Ryan Deiss On How To Keep Your Brand Human (As You Scale) Part 1.

You're listening to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. This is your seat at the table. Welcome to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. This is Darren Clark, the producer of the show, and I first want to thank you all for joining us. We've had a bunch of new listeners join after our power episodes last month, so make sure you actually hit the Follow or subscribe button on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, and you can also subscribe. Sign up for our newsletter@businesslunchpodcast.com and we will announce the winners of the contest this week, so watch out for that. Today we have Ryan Deiss as our guest on the show. If you don't already know Ryan, he's kind of the godfather of digital marketing and also one of Roland's partners. He's an entrepreneur, author and investor, and according to Shark Tanks star Daymond John, his companies practically own the Internet. In this episode, you get to be a fly on the wall as he talks to a room full of entrepreneurs about scaling business. He's sharing one of our core frameworks, which is the character diamond. And you will find this super interesting and helpful if you dig into it for your company. So join us next week for part two, and let's dive in.

Another kind of aspect of business that a lot of people want to talk about is brand. And they want to talk about it right from the beginning. They want to talk about brand and they want to talk about culture. And I can tell you that in the past I thought that both of these things were generally kind of like airy, fairy, fluffy, stupid, largely unnecessary. I now know for a fact that they're incredibly necessary. They're very important. How you think about your brand, how you think about your culture is essential to growth. However, it's one of those things, much like entity structures, that everybody wants to talk about right from the beginning, day one. They want to talk about what is our brand, what do we stand for, and all these things. And I've also learned from experience, having started, you know, a number of different businesses, if you try to decide from the very beginning what it's going to be before you've sold anything, before you have gone out and introduced your product to the, to the market, you're way too soon there. It is also too early. So much like thinking about how we go about structuring and in the, and all that fun stuff, what we're talking about now, we get into branding and character. Diamonds in particular is an essential subject once you're making sales. It is a very dangerous subject if you are Brand spanking new, just getting started because it allows you to do what I call waste a lot of time organizing the file drawers. And that's, I think, something that a lot of business owners do, especially entrepreneurs. They want to spend an enormous amount of time doing all the little kind of fun, creative and even administrative tasks that is everything other than seeing if anybody wants to buy the thing that they want to sell. So that's why we're talking about this. Let's talk about. Let's talk about character diamonds and essentially this idea of how do you keep your brand human as you grow and scale when you're brand new, when you're first launching your venture, especially if you're a solo entrepreneur, if it's just you out there doing it, your brand is human because your brand is you. But what do we do as it begins to scale? It's something that we faced here at Digital Marketer, and it's something that if you aren't facing yet in your business, you absolutely will face it. So, kind of thinking through some of this stuff, I think it's important to ask ourselves, why is Apple even today? And I know they've, you know, stumbled a little bit. Why is Apple today still far more loved than. Than Dell? Dell's a very successful company. They're based here in Austin, Texas. I know lots of friends who, who work at Dell, so I think it's, you know, I think it's great. But why is Apple more loved? Think about the term. Why is it more loved? And as a result, I believe, why is it a more valuable brand than Dell? Similarly, anybody read comic books? Yeah, me too. Okay. How did Stan Lee back in the 60s come out of nowhere? Stan Lee and Marvel Comics seemingly came out of nowhere to beat D.C. in terms of circulation, overall, comic book sales. It's pretty amazing if you don't realize DC Comics had Batman and fricking Superman, right? And you got now all of a sudden these characters that nobody had heard about coming out. And everybody wants to learn more about, about, you know, the Spider man and the X Men and these, these kind of new things. And they didn't care so much about, you know, the old, you know, the old guys. Well, how did that happen? Right? And what can we, what can we learn from it? And I also think it's important to ask ourselves if you know anything about Chick Fil A and what, what they're doing and how Chick Fil A is a far more successful and valuable brand than Kentucky Fried Chicken. They generate considerably more revenue, certainly domestically. So how does that happen? How do these brands, when we're all fundamentally doing the same things, how does some become so much more loved and lovable than others? And how can that add a tremendous amount of value? And I also think it's worth asking ourselves if you have seen. Okay, Google Matthew McConaughey, don't do it now. Matthew McConaughey, Lincoln Commercial. Like, I was driving a Lincoln long before anybody paid me to drive a Lincoln, right? And it's just the most kind of absurdly. Don't get me wrong, I love Matthew McConaughey. Like, I just. He's my. My man crush, right? He just is fresh out of, you know, what's all the time. But these commercials have been parodied because it's just so unconvincing, right? Why is Matthew McConaughey driving a Lincoln? Come on. We don't really believe that Matthew McConaughey, you know, drives a Lincoln. So why do these companies do that? Why do they feel the need to go out and find these celebrities to endorse their brands? Whereas if you think about the brands that are most loved, more times than not, they don't need celebrities to endorse their brands. The brands themselves are the celebrities. The brands themselves have become loved. How do we do that with our brand? So we think about branding. It introduces a bit of a paradox, this idea that for a brand to truly scale, For a brand to truly scale, it needs to abandon the face of its founder. If how many of you guys, you are the face of your company. Like, you are the company that was, you know, for the most part, that was me and digital marketer. It was me. And then it was me and Perry, and then it was just me again. And, you know, I was. I was the face. It was a guru type driven business. I knew that wasn't going to scale. I did not want the business to be, you know, Ryan Dice co. I did not want to be tied to it for a lot of reasons. And I knew that ultimately, if we were going to build a lot of value, we needed to do that. We needed to abandon my face. But I didn't want to lose the thing that still made it good. I didn't want to lose the things that made people want to invest in the trainings. So if you are not the face of your business, does it have a general spokesperson? In many cases, no. Right. Where you have to be really, really careful of is that you don't become boring and inhuman. All right. Why does Lincoln and so many of these other Brands have to hire celebrity endorsers. It's because the brands themselves have no soul. So what they're trying to do is they're trying to co opt and align themselves with people who do. All right, so whether you are the face, how do you scale without losing your humanity? And if you kind of are growing and you're beginning to build this boring and inhuman brand, how do you change that? How do you make sure that you scale and remain relevant at the same time? Yeah. So how do. And this is the other question. Those of you, how do you transition from a personal brand into a corporate brand? How do you do that? This is especially critical. So we got to get there, all right? And the way that we get there is you need to transfer your most desirable and interesting character traits of the founder onto the brand. This is the ultimate hack. This is the ultimate shortcut. If you think about a brand, okay, a brand is a hero. A brand is a fictional entity. It's what my. The person who really first exposed me to this idea, Roy Williams, who has another school here in. In Austin called the Wizard Academy. I think all of you should probably attend a class or two there. He was the one again that taught me about this concept, and he said that. I remember him first saying that that much like a hero, a brand is a fictional entity. Now, think about. If you think about the word fiction, fiction does not mean it's untrue. Oftentimes, fiction is more real than nonfiction if we think about, like, what it. You know, what it really means to this. So I'm not suggesting that you lie. And this is where a lot of brands go sideways, all right? A lot of brands, they want to be something that they're not. And that's where it comes off. Fake. That's where you have Matthew McConaughey driving a freaking Lincoln. Okay? Nobody believes that. That's a lie. So I'm not saying that you should turn your brand into whatever you want it to be. What I'm saying is you need to think, why do people like you today? Why do people like you? Why do they like your company, the ones that deal with it most intimately? What do they like about you? If you're experiencing any level of support today, I can assure you it's because you're doing some things right. And it's not just that you're providing a pretty good product or service, because guess what? Everybody is. All right? Everybody's providing a pretty good product or service. If you're in a market worth being in, you have competition if you're in a market worth being in, you have probably pretty good competition that, guess what, they're providing a pretty good product or service. So. So if you're competing and you're winning, it usually has more to do with the extras that you provide. Above and beyond just a pretty good product or service, it usually has a lot to do with some of these desirable and interesting character traits, either of the founder or of the people who are most visible within the organization. Okay, so what we want to do is we want to capture that, all right? We want to codify that, and then we want to inject that into our brand. The framework and the model that we use for this is what's known as a character diamond. A character diamond is not an idea that I invented. It came out of the screenwriting space. So if you take any screenwriting fiction writing, it's a pretty well known concept, this idea. And I forget, I like to give credit where credit's due. And I just flat out forgot the name of the person who came up with, I'll try to come up with something, give credit where credit's due. In terms of the original character diamond concept, what I did, what, you know, what Roy Williams and I kind of working together did, is we took a very, very complex and intricate model that screenwriters and fiction writers use to create characters, and we frankly simplified it. We simplified it into a four point diamond that pretty much any business can apply. All right, so if you go out and read about character diamonds, they could get very, very, very complex. And if you're writing fiction and you want to write the next, like Harry Potter, you know, or the next, you know, you want to be the next, I don't know, fiction author. Insert here. Then you need to be way better at this than what I'm about to show you. But I'm telling you from a, from a company brand perspective, this is going to make you light years better than them because they all suck so badly. All right, so how do you create a character diamond? The first step is to understand the different points of the diamond. We begin at the North Star. Okay? The North Star. This is the primary character trait of your brand. All right? The primary character trait of your brand. What is the thing that is most obvious and that customers would find most appealing? Why do people do business with you and your brand today? All right? Why does that happen? A digital marketer. It's because we're marketing savants. We're really good at marketing. You should not overthink this, okay? This is the Main thing that people, the main reason that people want to do business with you, okay, what is that, that thing? That's your North Star. If we think about it in terms of comic book characters, right? With Superman, it's a Superman, okay? Very simple. With Spider man, it's a spider man, right? The primary character trait is you've got a human being with spider like characteristics, like climbing up walls and be with the like web, okay? That's it. Don't overthink this. So a good way to ask this is what is your brand's mutant power? What is your brand's mutant power? You're doing something beyond the ordinary, all right? Or maybe another way to look at it is what mutant power do you deliver on behalf of your customers? How do you change them? All right, what is that? That is your North Star. Now, on the opposite side, we ask ourselves, what is the counter star? Now this can be a little bit confusing and even a little bit daunting. So we're going to hang out here for just a little bit. This north, south, this. These are external character traits. These are character traits that are generally visible from the outside looking in. Now, not, maybe not immediately visible, but anybody who's around your brand for any period of time, they're kind of going to see this and they're kind of going to see that. What creates interest, all right? Period. Interest is created when conflict occurs. Conflict creates interest. If there is no conflict, you don't have a story. All right? And most great stories, if you understand how like storytelling works, it's usually we meet a character and then something wretchedly horrible happens to them, right? And then the entire time they're trying to get out of this wretchedly horrible situation and back, you know, more or less back to where they began. That's Joseph Campbell. That's Hero's Journey, right? That's this basic idea. Absent conflict, you have no story. All right? If we think about what makes a joke funny, right? It's the introduction of a conflicting concept or idea that doesn't make sense at first, but then it kind of does. That's the aha. That's the punchline, that's the wonder. Plus understanding. Oh my God, I didn't think about it that way. Haha, I get it, okay? Absent that conflict, the joke ain't funny. There's no freaking punchline, right? You're just kind of describing stuff that's happening. There must be conflict. So when we're asking, once we've identified this character trait, we've got to We've got to then say what other external characteristics wouldn't normally go with that? They're a little bit. They're a little bit different, They're a little bit unique. So let's look at some examples again from the comic book world. Superman, all right? You know, he could freaking fly. Like laser beams out of his eyeballs. Seemingly indestructible, and yet you get this like little green rock that normal humans, it doesn't bother him at all, called Kryptonite. You get anywhere near him and he's dead. Right? So, okay, now it's still external. You see that? But here we've got this Superman that something that doesn't hurt normal human beings at all will drop him like a fly. Okay, that's kind of interesting, right? So you see how that, that's a counter star. Let's look at Spider Man. Spider man is actually a boy. So now we have a superhero that's a kid. A superhero that's a child. We've seen this character a little bit later. Harry Potter, you have a superhero like, who's a child. Okay. If you go and look, think about who are some of your favorite, you know, favorite characters, right? If you go back and look, you're gonna, you're gonna see this. In the early days, Superman did not have kryptonite. And so eventually it gets boring. It's like, yeah, I get it. He's from another planet. He's way better than us. It gets old. It's like, yeah, he's always going to fricking win. Right? Now you get the introduction of kryptonite. It's like, ooh, conflict. There's a chance that he could lose. Now, have you ever heard the expression a one dimensional character? This is a one dimensional character. A one dimensional character is somebody who has a primary character trait, a secondary character trait that is in conflict with the primary. That creates interest for a little bit, but it gets very, very boring because there's no internal struggle. So we're gonna get to the internal struggle just a little bit. But what I want you to think about right now is what is your secondary? What is your one dimensional character? Because most of, most of the brands that are out there, most of your competition, they're not even a one dimensional brand. So let's look at Apple. Okay, Apple. What you have is a. You have a almost. And again, we're back to like this savant, like type thing that's very nerdy and antisocial. If you think about where Apple was in the early Days, right? It was this kind of, like, antisocial, you know, we're not, you know, and that's why if you think about the I'm an Apple, I'm a PC ads, why were those so effective? Because it's so closely, you know, drew that line. Now what I'll tell you is any brand where you see it at the company level, you can always track it back to a popular. You can always track it back to some popular character because the same characters just keep showing up again and again and again and again and again and again and again. All right, so if you want to begin thinking about this, what are the characters that you really, really like from movies, film, comic books, Bible stories? It really doesn't matter. These characters are all over the place. And if you think about the ones that you like, guess what? The reason that you like certain characters is because they exemplify certain attributes that you admire in yourself. Whether you're willing to admit it or not, we like the characters that remind us of what we feel like are our most admirable traits. So when you have that again, if you're the face of the company now, you can begin to sort of pull out a little bit. What are those? What are those things? So we could probably go through and begin to analyze a lot of these, but it always does come back to fictional characters, because that's all a brand ever is.

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