I got lucky with my first real job. I was hired at a start-up a few months before it exploded. We made wakeboards in a garage and gave a young pro athlete who we thought had potential free product, but we didn’t pay him...at first.
A few weeks later, he came out of nowhere to take first at the world championship. Wakeboarding Magazine put a photo of him on the cover, high in the air, with the base of his board and our brand name clearly visible.
The orders started flooding in. Our brand identity had been defined by circumstance. We were “the up and comer’s board.” Our instincts told us to capitalize on the public’s perception. It wasn’t much of a stretch to change the idea of the “up and comer” to “core rider.”
We positioned ourselves as the antidote to the corporate brand that was a subsidiary of a water ski company. Our boards were handcrafted and we rode the prototypes ourselves. We advertised that we made wakeboards “by riders, for riders.”
We moved into a big facility, hired dozens of employees, and for the next two years, could not get ahead of demand. We were riding a wave of brand affinity. Our customers (and kids aspiring to become customers) wanted to affiliate themselves with our tribe, so we gave away bumper stickers. We gave away so many, in fact, that if we’d charged two dollars a piece, we would have made more selling stickers than wakeboards.
We didn’t want to lose a sale, so we began cutting corners in manufacturing to hit shipment deadlines. That eventually redefined our reputation as the makers of equipment that fell apart. We didn’t last long after that.
Last year I did a webcast with best-selling author and business strategists Martha Rogers. One of her slides had an image of a guy in a leather vest and bandana with a Harley Davidson tattoo on his arm. Her caption was, “Wish your customer’s loved your brand enough to tattoo it on themselves?”
Our wakeboard company failed because we lacked experience and the resources to rebound from our mistakes, but Harley Davidson has thrived for most of the last century. I’ll bet that when you think about the Harley Davidson brand, you don’t think about a machine as much as you do the culture.
When your brand comes to represent a subculture, and your customers do your advertising for you, you’ve done your job as a marketer. But as a brand owner, you still need to deliver.
