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Why brands looking to stand out should look to stand-ups
Journal of Brand Strategy,
9
(1),
44-58
(2020)
Abstract
The authors met when they were both standup comedians, and they soon realised that they also had branding in common. After spending their adult lives achieving success in both, they have concluded that they are essentially the same thing. That is what this paper is about. Whether you are branding yourself as a stand-up or your self, product or service for business purposes, if you can communicate your unique capability and your passion to innovate around that capability, and if there is a demand in the marketplace for that capability (whether the market knows it yet or not), you have a formula for success. But if you cannot articulate and communicate it in a clear and confident voice that feels unique, authentic and desirable, then you cannot transcend the noise to even be considered by your buying audience. Stand-ups understand better than anyone else how to deliver a unique, differentiated message around their authentic passion and capabilities. It certainly applies to Jerry Seinfeld and Aziz Ansari, #7 and #49, respectively, on Rolling Stone Magazine’s Top 50 Stand-up Comedians of all Time (Love, M. (2017) ‘50 best stand-up comics of all time’.1 And it also applies to ‘Wow’ ideas with billion-dollar valuations and carefully calculated grabs of market share that facilitate incremental growth — like Dollar Shave Club and BioTrue Contact lens solution. All four are market leaders who broke out by adhering to an authentic and differentiated offering driven by passion and capability. This paper explores how.
Keywords: comedy; humour; stand-up; Seinfeld; branding; authenticity; voice
The full article is available to subscribers to the journal.
Author's Biography
Leigh Kessler is VP of Marketing and Communications at donor management software platform CharityEngine and a frequent speaker on branding, fundraising, data and technology. He is a former nationally touring headline comedian and has appeared on numerous TV shows, including VH1’s ‘Best Week Ever’, CNN’s ‘Showbiz Tonight’, Discovery Channel and Sirius Radio. Over the past 15 years, he has overseen and informed research and branding strategies for some of the most well-known brands in America, including TUMS, McKinsey & Co., Microsoft and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he has led companies to the Inc. 5000 list of America’s Fastest Growing Private Companies seven times.
Steven F. Robins Steven Robins is Managing Partner and Principal with the New England Consulting Group (NECG), a leading boutique consultancy specialising in growth-focused commercial strategies. He is active in the firm’s healthcare, consumer packaged goods (CPG), financial services and restaurant practices and works across both public and privately held clients. Like his partners, Steven had a successful career in line management before joining NECG. He served in leadership positions with several iconic corporate brands including Johnson & Johnson, Bausch + Lomb and Pfizer, where he had a remarkable record of developing differentiated positionings and innovative strategies for consumer and professionally driven brands across a wide regulatory spectrum. As an executive, Steven structured multiple commercial organisations, driving improved results, integrating merged functions and divisions and re-establishing growth in turnaround situations. His experience is balanced across North American and international businesses. Outside of NECG, he is Vice Chairman of the Board for Butler/Till, a privately held media communications company that has the distinctions of being employee owned, women run, and a B Corp. He is active in local charities and is a past board member of The American Heart Association of Rochester and the Greater Rochester Enterprise, a public/private economic development organisation. Steven holds a BA from Bates College. He was selected for and completed Pfizer’s Elite Leader Training (Harvard School of Management) and Johnson & Johnson’s LEAD programme.
