I took a day trip to Manhattan with my parents in 2008, while I was studying in the US. My mum loves Broadway, so she booked us tickets to watch a matinee. I didn’t have high expectations, since I’d never heard of the show we were watching. I grew even more skeptical when the lights turned down, a dishevelled-looking guy in a baggy red shirt stepped onstage, and started rapping.
But the next two hours gave me one of the best performances I’d ever seen. I was blown away. Unlike other Broadway shows with classical ballads, this one was heavy on hip-hop and urban dance. The cast rapped about the struggles of a Dominican American community living in America. The show my mother unknowingly bought tickets to was In The Heights, which went on to win 4 Tony Awards. I later found out that the dishevelled-looking guy I had the privilege of watching was Lin-Manuel Miranda, who would later go on to create the global phenomenon Hamilton.
In The Heights and Hamilton are two of my favourite musicals not only because I love the hip-hop genre, but also because they were just so different from the other shows I’d seen before. Hamilton stands out because it dared to break the unwritten rules of Broadway at the time.
I’ve been thinking about the Hamilton phenomenon lately as it relates to brand-building. I have to confess that until recently, I was never a big fan of branding. I felt that it was a little too fluffy and woo-woo. And yet, companies spend millions of dollars every year on branding. These are (usually) run by smart people, so I figured that I needed to understand this branding business a little more. And if the success of Hamilton is anything to go by, perhaps I need to revisit my prior assumptions.
Why Having A Strong Brand Is Important
Hamilton itself is a brand. For several years after it launched, it was almost impossible to get tickets. I remember refreshing the website multiple times to score some tickets for shows several months out. And the Hamilton brand extends way beyond just the show itself. I have the soundtrack on loop on Spotify. There are YouTube videos analyzing hidden details buried within the show. People make TikToks lip-syncing to the lyrics.
Among the thousands of brands in the market, only a select few have achieved the brand significance of Hamilton. Apple is one of them. Nike is another. So is Disney, and KitKat with its iconic “have a break, have a KitKat” tagline. Brands in this rarefied club accrue benefits that other companies – even very successful ones – could only dream of.
First of all, strong brands have more power in their identities. They are less beholden to their products or to the whims of the market. Concept Bureau has a great article on brand-led vs. branded companies. It argues that while many companies are branded, only a select few are brand-led where the “identity of the brand supersedes the product and allows the company to resist certain market forces.”
For example, Apple faces plenty of criticism about their products’ features, or how they are simply copies of other products. And yet, we all personally know that person whose entire life is Apple products. I know a guy who not only has all the usual gadgets (Mac, Mighty Mouse, Magic Keyboard, iPad, Apple Watch, etc), but he outfits his entire home with Apple tech (HomePod, HomeKit, Apple TV, Apple Music, etc). To an Apple critic, this behaviour is irrational – why would you ever go for an “inferior” product? But the critics miss the point. Apple can command such loyalty precisely because the brand has an authority of its own, and people will look past its shortcomings simply because they love the brand.
Second, having a strong brand gives vision and clarity when making decisions. Disney famously doesn’t allow swearing on its shows, leading to unpopular decisions like censoring the F-bombs in the VOD edition of Hamilton on Disney+. People may viciously criticise a brand’s decisions, but no one can deny that they’re consistent. They have a point of view and will stick to their beliefs. This alienates some people, but builds undying loyalty among those who do get it: In the case of Disney, parents who want family-friendly content for their children.
The Conventional Wisdom: Better Branding = Being “Better”
I have a friend who once opened a restaurant. I was worried for him, because I knew that the Singapore F&B industry could be a bloodbath for entrepreneurs. I asked him how he planned to win despite the cutthroat competition of the restaurant business. He responded that he would serve great food at low prices, and provide a fantastic atmosphere “where people will just want to come and chill”. I tried probing him a little further, but that was it.
Unfortunately, my friend’s approach failed Roger L. Martin’s simple test of a good strategy: Does the opposite of your strategy look stupid?
The point is this: If the opposite of your core strategy choices looks stupid, then every competitor is going to have more or less the exact same strategy as you.
Roger L. Martin
In other words, the opposite of your strategy must still be a strategy. In the case of my friend’s restaurant, the opposite of his strategy was to serve terrible food at high prices in a crappy atmosphere. No one would actually do this, which meant that he would be virtually indistinguishable from his competitors. Therefore, there was no strong reason why he would succeed, which turned out to be right: He closed down within a couple of years.
It’s easy to sit smugly and laugh at my friend, but big brands make this mistake all the time. I’ve seen so many strategy documents where a brand’s strategy simply boils down to being better than their competitors: Provide better service, have better products, be better at digital, have a better rewards program, etc.
Of course, being better counts. You can’t put lipstick on a pig. But when it comes to building a strong brand, being better is insufficient. Samsung probably produces better products than Apple, but I’d argue that the latter has stronger brand equity. Companies spend all this effort and money to be better than their competitors, but often, the market simply reacts with a giant yawn.
So if it’s not just about being better, what’s the key to building a strong brand? I found a clue in one of the most unlikely places: A small Singaporean gym.
What Hamilton and a small Singaporean gym have in common
I’ve been going to a small HIIT gym called Ritual Gym for the past 5 years. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on it, and I’m just about to complete my 500th session. Now, there are plenty of other HIIT gyms in Singapore, many of them offering newer equipment, innovative workouts, and a great community. But what makes Ritual Gym stand out among them?
There could be many reasons, but I believe that it comes down to their brand positioning as “the 30-minute gym”. The founders believed that the #1 barrier to working out is not having enough time. So Ritual’s north star is convenience: Every session is only 30 minutes, so you can easily squeeze it into a busy day. You can book a last-minute session on your app. You don’t even need to bring clothes – they provide clothes, showers and towels – so all you have to do is show up.
Now, Ritual has been criticised for offering workouts that are too short,since other HIIT gyms typically offer 45-60 min sessions. But the 30-min branding is precisely what makes it unique, and addresses their north star (convenience) head-on. In other words, they maintain a specific point of view, took a firm stand, and are willing to make tradeoffs for it.
(by the way, Ritual didn’t pay me to write this – I just really like them!)
In the same way, Hamilton stood for something that wasn’t addressed by the Broadway musicals of the time: The spirit and heritage of hip-hop. As Gemma Allred writes:
At Hamilton’s heart is hip-hop. The musical started life as a hip-hop album, which Miranda famously described to President Obama as: ‘a concept album about the life of someone who I think embodies hip-hop — Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’…Miranda addressed this America in hip-hop, a musical genre and culture with its roots in inner-city African and Latin American heritage.
I think this lies at the heart of what builds a strong brand. It’s not merely about being “better”, but about standing for something different. As Concept Bureau writes:
Strong brands are unique. They say and do something different than other brands. They take a unique tone, follow a controversial belief or see the future through a different lens.
Apple, Disney, and Tesla are all examples of brands which took a distinctive stand and stuck to it. Apple’s famous “1984” Macintosh commercial solidified their brand stance around originality. Tell people you own a Tesla, and people immediately know what you stand for, and all the unwritten values that come along with it. Whether or not their products actually live up to those ideals doesn’t matter as much; what matters is that these brands clearly communicate a distinctive point of view that was original enough for people to sit up and take notice.
Why don’t more brands do this?
“If you stand for nothing, Burr, what’ll you fall for?”
Hamilton, Aaron Burr, Sir.
So let’s summarise: Better branding is less about being better, and more about having a distinct identity. This might sound obvious, but surprisingly few brands actually do this in real life. Think about all the brands you’ve interacted with in the past week – how many of them can you say are uniquely distinct from their competition? Most of them fall into a sea of sameness, with only minor differences between them.
A clue lies in the lyrics of My Shot, probably the most well-known song in Hamilton. After hearing the ambitions of Hamilton and his friends about joining the revolution, the antagonist Aaron Burr responds with “Geniuses, lower your voices. You keep out of trouble and you double your choices”.
Double your choices: Our culture today is obsessed with optionality. When deciding what positioning to go for, the “sensible” path most likely to be approved by the board of directors is one that offers the most options. Why restrict your reach and appeal by taking a stand? Better to play it safe (even down to your logo choice), aim for mass appeal, and report a larger Total Addressable Market to your investors.
I suspect that the difficulty of resisting the siren call of optionality is why so many brands remain undifferentiated.
Heck, this blog is a perfect example of my own unwillingness to restrict my choices – I’ve written about personal finance, productivity, faith, marketing, career, and everything in between. And I haven’t really landed on a sweet spot that I could really build a solid brand around. (But then again, I started this blog to reflect on and teach myself a variety of topics, and my hyperactive mind is interested in lots and lots of things).
It makes me wonder: If I was building a new brand today, what beliefs would I stand for? What tradeoffs would I make, even if they were unpopular? What would Lin-Manuel Miranda do?
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Disclaimer: Opinions stated here are my own, not those of my company
Image credit: Disney
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