Strengthening a Brand with a Book | Michael Tuggle | 482

Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us today on the podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Michael Tuggle. He brings more than 29 years of experience building brands for companies like American Airlines, Pepsi, Texas Dairy Queen, Papa John's, and more. He co-authored his first book with his longtime friend and colleague Mike Sullivan, who's the president at LUMIS, which was called The Voice of the Underdog: How Challenger Brands Create Distinction by Thinking Culture First. And he has a long and, uh, pretty impressive past that you could look up, but I'd rather just start talking with him. So Michael, welcome aboard. Thanks for coming on today.

Thanks, Peter. Thanks for having me.

So you've got this long impressive career primarily in the advertising space, right? Building brands, doing all those sort of things. And then one day you either woke up or were coerced into writing a book. Why, why or how did that happen? And why would one agree to do something so crazy?

You know, it's funny. Mike and I were— Mike Sullivan and I was the president over at Loomis. Um, I was at Loomis for 15 years, and Mike and I have been colleagues in a number of agencies and have been friends for almost 30 years now. And It's one of those things where we were building the agency. Loomis had adopted this challenger brand positioning to where we wanted to help brands, you know, that were fighting the category leaders. And we were living it. And we talked for 10 years about, you know what, we really should write a book about it. We're not the first to write a book about it.

Of course, right?

Yeah, the whole positioning came out of Eat Big Fish out of London. But, but we just, we talked about it for 10 years and like, you know what, we should just finally do it. And we said we finally did and, and have enjoyed it, you know, since.

Yeah, and I'm quite familiar with that content because Eat Big Fish at a Time was a client of ours. But give me a sense of what that process was like. Was it— did it take more time than you thought, less? What you got out of it? What was the— give us the experience of not just deciding to commit to writing the book, but writing it and what came out of that.

Yeah. So you know what, it's sort of the eat the elephant one bite at a time kind of thing. It was, you know, we worked together. And put an outline together about what we actually wanted to say. I mean, part of it, if you— once you read the book, part of it is about Challenger Branding, but really the other back half of it is all about culture. From the day we started the agency, I mean, literally the day we started it, we sat in a conference room like, okay, we want to take all the good things that we can take away from our past experience, and we want to leave all the toxic crap at the door and not, you know, and really be mindful and intentional about the the culture that we build. And now you don't just do that overnight, but we did it over the course of 15 years. And so the book was sort of an amalgam of that. So we set out an outline about what we wanted to write, and then he and I would trade off. So we wrote, I wrote about half of it, Mike wrote about half of it, but our styles are very similar. And so we would write and then hand it to the other person and they would, you know, look at it and And one by one, the chapters built, and then we had a book. About— took about 6 months to write it and probably another year to edit it and, and, and to get it in book form.

But, uh, and, and what, what are the benefits that you and the organizations that you've worked with received, if any, from getting that book out there? What doors have been opened? What surprising things have happened?

You know, we've been very— I mean, like every author, I think we both have been very pleased and surprised a little maybe at The reception, I mean, everybody who's read it has been very positive and very, you know, not just our moms, which was nice, but everybody's been, you know, pretty, pretty receptive. And they've said that they got a lot out of it and they felt like that. We tried to keep it really light. We did not want it to be an academic book.

Sure.

We tried to, you know, include a lot of stories, case studies, that kind of thing. And the entire intention of the book, frankly, was to drive business. It was really to lend credibility.

Well, so stay there then. So I get that. So, you know, if we're going to make— if we look at a book honestly, right? And I think a lot of people just either don't do this either out of naivete or they just don't do it and say, okay, we have choices to make. In the next year, I'm going to write a book. That's going to take whatever, 30%, 40% of my time. And there's opportunity cost. So you can assign a number to that. And it's going to take some dollars, marketing support, editorial support, etc. If I'm making an investment of X, pick a number, what is an appropriate return on that investment? And I think people, when they get into book mode, they get sucked into this vortex and all their business savvy and acumen goes out the window. So if you were to think about it without necessarily getting into the specifics, but the range of the actual cost, opportunity cost, and hard dollars and all that versus the outcomes? Are you happy with it? Does it have more to go? Tell me.

Yeah, I think we're pleased with it. I mean, it was— there's definitely an opportunity cost for sure. Um, I mean, it takes a lot of time. I mean, a lot of time. But it depends on what your intention is too. Like I said, this is not a vanity project for us. It was not a, hey, we have, you know, fun experiences in the business, and hey, we want to have our names on a book. It was— and it was never about getting rich or being a best-selling author. It was really about driving business to the agency, you know, adding credibility to what we were doing as a challenger agency, but also, you know, giving kind of a roadmap to—

so stay there for a minute, right? So, so if we think about it, because I like the level of specificity you're getting into now, so you're not the only challenger agency out there, right? So if people are looking for— hey, hey, people might be looking for an agency, right? Subset of those people might be looking for a challenger agency. And then they're gonna look at you and your competitors, right? So number one is if we know what our average client value is, and I'm sure that you do, you could look at this and say, wow, actually it's a pretty big cost, but all we would need to do is secure whatever, one net new client or three net new projects over the course of two years. And this is a no-brainer. And then I think what people also don't realize when it comes to writing a book is even though the publishing universe thinks in terms of a 3-month or a 6-month cycle, you know, a book typically has, no pun intended, you know, a 5 to 7 year shelf life when it is viable in that regard. So how, what's your experience been on that side?

You know, when you self-publish, which I mean, and there are, you know, 10,000 titles a month or whatever it is that are published, right? There's a, there's a lot out there. Our experience has been, it's been more this, and thankfully like being on your show, you know, we're, we're We are pushing a little bit more, you know, in terms of getting more exposure now. When we published, it was more self-push. You know, we were sending it out, we were sharing it with people that we knew and that kind of thing. But to your point, it is, you know, if you can get 1 or 2 clients, you know, it's certainly worth the effort.

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Well, and you mentioned self-publishing, and I think that To me, self-publishing is just a business model. It is one— there are many ways to publish. You can go traditional. In an instance like yours, there's probably a lack of alignment between what a publisher would want as an outcome for the book. They want to sell a lot of copies and you're going, "Hey, I'd be happy if over 5 years we got 3 new clients." Right? And then there's different levels of self-publishing from copy shops all the way on to those that give you various services from editorial marketing, etc. So that's a whole other ball of wax. But on the self-publishing side, you have the advantage of speed, of control, of ownership of the intellectual property, not being accountable. And I think the reality, I'd love to hear your thoughts, is that unless you're hardcore in the publishing business, most people don't know the difference as long as it's a quality product. If you have great ideas to share, I'm going to consume those ideas and go, "Wow, that was awesome," and not go, "Oh, poo-poo, he self-published it. He's probably not as smart as so-and-so that didn't." Right.

I don't, you know, it's not like we were averse to, you know, a big publisher publishing a book, you know, our book. We were just probably impatient in that we, we were not, we didn't want to go through however long that process is of finding a publisher and da da da, you know, we were ready to go. We wrote the book, we had a very intentional reason for doing so. And so we were ready to go. So we published it ourselves. Now, to your point, we made sure that the product looked the part, right? We had it— art— we have art directors obviously at the agency. Tina Tackett, who's our executive creative director, designed the COVID designed the book, laid it all out. I mean, it looks nice. It looks like anything you'd see professionally done. You've seen books that were self-published that you can— it looks like it was cranked out on a press in a garage. This doesn't look like—

you're seeing, you're seeing— I mean, quite frankly, there is no excuse for that right now. I mean, you've seen less and less and less of that. I would say 15 years ago, if somebody threw 5 books down on the table and say, pick out the 2 that are self-published, you could do it. I would say, unless it's really awful or low quality or whatever, it's almost impossible to discern from a quality perspective, A versus B versus C. Agreed.

And we were just, you know, we wanted to get the ideas out, you know? And so part of the plan as well was the book. You know, it talks a lot about challenger branding and culture, but we also, we also wanted to include literally a blueprint. Like if you were gonna start from, you, you wanted to embrace both of these ideas, culture especially, but you didn't even know where to start. It wasn't just a 50,000-foot level, you know, here's just a great idea conceptually. We wanted to literally give a step-by-step blueprint to do that. And so when you—

so, so stay there with the blueprint for a moment because one of the things that I've seen that are interesting is I agree with you that that is a better way to go about it. Like, here's exactly what you need to do and here's how you do it, etc., etc., etc. There are some folks that would push back and say, oh geez, but if I tell them what to do, why would they hire me? And my response to that is always, that's not the group that would ever hire you anyway, right? Like, the more that you could show them— now there's a subset of readers that say they can't afford you, they're not in the market for an agency, whatever, whatever, whatever. They're gonna, they're gonna do that and that's great. And that leads to good accolades and positive vibes and all that sort of other stuff. But most folks look at that and go, okay, they have a methodology, they have a process, we need the work. I know exactly what it's gonna be like to work with those folks. They have a challenger mindset, right? Yep. And this is their methodology and process. So by the time they come into the sales cycle, you know, they're, they're halfway home.

Yeah. I think there were two great things that came out of actually, you know, do it, writing the book as opposed to just talking about it, right? So the first was, you know, we, we wrote the book based on what we've been doing for years. It's not like we met, you know, suddenly did this, right? But the first thing was we, we literally had the blueprint for how do you create a great culture. But the other thing we did, we sort of codified this process of if you are a challenger brand and you are starting off with a, okay, I am a challenger brand and I don't know what to do next. We literally have codified a document now to where we can literally take you through an entire Challenger process to where when you get to the back end, you're gonna know who you are, how ready you are to go to battle, and how to go and how to do it, you know, and where you might need help along the way, right?

Or right, exactly, right?

Yeah. Cool.

So if someone was out there now, Mike, in any sort of professional services, let's just stay in that space for a while. And they're contemplating going down the path that you went down, what thoughts, what advice, what insights would you give them to increase the odds of success, maximize the probability of having a win when investing their time and energy in a book? Sure.

I would say start out with a great plan. I mean, obviously start out with the architecture of what it is that you wanna say. Don't just start writing. I mean, you really have a plan, have a, have, you know, your chapters laid out. I would, you know, we, we had laid out the chapters and then we laid in a bunch of notes on each chapter, not, not writing, but just what do we want to include? And then, you know, let the writing process take over. The other thing is, know going in, it's a long process. And the best thing I can say is give it, you know, 500 words a day. You know, 500 words a day is not that much, but 500 words a day over the course of a year is 180,000 words. That's a 500-page book. So if you can just stay at it and do a little bit at a time, there's this feel that like, I gotta sit down and write a chapter today. I've gotta, you know, knock out 4 chapters this weekend. Number 1, that's hard to do. Number 2, I think you miss things along the way. Doing it a little bit at a time, like you, you'll have thoughts in the middle of, uh, sleep, in the middle of the shower, scribble down a note. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And then just find it.

But I like that 500 words, you know, 500 words is, is a average length blog post, right? Right. So, you know, because I think the other problem is that, you know, so let's say you decide, because we've seen people go down this, you know, the Thoreau route. I'm gonna block up 3 weeks and go up to the cabin. It's hard to schedule an insight. It is. Yes. So then you get up there and it's like, okay, now what? Chirp, chirp. What do I do? What do I do? But you can force yourself through the 500. Maybe there's times where you, you know, you get an extra burst and you give it an extra hour or so. But I would argue you probably knock out 500 words in what, 15 minutes, half hour, depending?

Uh, well, it depends. I mean, it depends on who the writer is, you know.

Sure.

I would say no more than a couple of hours. I mean, to have it like, if this is a great 500 words, I mean, you can knock out 500 words stream of consciousness pretty quick. But if you really—

right, they need to be polished. Yeah.

And that's the other thing I would say too, is don't edit yourself along the way. Get it out. You know, that's a Stephen King rule. Just get it out of your head and then edit later.

Well, and that's a great point because there's a process where you just want to extract the ideas.

Yep.

And then there's a time and, and, and actually not just a time, but other folks that can help you polish it up grammatically, or is that the best way to get that thought up? But just letting it sort of go somewhere between stream of consciousness and a punctuated sentence, right?

Got it.

Good sweet spot.

And I would say too, based on what you said with the blog, don't underestimate things that you've already written. I mean, by the time we sat down to write this book, we'd probably written 250 blogs, many of which were about Challenger Branding, many of which were about culture. It's your intellectual property. You wrote it, right?

So I love that because most people think starting to write a book is literally a blank page. But what you're saying is I would push on that and say, actually take inventory. What are the blogs I've written, the speeches I've written, the decks I've created, the interviews I've done? Get transcripts done and say, wow, you know what, I might be 30, 40% of the way there. Or, you know, you also have some data to say, for some reason, these 20 blogs people really, really, you know, resonated with. These 10, crickets. So what was it about these that resonated with folks that I should expand on in the book? Because I look at those things as just sort of micro experiments that give you insight.

Sure. And you know what, and those 20 blogs that resonated that you already got traction with, We'll see if they hang together conceptually, but those could be your 20 chapter starters. I mean, literally, you may have, you may have a book already kind of in the background, like ready to roll.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, this has been a lot of fun, Michael. I appreciate your time. I appreciate you sharing your journey with us. Any parting words of wisdom to those out there about to embark on a similar journey?

You know what? It's just, the whole thing is worth it. I mean, it really is. It's, uh, we, we were very thankful to get to the end of it, you know, after after the work. But yeah, it's something that, you know, like you said, it never kind of goes away. You know, it always is there. You know, we're proud to have done it and hope that people get something from it.

Great. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Thanks, Peter. Appreciate it.

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