were interesting. The problem was that because of her own cultural background, Stephanie wasn’t accustomed to offering praise to her employees: to tell them that they did good work and that she appreciated the efforts. It seems like something very easy to do, but where Stephanie came from in Germany, it was very unusual to offer such praise to employees. German bosses certainly appreciated their employees, but they were not accustomed to praise them for their work in the way that Americans are typically praised. In Germany, you’re expected to do your job, and when you do, you don’t need to be praised for it, unless it’s for something truly exceptional. In fact, being singled out in this way, especially in a public setting, can be embarrassing. For these reasons, Stephanie didn’t praise her American employees — but unfortunately, that lack of recognition led them to feel underappreciated and ultimately leave the firm.

Given the internationalization of business and the mixing and blending of employees onto cross-cultural teams around the world, managers like Stephanie often have to motivate employees from different countries and cultures. So as a global manager, how can you adapt to a different “praise culture” without losing yourself in the process?

Tip #1: Make sure you actually understand the local cultural norms. It might seem obvious, but it wasn’t to Stephanie. She only learned these cultural differences after her employees started to rebel and leave the firm. Make sure you are proactive in diagnosing the local cultural of praise. A trusted mentor, advisor, or cross-cultural consultant with deep knowledge about both cultures can be an invaluable resource in this regard.

Tip #2: Once you’ve diagnosed the new cultural norms, make sure you’re also aware of your own. Stephanie was from Germany and had an internalized culture of praise that was very characteristic of her native cultural context. In that sense, she was what we might call a “local” manager — with an internalized culture of praise characteristic of a particular cultural setting. That, however, is not always the case. We’ve worked with more cosmopolitan managers who are far more flexible than Stephanie was and who have internalized multiple approaches for praising and recognizing employees. For the local manager, the task is learning to act outside his or her personal and cultural comfort zone. But for these cosmopolitan managers, the task is different: It’s simply matching one of their internalized styles to the particular demands of the situation.

Tip #3: For managers who aren’t cosmopolitan and who haven’t internalized multiple cultures of praise, the key task is to learn to act outside of their personal and cultural comfort zone. That certainly was the case for Stephanie, who eventually learned to praise her employees with an American cultural style. It wasn’t easy — and often isn’t when the way you need to act effectively in a new setting is so different from what you are accustomed to. The trick, we find, is to personalize or customize your approach so you’re effective in the new setting, but you don’t lose yourself in the process.

Stephanie, for example, found it uncomfortable to use stock American phrases like “Great job!” and “Well done!” so she avoided them. Instead, she customized her own approach to offering praise based on detail and specificity — which were important values to her. For example, she would praise employees for very specific elements of their work and for concrete contributions to the team. Interestingly, as she started managing employees from outside the U.S., she further customized her approach by remaining specific and detailed, but then also emphasizing team and group-level accomplishments, which resonated with her employees from collectivist countries like Korea and Mexico. Overall, the key was to find an approach that was in that sweet spot of being authentic to her and motivational to her employees.

Praising employees is a universal — everyone likes to be recognized for excellent work. But the way in which praise is delivered is culturally specific. So learn the praise culture of your local setting and adapt accordingly. The return on your investment will be a motivated and committed multicultural workforce.

Andy Molinsky

Andy Molinsky is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Brandeis International Business School. He is the author of the book Global Dexterity: How to Adapt Your Behavior across Cultures without Losing Yourself in the Process (HBR Press, 2013). 

Christian Höferle

Christian Höferle is an intercultural trainer and consultant. He works with multinational organizations in training their expatriate talent and developing multicultural teams. 

Why Big Teams Suck

In 1957, British naval historian and management satirist Northcote Parkinson painted a cynical picture of a typical committee: It starts with four or five members, quickly grows to nine or ten, and, once it balloons to 20 and beyond, meetings become an utter waste of time – and all the important work is done before and after meetings by four or five most influential members.

As Parkinson would have it, numerous studies now confirm that, when it comes to teams, many hands do not make light work. After devoting nearly 50 years to studying team performance, the late Harvard researcher J. Richard Hackman concluded that four to six members is the team best size for most tasks, that no work team should have more than 10 members, and that performance problems and interpersonal friction increase “exponentially as team size increases.”

These troubles arise because larger teams place often overwhelming “cognitive load” on individual members. Most of us are able to mesh your efforts with and maintain good personal relationships with, say, three or four teammates. But as a group expands further, each member devotes more time to coordination chores (and less time to actually doing the work), more hand-offs between the growing cast of members are required (creating opportunities for miscommunication and mistakes), and because each member must divide his or her attention among a longer list of colleagues, the team’s social glue weakens (and destructive conflict soars). Following my earlier LinkedIn piece, findings about group size are reminiscent of psychologist George Miller’s famous conclusion that seven was a “magical number” because people could only hold “seven, plus or minus two” numbers in short-term memory. Both Hackman and Miller found that, once people start trying to deal with double digits, the cognitive overload takes a toll.

These findings help explain why the average restaurant reservation in the United States is for a party of four. Think of the last time you were at a dinner with a group of 10 or 15 people. It is difficult, perhaps downright impossible, to have a coherent and emotionally satisfying conversation that engages each member of the party all at once. Typically, the group breaks into a series of smaller conversations or a few people do all the talking and the others say little or nothing.

Some organizations learn about the drawbacks of oversized groups the hard way. Retired Marine Captain and former U.S. Senator James H. Webb explained why the “fire team” – the basic combat fighting unit – shrunk from 12 to 4 during War II. Webb wrote in the Marine Corp Gazette that this “12 man mob” was “immensely difficult” for Marine squad leaders to control under the stress and confusion of battle. Coordination problems were rampant and close relationships – where soldiers fight for their buddies – were tougher to maintain in 12-man teams. The U.S, Navy Seals have learned that four is the optimal size for a combat team as well. And, the basic work unit at McKinsey, the consulting firm, is one “engagement manager” and three other members. As Intuit’s CEO Brad Smith puts it, when it comes to teams, “less is often best.” Just like on­line retailing giant Amazon, Intuit insists: “Our development teams can be no larger than the number of people who can be fed by two pizzas,” which helps them “stay nimble and make decisions quickly.”

This lesson applies to small organizations too. Pulse News, makers of a “news aggrega­tor” app, was started in mid-2010. Communication breakdowns and misunderstandings flared-up after it grew slightly, from three to eight people. Founders Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta told us that, after they divided those eight among three teams, people produced better software, did it faster, and argued less. When Pulse expanded to about 12 people (working in four teams, all in the same room), each team maintained a bulletin board that captured their current work to help everyone at Pulse follow what they were doing. Every afternoon at about 3:30, each team also gave a short talk to the company about what they working on and where they needed help. Pulse relied on small teams as it grew to 25 employees and 30 million users; it is now part of LinkedIn, which bought Pulse for 90 million dollars in April, 2013.

The lesson is that, if you are on a big team that keeps screwing up, where members don’t care much about each other, and are fighting like crazy, try some subtraction or division. A Harvard Business School study by Melissa Valentine and Amy Edmondson of a large hospital’s emergency department demonstrates how powerful such moves can be. The crowd of 30 or so doctors and nurses who staffed the department at any given time were divided into multiple six person “pods,” each led by a senior doctor or “attending physician.” After the change, information about patients flowed more quickly and accurately and personal relationships improved markedly. Smaller teams reduced confusion and discomfort about who to ask for help and updates.

One nurse said, before the pods, “You had to walk across the ED all timid” and get up bit of courage and say to the doctor “Uh, excuse me?” With the pods, “Now they are in the trenches with us.” It was also easier to discern which “podmates” were responsible for particular chores and deserved credit or blame when things went well or badly.
Another nurse added:

“Now there is much more of a sense of ownership of each other. I’ll say, “My pod isn’t running well. Where is my doctor?” And he’ll be accountable to me. And the doctors will say, “Where are my nurses, who do I have today?’” People rarely, if ever, claimed each other in this way before the pods were implemented even if they were working together on many shared cases. A resident would have used more detached language like, “Who is this patient’s nurse?” – ignoring that the nurse had any relationship to him – rather than, “Where are my nurses?”

The pods also created big efficiency gains. Valentine and Edmondson analyzed data on 160,000 patients served by the Department during the six months before the pods were created and the year after. After the pods, patient throughput time plummeted by about 40%, from about eight hours (8.34) to five hours (5.29) per patient –without increased staffing levels. This drop not only reflects more efficient use of staff; think of the patients’ experience: Five hours at the hospital sucks a lot less than eight.

The upshot? As my co-author Huggy Rao and I found in our research, scaling is a problem of both more and less. Many hands do not always make for light work, especially when it comes to team size. The first question I ask when a team reports they are locked in dysfunctional conflict, suffering from indifference, making bad decisions, or missing deadlines -- or all of the above -- is “how big is it?” If the answer is more than then five or six members, especially more than than ten, some savvy subtraction or division can create striking improvements. As Valentine and Edmondson's research shows: Leaders become more effective. Efficiency improves. Interpersonal friction wanes. And strangers become friends.

Robert Sutton is a Stanford Professor and co-author (with Huggy Rao) of Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More without Settling for Less. This piece is an edited excerpt from that book. 
Posted by:Bob Sutton