[Podcast] Building Legendary Brands with Storytelling w/ Gair Maxwell

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Show Notes

• Gair Maxwell’s website
• Big Little Legends Book

 

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Transcript (Auto Generated)

Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies.

Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding. This is episode 2 of season 3, which is just crazy that we’re into season 3. Somehow, Matt and I are still together.

But today, we have Gair Maxwell, who is a brand strategist and a historian as well as an incredible speaker, a former radio and TV host and author of the new book, Big Little Legends, which explores how everyday leaders build irresistible brands. Today, we’re going to be discussing just that, deciphering why some brands have lights reaching around the block, while others sit empty just steps away. What’s the secret?

Well, that’s why we have Gair here today. So Gair, welcome to the show.

Well, great to be here, fellows. And I’m just so fascinated by being on your program for a number of reasons, not the least of which is we were saying just before we went on that here we’ve got, you know, Matt in the UK, Jacob’s in Australia, I’m in Canada. We’ve got the Commonwealth pretty much covered just on this podcast.

Right? But what I found fascinating was you two guys have never actually met in person and I’m noticing a growing number of friendships and relationships that are happening that way thanks to these wonderful tools. We would never have been able to do this in the 20th century.

It is incredible. And I always say it’s probably a good thing we’ve never met in person because frankly, I do worry that if Jacob ever does meet me in person, that’ll be end of JUST Branding and I’ll probably, you know, that’ll be that. But no, you’re absolutely right.

Isn’t it most peculiar? And, you know, it’s great to meet you in this way as well and also to connect with our lovely listeners.

Yeah. So, like I say, I’m looking forward to this. We have no idea where we’re going, only that it’s going to be JUST Branding.

That’s correct. And storytelling, so I do have a little icebreaker question for you, although we don’t really need it because we just already jumped in. But I’m curious to this.

So Matt doesn’t know what I’m going to ask, but who do you think is the most interesting Disney character and why?

No one has ever asked me that question. The most interesting Disney character and why?

I’ll give you a second to think about it because the reason I’m asking because you’re all about legends and storytelling. Disney really probably top of the world in that.

Yeah, no, no, no. I think for me, and it’s going to sound a little cliche, it would be Mickey Mouse. And I’ll tell you why.

As I think about it and I’ve been to Disney and a great friend of mine is an expert in all things Disney. A little shout out for Jeff Barnes, the wisdom of Walt. But my point is that I never lost sight of how Walt Disney used to say it all began with the mouse.

Every time I’ve been to Orlando, Florida, the city built by a mouse, I’ve heard that repeated, no, that’s not just one time. That’s more than a dozen expressions I’ve heard just when you’re traveling in and out of Orlando, the city that the mouse built. What do you think it was about that mouse though?

I mean, it is remarkable, isn’t it? Because when you think Disney, you do think the archetypal mouse, you do think Mickey Mouse.

Just off the cuff, I think it has something to do with the way Walt created the character that he could represent that expression, every man. Mickey Mouse is every man, so everyone can see themselves in Mickey Mouse, basically, male or female. Now, we know they expanded the, and they added Minnie and they rounded out the family, so to speak.

But I think at the core, I think Mickey Mouse could be anyone. Anyone could relate to whatever Mickey was going through.

I agree. Jacob, what’s your favorite Disney character? I should have been prepared for that one, but I reckon it’s the Little Mermaid.

The Lion King comes to mind.

The King in The Lion King.

I don’t know, just top of the line for me.

Brilliant. And when you asked it, I was like, for some reason, my mind went to Jafar, the evil villain in Aladdin. I don’t know why, just stuck in my brain.

I think when I was a kid, he terrified me. So like just came to my mind. I find him fascinating.

Just the evil of him.

And honestly, fellas, isn’t that the essence of branding? What is it that enters our brain immediately? Whenever we could be talking razor blades, we could be talking shampoo.

No, it doesn’t matter. We could be talking automobiles. Whoever enters the brain first, isn’t that the ultimate strategic goal to have that quote unquote top of mind shelf space?

Absolutely. 100%. And stories help us get there.

And I know that’s going to be the grand theme of today’s episode. So, Jacob, do you have a second question to kick off with?

Yeah, absolutely.

What do you think?

Well, we often start with definitions in our podcasts. I understand the lens which you look through brand. So could you just define how you see brand and perhaps what actually is a big little legend?

Yeah, absolutely. So beginning with brand, and I actually have always credited a gal by the name of Karen Post. She wrote a book called Brain Tattoos many years ago.

And so I always honor her to this day in terms of defining brand. And she called it, and it was interesting. It was early in the book, and I felt she never really came back to it and explored it.

But when I read this definition, it’s like the heavens opened up for me. A brand is a story embedded in the mind of the market. And I love that.

A brand is a story. It’s not a logo, right? It’s not a brochure.

It’s not graphic design. No, a brand is a story. Embedded.

What does the word embedded mean? Oh, it’s deeply sunk in. So whether it’s the Lion King or Mickey Mouse, it’s so in there, in the mind.

Where is the mind? Oh, the human brain, the billions and billions of synaptic connections, and the market? Where’s the market?

Now the market, which I find extremely energizing, is at the markets anywhere. It’s no longer bound by geographic zones. Marketing in the 20th century.

Hey, if you had the right ad, let me see if I got it here. But if you had the right ad, do I have it handy? I don’t have it handy.

But if you had the right ad, for instance, or in your country, Matt, the right advert, if you have the right advert-

I appreciate the correct pronunciation as well.

Driving me crazy here because I don’t have my little pro. But if you had the right advert in in the yellow pages, you won. It was so simple back then.

And so the market where it was once restricted by geography, for instance, we know now we could be in- someone could be watching us right now in New Zealand to New York to New Mexico. What’s the market now?

The word market has never been more fluid in terms of its definition. So brand is a story embedded in the mind of the market. So brand I see always as a noun and branding is the verb.

Brand is the story. Branding is how you tell and live the story.

I love that definition. We haven’t had someone describe it that way. Often, Marty Newmayer brought up in his definition, but I love that.

Some different reframing.

Actually, Jacob, can I just say something in there? Because I completely agree with that, Gair. Another definition that I tend to use sometimes is like brand is the meaning that other people attach to your product or offer or service.

And if you were to ask, well, how does the human mind kind of make sense of the world around you? How does the human mind create meaning? I don’t know if you’d agree with this, but stories, right?

They’re part of our operating system. And so I love that definition, brand is the story embedded in the mind of the market. I think that’s absolutely beautiful.

It really is exquisite. So I just wanted to add that in there. What do you think about that, Gair?

Absolutely, because through story is how we attach meaning and what something means. And I don’t think we want to get too deep into semantic Wimbledon or anything like that. But what something means will also dictate how someone values a certain product, service, place, object, event, person, right?

So in other words, we’re all singing from the same song sheet in that these ideas are linked, but they’re linked at a very deep, deeply subconscious level.

Yeah. So talk to us about Big Little Legends. What’s that all about?

How did that name come about?

Yeah, well, Big Little Legends is a metaphor, if you want to know the truth. And the quick story is, I’ve been speaking all over the world for a number of years, and I recognize something. I’m so fascinated by the subject from the point of view of a recovering broadcast journalist.

And a number of years ago, someone in one of my Tech Canada audiences, now TEC, the acronym, the Executive Committee, it’s known as Vistage in the UK. There’s a tech organization in Australia, for example. It’s all over the world, but it’s a private peer advisory group for CEOs.

And a member said to me one day, and it really stuck, he says, you know, we’ve been to so many marketing presentations and all you guys talk about are the same brands. You’re all telling us you got to be like Apple or Nike or Starbucks or Disney. And we’re sitting in the room and we don’t relate.

We don’t have the budgets. It’s just not something we connect with because they’re too big. They’re too impossible to reach for us to even comprehend.

Even though the principles might be the same, there’s a gap just in terms of relatability. And that really, guys, that really hit home with me. And I said, well, what if?

What if there are small to medium sized companies, and to your point, Jacob, about definition, a billion in sales and below, okay? I define small to medium as a billion in revenue and below to about 10 million, not startup, okay? But you guys get the picture.

What if there are small to medium sized businesses out there that have this incredible magnetic pulling power similar to the best brands in the world? So if I expand on the metaphor, they’ve become the equivalent to the Apple, the Ferrari, the Harley Davidson, the Harvard, the Harry Potter of their particular product service category. So Big Little Legends was a metaphorical description of how do you describe a small to medium sized business when you see its marketing is incredibly effective.

And as you said in the opening, Jacob, they’ve got these long lineups of customers online or offline. And their biggest issue is how do they satisfy all the demands? That’s kind of where the concept came from.

And if you’re curious, they all share, and we’ve studied literally dozens of them. And this is, I think, important for everyone watching or listening today. We’ve studied dozens, way too many to go in the book.

Like, there’s too many out there. And so many of that of which we’ve studied, I’ve actually been to these locations firsthand. I’ve basically seen where they laid the keel.

And that’s going to probably necessitate a second book and maybe a third book, and maybe there’s a trilogy coming out of this, to be honest. But so what we did is we identified from our criteria and a definition point of view, there’s four key characteristics, the Big Little Legends. And the characteristics are as follows.

Number one, they all have a very favorable reputation within their own community and a reputation that extends far beyond their area code. And it’s important for me to say this. This is why you don’t want to be famous just for being famous sake.

It’s not a, in other words, being famous and building a reputation, because someone’s going to say, well, why do I need to be famous beyond my local area code, right? Why? It’s not fame for vanity.

It’s not a vanity play at all. But here’s the fundamental truth. And I picked this up from one of your countrymen, Matt, Rory Sutherland.

I don’t know if you know that name, Rory Sutherland. But, you know, I thought Rory said it perfectly. The more famous you are, the luckier you get.

And I think luck plays a significant part in business strategy more than people would care to admit. I think the business schools don’t teach luck. But if you think of every break you ever got along the way, luck played a bigger, you know, played a significant part of it.

And consequently, when you have a reputation that allows you to make lucky, what is it? Luck is the residue of preparation, something like that. So, you know, the luck, what is it?

The harder you work, the luckier you get. Yeah, yeah. You make your own luck.

That’s another one.

Yeah, so you want it, you do. It’s important that you are known way beyond your area code. Number two, you have a brand story.

And how that happens is number two, you get a brand story that gets told and retold and retold over and over and over again, so that the story eventually becomes mythology and mythology becomes legend. Okay, it kind of worked from the opening of this podcast. It kind of worked for a guy named Walt Disney.

Number three, longevity. All of the big little legends we studied, they have longevity in the form of decades, typically. We’re talking decades of building their brands and building their reputations.

And number four, because of all that, they own a substantial share of the market. So they don’t own just a piece of the pie or settle for crumbs. No, they are the game changer, the big player.

They’re the Moby Dick in their category, so to speak. Which right away, that leads to an interesting observation because I really believe, and I know there’s a lot of creative people listening today and watching today, I believe brand speaks an entirely different language. I believe brand is metaphorical.

I believe it is meaningful, to use your word, Matt, emotional and symbolic. That’s what brand is. Business is logical, linear, analytical, mathematical, mechanical, rational, factual.

I’m always challenging business leaders that it’s not one’s better than the other. It’s both. You got to be fluent today more than ever.

You got to be fluent in both of these vitally important languages.

100%. We got to get that bridge, build the bridge between, bring them together.

Right. Because business people, and I’m sure you’ve known people yourselves in your careers, those who come from the world of operations or sales or HR, they tend to think and see the world in very linear terms, in a very step-by-step logical fashion, where with brand, it’s anything but logical in terms of what is it that really grabs attention, pulls at heartstrings and things of that nature.

I think you’re right. And I think the other thing I observe in business, I don’t know if you’d agree with this, is that if you think business, but after your description, it’s very much internal and from a leadership level, can become very narcissistic. In other words, it’s about us all the time.

But when you get into more brand thinking, you start thinking about things from the customer’s perspective. Why should the customer care? Will that wreck the narrative and the reputation that we’ve been building for the last 30 years?

That’s the sort of area you go in. So the two need to fuse together because they both are symbiotic. They both need each other to be successful.

But I would agree with everything you’ve just said.

I often say to clients is that two sides of the same coin, right? They work together and they have to work together. So that really makes sense when you say it like that.

So yeah, thank you. So what’s the last one? You have story, you have reputation, the story, longevity.

And then the fourth is they all own a substantial share of the market. Because if I don’t see a small business, medium-sized business with substantial results, then obviously I can’t, you know, not a legend yet. No, you’re still working on it, right?

There’s still work to do.

You.

I’ve got a question for you in here. So when you say their category or their section of the market, this is always a big kind of question for me as a strategist. How do we create, how do we define a marketplace, a category?

What’s your sort of response to that?

Yeah, that’s a fabulous question. Let me roleplay it with you a little bit, fellows. How many lawyers are there in Chicago, Illinois?

Let’s say 200,000.

Well, the actual number in Cook County, Illinois is 45,210. I’ve done that research and I’m not saying that to be a smarty pants or anything like that, but I think it helps define, I think you’ve got to know how many secondhand stores are there in America. That number is 11,800.

How many golf courses are there on planet Earth? That number is 38,000 and change. Everything has got, you could put a metric and a geography to anything.

Does that make sense? Nationally, globally, regionally, locally, you can do it in any way. I always try and filter what I’m invited to help people through our consulting programs.

I’m always trying to figure out, well, how are we going to be the category of one relative to the rest of whatever market you’re competing in? Does that make sense, guys?

So, for example, and I’m not just pulling this out of my hat or whatever, we’ve got a guy out of the windy city of Chicago, and sure enough, he’s a lawyer. And sure enough, he’s one of the 45,210. And what’s he trying to do?

He’s trying to get attention. So, okay. So, he’s no different than what we explored in Chapter 1 of the book.

So, the book, very deliberately, is broken into, there’s four parts, there’s 12 chapters, and there’s 36 strategic and practical takeaways. And this has all been done by design. And it starts at a certain museum in Paris.

That’s where the whole thing starts. Because metaphorically, what is the Louvre? The Louvre is the market.

See, literally, it’s a museum in a literal sense. If you’ve been to the Louvre, right? It’s a physical building and we can walk around.

It was on my last visit that I realized I’m not at the Louvre. It looks like a museum. No, it’s not.

It’s a market. And that market could be anything. And at the Louvre, there’s 35,000 paintings and objects and artifacts.

And what are they competing for? They’re competing for attention. What’s everyone competing for right now, folks?

Attention. We live in the attention economy, which is a phrase coined by an American, Herbert Simon, in 1972. He who gets the attention is going to win.

Can you get and hold the attention? So I’m wandering around the Louvre, and I know people watching and listening are going to say, the same thing happened to me. Yeah, I’m going through these galleries that are empty, and I’m seeing beautiful, breathtaking masterpieces on the wall.

No spectators, none. I’m the only one there, and I can’t believe that I’m looking at this piece of art. I couldn’t tell you who the painter was, but this was many times over, and I’m by myself.

You turn the corner into one gallery, and there’s a mob. Which painting is in that gallery?

Mona Lisa.

The story behind it, because it’s the most famous. It has that reputation.

And why is the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world? Why? How does anyone explain it?

It’s difficult, but I always think it’s something to do with is she smiling or not. There’s something weird in that. Anyway.

But there isn’t, and this is why the book starts with chapter one, is because as a recovering broadcast journalist, I had to know, and I had to do my research and dig into why. Why did this happen? And so because I discovered in the 19th century, the Mona Lisa was not the most famous painting in the world.

And I’ll tell you the honest to goodness, real life story of how I tested this out, because I like to test and experiment all the time. I just want to see how to real people react to it. So as I was starting to get hooked on the research of this, I thought, I’m going to test this out.

I was in Las Vegas. I was speaking at a big conference in one of those big hotel ballrooms. You know, there’s seven, 800 people in the room.

And I said, on the count of three, what is the most famous painting in the world? One, two, three, seven, eight hundred people. What do they all shout out in unison?

The Mona Lisa. And then I go, why?

And nobody knows.

So in Chapter one, we don’t know. So in Chapter one, we call it the Mona Lisa effect. And it’s a recurring theme through the book.

And in fact, in all twelve chapters, we identify the specific moment in time when the world tilted on its axis and nothing was the same after that. So in the case of the Mona Lisa, it was August 21st, 1911. That’s when everything changed because up until that time, it wasn’t even regarded by the snooty art critics of the day as being Da Vinci’s best work.

In fact, many art critics felt The Last Supper from Da Vinci was deemed more worthy, Jacob. And I can see you’re the artist, the real connoisseur of art in this gang.

You know what I mean, Matt? You and I are down at the pub, right? Jacob, of course, is out with his high-flying intellectual friends.

He’s like a monocule looking at all the…

Yes, yes, yes, yes. But yeah, high society in the art world felt other paintings from Renoir or Rembrandt were more worthy of acclaim. And then everything changed August 21st, 1911, when the Mona Lisa was stolen.

And when she was stolen, it was an Italian handyman named Vincenzo Perugia who walks out in broad daylight on a Monday morning. He had camped out in the museum over the weekend. One of the theories is because he, because it was so small, he could tuck it in under his smock and get out and not be detected.

And then here’s how not famous the Mona Lisa was. She’s so not famous that it’s almost 48 hours before the officials at the Louvre even notice she’s missing. So please don’t tell me that she’s always been this slam dunk top of mind queen of brand awareness in the category called famous paintings because she wasn’t.

So here’s what happens. After they discover she’s missing, they alert the authorities. Once the authorities have been notified and they’ve called in the gendarme, well, then the media picks up the story and it’s front page, but it didn’t just go front page in Paris.

It went front page everywhere. Guys, what was the only mass media available to humans back in 1911?

Newspapers.

Yeah, that’s it. So if we look at newspapers in 1911, we go, oh, that’s Facebook, that’s Google, that’s network television all rolled up into one.

Amazing.

Right. So she’s front page in Paris, in Pittsburgh, in Peking and Pensacola, Florida. Wouldn’t matter with Possum Ridge, Arkansas.

It doesn’t matter where it is. She’s front page in the paper. For a two year news cycle, the Mona Lisa gets millions and millions and millions of dollars of free publicity that no painting ever got before or since.

Once she disappeared, crowds started to appear at the Louvre just to stare at the empty wall where she once hung. I can’t make this up. This is exactly what happened.

And then when she was recovered, two years later, Perugia tries to sell the painting to an art dealer in Florence, Italy. And that’s how they cracked the case. She’s coming back.

The girl’s coming back to Paris. 120,000 people are there to greet her upon her arrival because people love the comeback, don’t they?

We love a good comeback.

We do.

That’s brilliant.

Between that time, the Mona Lisa got the priceless news coverage that no painting ever got before or since. And can you imagine the conspiracy theories that were going on back then? It was an insult to French honor and the chief of police in Paris resigned in disgrace.

I mean, it just snowballed. That’s amazing. That is, isn’t it?

So here’s the theory. And by the way, there are two wonderful filmmakers out of Los Angeles. Big shout out to Joe and Justine Medeiros, they are the global authorities on the theft of the Mona Lisa.

Their documentary has done more to expose this. What was interesting is I had been studying the story for about, I don’t know, I’m going to say four or five years before I met Joe and Justine. So it’s like we intersected like ships in the night and connected on this story.

But my point is this, what would have happened that day if Vincenzo Perugia walks out of the Louvre with a different painting? Which painting would Matt and I be talking about down at the pub and at the country club, Jacob and his, you know, Monocule. Exactly.

And his well-heeled friends. In other words, you can see what this is, right? We wouldn’t be talking about the Mona Lisa.

Whichever painting got stolen, that’s the one that was going to win.

There’s so much in there that we could tuck into. And the fact that it’s a female face and there’s, you know, as you say, the girl coming back home and there’s like loads of stuff that kind of you emotionally, probably, now you’ve said that story, I didn’t know that story until this moment, right? So I just think that’s remarkable because I think there’s so many things in there that you connect with, you know, as a human as well.

So you can see why the story spreads and, you know, a theft and French honor and oh, it’s just full of drama. I love it.

Right. And so that’s why I wanted to start the book there, because that now is the universal application in every single product service category. If you can see beyond the museum and see it as a metaphor for any market where you’re competing for attention.

And so I say this in the book, you know, art without a story is just paint on a canvas. A business without a story is just like every other business. Let me ask you this, fellas.

How many world class paintings are hanging in the Louvre?

All of them. Think about it. So what does that tell us?

I was expecting an actual number there, Gair. I mean, disappointed really.

Well, out of the 35,000 or whatever it is, I’d say all of them are world class. You don’t get into your piece of art doesn’t get into the unless it’s world class. So the point is that you can be world class at what you do and still be ignored.

You’ve got the best restaurant with the best chef, but it’s the guy across the street for some like you described earlier, Jacob, for whatever reason, he’s got the lineup of customers probably because he’s got a better story.

You do know that there’s probably a ton of executives that’s listening to this right now scratching their heads thinking, like, how can we get someone to steal something from us?

Need a break-in.

And by the way, me and Jacob are available for break-ins if anyone wants to stage one. We do have a set fee for that, but talk to us after.

And the salient point, Matt, to what you just mentioned is this, a story either happens to you or you make one happen. I just want, okay. Now, excuse me.

You could get lucky. It is possible to get lucky. In the case of the Mona Lisa and Leonardo da Vinci, Leo got lucky with this one.

The heavens just smiled on him. But that happened in New York with a guy selling soup. And I don’t know how familiar you and your audiences are with that story, but a guy selling soup.

What’s that?

Tell us the story. Tell us.

Oh, the guy selling soup in Manhattan. How many soup vendors do you think there are in Manhattan? All kinds.

I don’t know the exact number.

I don’t know the exact number, but I do know this. This guy selling soup. Everything changed in November of 1995 with one episode of Seinfeld.

Oh, that’s what I was thinking about when you mentioned it. So it’s actually that guy.

That’s the guy.

We have a picture of him, a signed picture of him in my father’s place. Weirdly enough that he got it at an auction.

How come everybody knows about this guy selling soup but me? Can someone explain this to me?

The soup Nazi.

The soup Nazi?

Yeah.

What did he do?

Well, he was on Seinfeld and you can tell the story better, but go ahead.

I’m enjoying listening to you tell it. This is the beauty of the story being shared. Go ahead, Jacob.

Especially since you’re in Australia telling the story.

I was made a year ago, so I’ll have to draw my memory. What I recall of it is the soup Nazi is very evil and he says yes or no to who can have the soup at the store. That’s basically the story.

I think it’s Elaine or something that can’t get access because he buys her from the kitchen and that creates the story.

So what he just has a criteria and just says, no, you’re not having any soup.

Put it this way, Matt, if he doesn’t like your face, his line would be, no soup for you.

Yes, that’s it. That’s the phrase.

That’s the phrase.

I’d definitely be saying that to Jacob every single time he stood up for soup.

And to our point about a story could happen to you, here’s this character playing this out. He’s kind of abrupt and a little rude and a little, shall we say, rough around the edges. Yeah, like fuzzy hair.

Yeah. And a couple of the writers from Seinfeld used to go there because that’s where they shot the show in New York. And they used to go there and they thought this would be, we could turn this into an episode.

It was November of 1995. And when that episode dropped, it’s probably the most famous segment on Seinfeld ever, which is only like the biggest sitcom in the history of television. And that guy’s business, what do you think happened?

It just exploded. And it’s the same as the Mona Lisa. It’s got nothing to do with the soup.

It’s got nothing to do with the painting and the shadows and the type of canvas. And think of all the painting.

I love how you do that with a British accent.

Don’t get me going because I could slip into some early Winston Churchill here in a hurry. But for our business listeners, I hate to break the bubble. Building a brand that becomes irresistible and a category of one and maybe someday legendary.

That’s got nothing to do with your features, advantages, benefits, your competitive advantage, or heaven help me, your unique selling proposition. What is your unique selling proposition? I’ve never, ever, ever seen customers think about it, Matt.

You’re in, you know, you’ve been in London, right? Yeah, with all those taxi cab drivers in the back of those black taxis going all over the place, right? I’ve never seen two blokes coming out of the cab, you know, puffing on their smoke, talking about some company’s unique selling proposition.

I’ve never seen that happen. And you haven’t either. And that speaks to what we were talking about earlier.

Business on the inside talks about a lot of things that people on the outside could care less about.

Here’s a question. You said stories either happen to you, or you make them happen. So we’ve had some examples of stories happening to someone, and it working well.

I’d love to see if you, what examples you would share with us for stories that people have made happen.

Sure. The vast majority of the stories we explore in Big Little Legends are those stories of leaders who made it happen. Because we will always say you could get lucky, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on that.

But I do acknowledge, can it happen? Yes. We got to acknowledge at least its possibility.

But like Matt, to your point, like 99% of the time, probably 99.9, you got to make one happen. And the origin story from Big Little Legends is the perfect illustration of how you do this. So here’s Jim and Donna.

They’re based in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and they run a small business. I meet them in 2002. This is really important for me to share because if people want to know, what is the origin of Big Little Legends?

Where does it all come from? It comes from the day we met. And I will never forget the day Jim and I met.

It was at the Fredericton Chamber of Commerce. They run a small mom and pop shop. They got five employees.

I want you to hear that, guys, five. You know, they’re selling an interchangeable product. They’re doing pretty good.

They’re just over a million, but 1.2, 1.3 million in annual revenues. And I just want to paint the picture. They’ve got a nice, small little business and they’re doing okay, but they feel they can do so much better.

And that’s, you know, I did a little presentation at the Chamber of Commerce that morning at the Lord Beaver Brook Hotel, and Jim comes up afterwards. And let me describe Jim for you in a way. And I don’t know what the equivalent is on Australia, Jacob, or in the UK, but Jim is this very soft spoken individual.

In Seinfeld, he’d be called a low talker. He doesn’t talk. He’s very quiet.

Do you have any characteristic to describe that in the UK or in Australia?

Softly spoken, maybe?

Introverted as well?

A little bit of that.

Oh yeah, very much so. I can describe it because he approaches and he doesn’t even make a lot of eye contact. He says, I like some of the stuff you were saying up there.

Hands me his business card and it says, the glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than anything. Thank you. I’m thinking that’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen on a business card.

Like I say, I can’t stress enough how very quiet and gentlemanly he was and all these different things. I’m describing it this way so you could really feel and the listeners and viewers can feel, he doesn’t fit the stereotype of his business category at all. He’s in the worst business category in the world for public perception and reputation.

He’s selling used cars.

How do they look at used car dealers in your part of the world?

Not great. Yeah.

Yeah.

Con merchants often.

Yeah. How are they viewed in Australia?

I bought one the other day. Literally, I blew up this BMW 4 Series, I think it was. Honestly.

Yeah. And it drove me crazy. Thankfully though, there was actually quite reputable, so I got another one.

But yeah, not great.

Not great. How are they viewed in Australia, Jacob?

I just recently got a car a couple of years ago. So I don’t have much experience buying used cars.

What would you say people say about them?

The stereotype of them, I learned from TVs and cartoons and things like that. It’s like the bottom of the barrel.

If there’s a totem pole of credibility there at the bottom below lawyers and politicians. And here in North America, they would be described as greasy and slick and all kinds of very unflattering terms. When I did that, I was telling you, Matt, I did a two week tour of the UK.

Whenever I told this story, there was this consistently, the audiences all had one, a one word reaction. I get to use my British accent. You ready for it?

Come on, go on.

It was dodgy.

Dodgy.

They’re all dodgy.

So what I’m sharing with you folks is that the two of them, Jim and Donna, don’t even fit the stereotype. So Jim and I start working together. And at the time I was doing, I had spent 20 years in broadcast journalism and I’m out of it.

I’m in the world of soft skills training. We’re doing things like customer service training and team building. And it only took us four years.

And I don’t mind sharing with you. It was part accident, but also part by design. And I’m not going to bore you with the details, but I will tell you it was a four year process to get to where we needed to go.

And it launched in September of 06 with 32nd Radio Spots where we never talked about the cars. We did 32nd Radio Vignettes with little stories about Canada’s huggable car dealer. He’s the Casanova of customer focus.

He’s the Romeo of roadsters. By golly, he’s been called the McDreamy of drive. Stop by Jim Gilbert’s, get your daily dose of hugtonium designed to improve your love affair with your car and your libido.

So in his trade area of, let’s say, 22, 23 car dealers around 50 kilometers, what is everyone else talking about? They’re all talking about the same things that they’re still talking about today. Better quality, better selection, better service, better value, better prices.

Everyone’s better. Okay. So while they duke it out over that, a game, by the way, you can’t win.

Let’s let me point that out. You’ll never win that game. What are we doing?

We’re telling all these 37 and we did this, guys, for years. And then I can share this with you. Within six weeks, we knew we had something.

We didn’t know what or how big it was going to get, but we knew it because within six weeks, complete strangers are walking up the gym at the shopping mall or coffee shops or hockey games. And they’re asking them for a hug. And they’re saying, is that true?

Are you really the huggable car dealer? Is that true? So think where in your worldly experience does it exist where strangers go up to a used car dealer and ask for a hug?

That doesn’t happen. And the real genius strategy wise was Donna. And I was at dinner that night.

It was a gym, right? Donna says, we can’t just talk about it. We have to be the huggable car dealer in every way.

And we didn’t have the words then. But the idea was we got to live the story. We can’t just tell the story.

We’ve actually got to live the thing. And that’s when dozens of teddy bears followed by hundreds of teddy bears and mascots and merry-go-rounds. There’s a two-kilometer nature trail, Matt, to go walk your dog.

It’s called the Trail of Hugs. So going back to where we started, if Walt Disney was to actually imagine a used car lot, it exists in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Get your popcorn ready, because by 2020, that business employed 38 people, was doing north of $50 million.

And on the 40th anniversary of their being in business, you can see in the video behind me, more than 2,000 people show up just to line up and give Jim and Donna a hug and shake their hand and congratulate them on 40 years in business. Nowhere in the world will you find a car dealership, anything like this, that has completely redefined and repositioned itself within a category that we said we all agreed earlier was quote unquote unfavorable. So metaphorically, and this is what I teach my CEO groups and all the business audiences I speak to, metaphorically, the huggable car dealer is in the Apple, the Nike, the Ferrari, the Disney of his product service category.

Amazing. Absolutely incredible story. I absolutely love that.

Brilliant.

Right. But to your point, Matt, that’s why when you hold up something like this, it’s a real brand strategist and a long-term thinker will see beyond what this is, because on the surface, it looks like a piece of swag, right? That’s what it looks like.

And I explore this in Chapter 8 in the book, the power of symbols and rituals. Symbols and rituals have more power than we can even imagine. In fact, when I was writing Chapter 8, I was thinking, I think this could be a whole other book, because I don’t think that anyone’s ever really written the book on that.

And I’ve only got room to put it all into one chapter. But my point is this. If you dismiss this as swag, you’ve missed the point.

I don’t see swag. I don’t even see a teddy bear. I see a $50 million idea that keeps providing return on investment year over year over year.

So we’re 15 years in to the huggable car dealer brand. And so, as you fellows can imagine, it’s been an incredible laboratory to study how do we use the power of story to positively influence buyer behavior in our favor. And while that’s the origin story in Chapter 2, the subject demanded a book.

I realized, oh, there’s a book in this if you start to incorporate and see the patterns that develop in other places in the world.

Absolutely phenomenal.

Sorry, Matt. Yeah, to dissect that, what you’re talking about is making them different, standing out in the marketplace, differentiation and relevance. So the stereotype of car dealerships are that they are awful bottom of the barrel, flip that on its head is the most huggable car dealer.

So it’s totally flipped. And that’s why they stand out in the market. And often we talk about differentiation when it comes to brand and branding.

But how do you actually stand out? How can you actually find that place? And I think that’s a perfect, perfect example of how it’s being done.

So another thing is coming down to a single word, how can you actually define your brand in one word? It’s often a challenge that we talk about to our clients. It’s like, well, that brand is huggable, right?

Or Coca-Cola is happiness. Volvo is safety. Your whole brand strategy is brought down into one word.

So I think huggable is a brilliant word that I definitely have not heard anywhere else before. So I think it was a great example. So thank you so much for sharing.

Yeah, my pleasure. And that’s one of the reasons, too, I wrote the book, Jacob, is that there’s all these different aspects around this discipline. And long-term brand building is a discipline, no different than golf.

It’s a discipline. Okay. And so as soon as Jacob started talking, I look at it as you’ve got two to six words to own the market with.

Two to six words. Now, Nike is my universal example of three words and they own the market. Those three words are ubiquitous, aren’t they?

Yeah. Just do it.

You know what I mean? Well, Just Do It is a flag they’ve planted on a mountain since 1988, and they’ve built equity around that. Right?

Canada’s huggable car dealer, four words. Right? You’ve got two to six words, and likely one out of those two to six is going to be, and this is for public consumption, so that the audience can hear how you’re different in what we call it a tribal narrative.

So that tribal narrative is elevated beyond slogan or tagline. I’m absolutely convinced of this, that slogans and taglines too often are just as common as dishwater and table salt. Whereas, do you want a slogan or do you want a battle cry?

Do you want to jingle? Do you want an anthem? And so the tribal part comes from Queen.

You ever see Bohemian Rhapsody?

No, I’m not seeing that. You’ve seen it? Jacob’s seen it.

The biopic?

Yeah.

Do you remember, Jacob, when Brian May is in the studio and he’s telling the rest of the band, guys, guys, they’re loving our songs. We’ve got to give them something. Do you remember that one?

I think you did it better.

He says, and then follow me.

He says, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s like the whole stage is out there and you can see everyone.

We will rock you is four words. The tribal part comes from the drum beat. The drum beat, the sound of those African drums, the djembe drums that used to help villages communicate for many centuries ago.

I take tribal and fuse it with narrative, which is storytelling, the story that has no ending. And I go, just do it has no ending. It’s almost got a rhythmic beat to it.

But so does Canada’s huggable car dealer. So does here. I’ll show you one.

I do have it handy. Where did I put it? I just saw it here.

I think Gair is the only the only guest we’ve ever had, Jacob, who has brought props. I’m so impressed.

For our podcast listeners, there’s a screen in the background that has had some slides go through as he’s been speaking. You can tell that he’s a former TV host and radio host.

I was expecting the weather to go up there in a minute.

I would say, while Gair is looking for his props, if he does find them, check us out on YouTube. If you’re on YouTube, you will find a very handsome fella and a less handsome fella. I’ll leave you to decide on who’s who.

But we are on YouTube. Definitely subscribe and you’ll get all of our content on there as well. Gair, have you found it yet?

Not yet. That’s so annoying because it’s usually, that prop is usually like right here.

What was it?

What was it, Gair? At least, fellas, people will now know we did it live. We were live.

This was not prep. And here’s the thing. I reckon there’s some bloke with a trench coat just hurrying out the side of your house there.

Just, you know, and now we’ve got a story happening.

This was planned, wasn’t it?

It was planned after all.

What it was, it’s a hardcover book that was sent to me by my good friend Tim McClure. Tim totally created something out in the state of Texas in the mid 1980s. It’s probably it’s in the advertising Hall of Fame, and it’s one of the greatest tribal narratives that I’ve ever seen.

And it’s called Don’t Mess with Texas. And Don’t Mess with Texas was a narrative they used for an anti-littering campaign in the state of Texas back in 1986. And it’s still going to this day.

So it’s got longevity. They used iconic Texans like Willie Nelson and Warren Moon and the Dallas Cowboys and later Matthew McConaughey and George Strait to encourage Texans not to litter on Texas state highways. And Don’t Mess with Texas transformed into a multi-million dollar merchandising business.

You go into any airport in Texas or any souvenir shop, you’re going to see the t-shirts, you’re going to see the mugs, you’re going to see the swag all around Don’t Mess with Texas. So that’s what I mean by a tribal narrative to close the loop on that, fellas, is that amazing. You’ve got about two to six words to really own it.

But once you figure it out, and that would be the big learning from Canada’s huggable car dealer. Once you figure that out and build equity on that, you’ve left behind short-term campaigns and now you’re building long-term brand.

100%. And it comes to the story. Wow.

Well, thanks so much for sharing all your knowledge, Gair. This has been a fascinating conversation. I hope the listeners have enjoyed it.

Jacob, do you have anything final to ask Gair?

I think just where can we find you and where can we get the book?

Yeah, I’m the easiest guy to find online. So it’s Gair, G-A-I-R Maxwell. The book is all over the world now.

This is what we were talking about this earlier. If someone was in Tokyo today walking down the street and they got the impulse to go out and get Big Little Legends, they could do it. So it’s on Amazon in the UK, I know.

I’ve just bought it, literally as you were talking. I was like, I’ve got to get this book. This sounds awesome.

So I bought it. You’ve got another sale. Ka-ching.

Come on, folks, get on Amazon. Let’s get this book on our bookshelves.

Here’s what we’re doing too. A little groundswell has started in North America. So, Matt, it’ll be interesting to see what you could do with this.

I was going to blow up after this podcast. You’ll see a huge spike.

Here’s what we’re hoping to do. I don’t know how much you know about the book business and distribution, but there are ways, there are, how do I say, cloak and dagger ways, OK, to game the system and rig the system. We’re not doing that.

This book is going to live and die on its merits. It will grow organically or it won’t. And I’m OK with that.

Hey, do you know what? I’ve just got a bit of an idea where we should like get someone to steal it and maybe just like, you know, like we could get some press out of that. Just a thought.

Anyway, well, I’ll leave everybody with that thought.

But here’s what’s happening organically in North America, Matt. And I thought if you just bought it, here’s what I mean. People are starting to send me pictures of the book in like these very interesting locations.

So I’m already picturing. Can you picture Matt holding Big Little Legends, Jacob, at Stonehenge, for example?

I’m miles away from Stonehenge.

I’m not going to Stonehenge. Well, maybe I will.

Where was the sword Excalibur in Wales? Where’s that place where King Arthur was?

I’ll have to find it. I’ll have to find it. And then, as you say, take a photo of it there.

Take a photo. And that, to me, this is just… And this started…

I’ve got, like I say, people are doing this on their own. They’re just sending in these different photos from different places. And I’m going, isn’t this an interesting dynamic that…

You might have to just settle with me and a cow or something like that. That’ll probably have to do. But we’ll figure something out for you.

Here’s my favorite from the UK, Matt. Newcastle. You know about the Newcastle beer?

Yeah, Newcastle Brown Ale.

Yeah, no bollocks. Right?

There you go.

There you go.

Well, we’ve got a lot to work with and Jacob will have to do it over there in Australia. And then, yeah, there’s two for you all. So, well, thanks.

Look, anyway, thanks so much for coming in and carving out the time for us. Amazing stories. Really appreciate it.

And we know where to find you now. So thanks so much and have an absolutely wonderful day. And keep telling these stories, because honestly, brilliant research, brilliant work.

My pleasure. Jacob, Matt from Sydney and the UK. Keep it on JUST Branding, the JUST Branding Podcast.

Keep doing JUST that, JUST Branding. Bye.