How to … be your business

By Simon Young, August 2, 2007 @ 11 pm

What will people think of when they think of your product? Simon Young discovers why some brands have a bit more personality than the competition

Vodafone arguably has it. Most would agree 42 Below definitely has it. The Warehouse hasn’t really got it at all.

There are some businesses that you just like. They’re the cool kids that everyone wants to be around. And then there are the other ones that we just put up with.

How does a business go about being the cool kid? How can you attract raving fans to your brand?

If it’s a small business, it’s probably got a lot to do with the founder. In some cases, like fashion label Kate Sylvester, it’s hard to know where the individual ends and the brand begins.

Even with a less personal brand like Charlie’s juice, there’s a strong personality at play. There is no ‘Charlie’, but chances are when you see the packaging, you’ll think of co-founder and frontman Marc Ellis.

It only makes sense that small, entrepreneurial companies should have a strong personality. You need a fair bit of personality to be an entrepreneur, to stand out in a crowd, to win investors and customers—and that personality usually defines the brand.

Ken Block and Damon Way put a lot of their own personalities into DC Shoes, the skateboard shoe brand they founded in 1993. They began with a simple but profound idea, based on their own experience as skaters: the world’s first skateboarding performance shoes.

While other skating shoes focused on looks alone, Block and Way needed shoes that helped them skate better. So they made them. Two years later, the three brands created by DC Shoes had grossed almost US$7 million. Perhaps more importantly, DC Shoes has been recognised as skateboarding’s “coolest brand of shoes” for at least four consecutive years by market researcher Board-Trac.

Even as the company has branched out into products for kids and older adults, DC shoes retains credibility among its hard-to-please primary teenage audience. Block puts this down to DC Shoes’ attitude.

“Having a successful business in the youth market is an accomplishment,” he says. “Without relating to that consumer in a fashion sense or a message sense, you can’t sell them anything. You cannot be a fake in the youth market.”

As the company has grown, how have the founders kept the entrepreneurial flame burning? After all, it’s personality, not product features, that sets a youth brand apart from its corporate competitors.

Block says it’s about leading by example. “We live by the idea of pushing the boundaries and trying to be innovative,” he says. “We try and translate that as much as possible to our employees. It’s walking the talk.”

When Quiksilver bought the DC Shoes brand in 2004, Block and Way made sure they would still be able to run the company the way it began. “We wanted to continue the brand direction that had proven successful,” says Block, who is balancing his time at DC Shoes with a new, second career as a rally driver.

Think of Kate Sylvester and you’ll think of Sylvester herself (above). “If I love my product and love what I'm participating in, then that’s right for the brand,” she says. “It always comes back to your instinct.” It’s the same for sneakers, juice and even online supermarkets.

Charlie’s also spreads its personality seemingly by osmosis, reflecting the personalities of its founders and creating a strong culture along the way. CEO and co-founder Stefan Lepionka says: “My personality traits are about having fun, engaging people and building strong teams, so I guess that just gets translated throughout the business. We’ve got a great culture here and that started on day one.”

The company’s most recent brand positioning—good old-fashioned juice—is also simply a reflection of the conversation going on inside Charlie’s, particularly about the value of authenticity. “We spent many years trying to educate the market and that was a hard sell,” says Lepionka. “About 18 months ago we just came up with ‘good honest juice’ and it works!”

Is it really that easy? Maybe it is. Kate Sylvester puts it this way: like minds attract like minds. “If we don’t click with people, if we don’t have the same vision, then the relationship doesn’t progress,” she says. “We’ve built up fantastic relationships with a big network of people that we work with. That’s a really positive part of our business: strong relationships that we build with like minds.”

So while Sylvester may not have a brand blueprint that articulates her brand’s values and attributes, she does have instincts. Those instincts guide her regarding who to work with and what to make. “It’s trial and error,” she says. “If I love my product and love what I’m participating in, then that’s right for the brand. You always comes back to your instinct.”

It certainly helps that Sylvester’s customers are people like her. That’s the same kind of thinking that has guided Kristine Crabb, founder of clothing brand Miss Crabb. After trying her hand at a label called Nun, Kristine wanted “something that was more like me”—and launched Miss Crabb. “I wanted to put my name in there,” she says.

“I try to stay true to my vision and artistic style at all times. It’s extremely idealistic and sometimes I think I’m being stupid but I live by the phrase ‘doing my own thing’.”

The Miss Crabb label reflects the woman who named it. “Miss Crabb is someone who likes to have fun, really likes to party,” says Crabb. “You need personality to wear it—it’s not like a Karen Walker piece, where you know it’s a Karen Walker piece. This label lets the wearer be themselves.”

Like Sylvester, Crabb doesn’t have an official strategy for spreading the culture. “It seems to just happen naturally,” she says. “I try to stay true to my vision and artistic style at all times. It’s extremely idealistic and sometimes I think I’m being stupid but I live by the phrase ‘doing my own thing’.”

While Charlie’s doesn’t seem to have a corporate blueprint for creating brand personality, Lepionka does have clear guidelines. “We don’t want to be a corporate,” he says. “We operate in a flat structure. Our management team hangs out with anyone.”

It sounds ridiculously simple: create a brand personality by living the brand and hiring like-minded staff. Does that work for every business?

All the examples we’ve seen so far have been entrepreneurs who’ve made products for themselves that just happened to appeal to a wider audience. But what about the poor corporate that is just out to make some money and doesn’t have a clue about all that passion stuff?

Turns out you can get a personality, even if you don’t have one to start with. Attendees at the recent Better by Design CEO summit in Auckland saw how this happens in a case study of UK online grocer Ocado, presented by Interbrand CEO Jez Frampton, who is also a non-executive director of Ocado.

Ocado is about as corporate as they come. The company was founded by a group of merchants from Goldman Sachs in partnership with the upmarket British supermarket chain Waitrose.

This was the early 2000s, just after the tech wreck, when dot-com became a dirty word. Webvan, an online grocery delivery service, had just folded in the US, and it became apparent that logistics alone would not be enough to sustain Ocado.

Today, Ocado is a brand which attracts loyal fans with its high service standards and distinctive branding. While competitors like Tesco and Sainsbury’s focus on product, Ocado provides a designed experience—a kind of manufactured brand personality.

First, the Ocado team carefully identified their customers, singling out well-to-do, busy mums in wealthy suburbs as their ideal target market. Then they set about understanding the priorities of their customers, particularly when it came to providing food for the family.

Knowing their customers—something which comes so instinctively to entrepreneurs like Ken Block, Kate Sylvester and others—was an intensive and rigorous process for the merchant bankers and grocers of Ocado.

Along the way they discovered some things would be harder than they thought. Providing a high-quality service meant they couldn’t hire just any old truck driver, for example. The delivery is part of the overall process, so Ocado had to train people from scratch. Jez Frampton says he’s not qualified to drive an Ocado truck, because he hasn’t completed the five-day course in driving, food handling and customer service.

Sure, it’s an extra expense for Ocado. It would be cheaper and faster to poach truck drivers from the competition. But that would betray the personality—the brand—that Ocado has built up through its advertising, website and even the colour-coded delivery vehicles and containers.

That seems to be the secret discovered by DC Shoes, Miss Crabb, Kate Sylvester and Charlie’s. Articulating a personality for your business—whether the owner’s best attributes, or a carefully crafted corporate identity—must be consistent throughout the whole customer experience. When it comes to personality: if you’ve got it, flaunt it.

Originally published in Idealog #10, page 98