Last week on Branding Strategy Insider we explored How the Fox News brand reached cult status and we looked at how this media giant did several crucial things right to become the most profitable cable news outlet on Television.

This week we examine how another brand achieved the same feat but in a surprisingly different way; without the power of compelling creative, paid media or even a dedicated website for its flagship brand.

Remember we define cult status as a place beyond brand loyalty and even brand advocacy. A place of brand insistence where there are no substitutes. Where the notion of a substitute is flatly rejected.

Sriracha has taken its place as one of the cult status brands.

The first thing you need to know is that “Sriracha” is actually the generic term for a type of hot sauce, not a trademarked brand name. It originates from the coastal town of Si Racha (hence the name), in eastern Thailand. Immigrant David Tran, who sold his concoction in used Gerber baby food jars in Vietnam, brought his love and his recipe for Sriracha to the US, selling it out of the back of his car in 1980. Today, Huy Fong Foods (Tran’s company named after the ship that brought him to the US) is a multi-million dollar food phenomenon, even catching the attention of film documentary producers in Hollywood and industry opinion makers like Bon Apetite.

Aside from the simple fact that brand cultists crave Sriracha and put it on almost everything, what is the secret sauce behind this not so secret sauce brand? Among the many factors that are necessary ingredients in building a food brand like Sriracha (taste, quality control, recipe versatility, etc.), the brand excels where thousands of hot sauce labels, whether local, regional or national, never reach. We’ve identified five areas that marketers will find noteworthy:

1. The Anti-Brand Brand

This is perhaps its greatest anti-marketing, marketing asset. The irony is that in a world that loves brands, Sriracha sauce resonates because it doesn’t follow the expected marketing template of other packaged goods brands with the use of advertising. In fact, Huy Fong Foods is quite proud of that. It has no marketing department. No sales force. Even in the hot sauce category this is considered a risky and inhibiting move for any number of reasons: limiting share growth, non-support of distribution, inviting competitors, etc. But remember, cult brands can do things others cannot.

2. The Beautiful Ugly Package

There are so many Vietnamese logographs on the bottle that one writer observed, it could be a 101-level course in the language. The rooster rendering is crude. The packaging is functional but hardly P&G standards. And yet, who would ever change it? The utilitarian green cap is even spoken of with great affection by food critics. It’s not the quality of the graphic design that makes the brand rather its consistent, unwavering use, that makes the design meaningful…and a thing of beauty to the brand cult.

3. A Great Humble Story

Great brands have great stories about their beginnings, their climb to success and their subsequent fame. Sriracha has all the ingredients for a great story as well as a great hot sauce. The storyline goes something like: Immigrant leaves war-torn communist country for America with a recipe for hot sauce in his pocket and a dream in his heart to bring flavor to a nation of blandness. Founder David Tran is the brand, the story is real, and the passion is as authentic as the bottle.

4. Mass Appeal, One On One

While Sriracha sauce is used as an ingredient by several major restaurant chains in their recipes and sauces, the brand is enjoyed most as an individual food enhancer by individuals, and thanks to Amazon, they can be enjoying it anywhere. Driving this mass brand appeal, one customer at a time, is Sriracha’s embrace of social media—a strategy that both reinforces and stimulates the growth of the brand cult without the commercial stigma of TV spots and billboards. While the brand boasts that “it sells itself” and that its growth is by word of mouth, it gets a little help online. For example, the brand’s Facebook page is sophisticated in content and management with over 280,000 followers. There you’ll find incentives, recipe book offers and announcements from the “Rooster Room” plant gift shop and annual Chile Grinding Event tours.

5. The Coolest In Hot

Craft beers, electronics, cars and jewelry are a few of the categories where brands thrive on the “cool factor”…that heightened sense of self-image by the use or association with a particular brand. The sum total of its anti-brand approach, unsophisticated packaging, storied beginning, and consumer engagement are just a few of the many factors that contribute to its “coolness,” while its flavor profile is anything but, of course. Being cool and desirable is the first step in developing a brand cult following, as Sriracha sauce so ably demonstrates.

Today, 36 years after David Tran started his brand in LA’s Chinatown, it can been seen dressing burgers in ballparks…In Atlanta or elsewhere, carried on their persons by the cult of Sriracha consumers far and wide. All while breaking the rules and building a hot brand.

As you aim for cult brand status, sometimes the best path is to take the one less traveled. In Sriracha’s case, that applies to a lot of things as we’ve seen. So ask yourself:

• Am I relying too much on a traditional marketing strategy and tactics to build my brand?
• Is the media that I use truly reflective of my brand?
• Is my packaging reflective of my brand? Does it reveal the authentic nature and essence of my brand?
• Does my brand have a story and am I telling it?
• Where does my audience most want to engage?
• Where are there growth opportunities by doing the opposite of the competition?

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Storytelling Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

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Marketing automation. Real-time analytics. Chat bots.  New technologies like these have created some tremendous capabilities in marketing, customer service, and the customer experience. But as I was reminded by several posts this past month, we must not become so enamored with technology-enabled service that we forget our first love must be our customers. We shouldn’t rely on technology over common sense. Here are a few points that I read about the importance of using technology to enhance, not replace, service.

In When It Comes To Customer Experience, Consistency Is As Important As Innovation, John Sills writes about the need to always deliver on basic customer needs before engineering some new experience dimension.

“Companies are always trying to work out what The Next Big thing is…[but] they miss the things that don’t change. The constant threads that run through life. The things that people really care about, whether they know it or not… These threads exist in every industry. Airlines – get me there safely and on time. Restaurants – give me food that tastes good. Banks – keep my money safe and secure. Utilities – keep my lights on and water running. These are all industries that have played around endlessly with how to deliver their products & services to customers, with some brilliant innovations. But ultimately, unless those core needs are met, everything else is insignificant…Obsessively monitoring Twitter and overweighting the opinion of the outraged and techno-dazzled can cause companies to miss or forget about the consistent, necessary, and often unexciting threads that form the backbone of their offering.”

Micah Solomon describes some of his recent customer service experiences in Stupid Touchpoints Are Worse Than No Touchpoints In Customer Service And Customer Experience.  He relayed one particularly frustrating scenario in which technology-enable service that was supposed to delight him ended up doing the exact opposite. “Just as I got to my room, a text on my phone offering to help me, directly, with any needs I had. (‘My name is Rosa [not her actual name]; please just text me if you need anything at all and it will be my pleasure to take care of it for you, Mr. Solomon.’) When, in fact, I did need something, and pronto (I had left my iPad in the room and was texting from the cab en route to the airport), I took my texty friend Rosa up on the offer, texting ‘her’ to find out if they had found my device. Did Rosa text back ‘Absolutely, let me check?’ Nope. She texted back, and I quote, ‘You need to call Security.’”

Disney is an example of a company using technology the right way. Evan Carroll writes about the Disney Operational Command Center in Real-Time Response: Creating Customer Experience Magic.  “Technicians there are watching wait times at every Magic Kingdom attraction and deploying various tactics to alleviate congestion in real-time…[If they are alerted about increased the wait time at the Pirates of the Caribbean ride], they might respond by alerting managers to launch more boats. Another option involves dispatching Captain Jack Sparrow or Goofy or one of their pals to the queue to entertain people as they wait…By monitoring and responding in real time, Disney can manage wait times and provide a less congested experience for customers. Waiting is a fact of life at any theme park. However Disney’s monitoring and responsiveness enables them to keep guests happy by maximizing capacity, directing flow through the park, and providing entertainment in those moments when waiting is inevitable.”

Zach Heller provides a good takeaway. In Marketing Myths – Automation is Always Better, he writes, “The human touch is still important to most customers. People don’t buy from emails, they don’t buy from websites, they don’t buy from machines. People buy from people. Not in every case, but in some cases…In our rush to automate everything, it can be tempting to ignore the devil’s advocate who we see as afraid of change. But I’m here to tell you that there are some things that should not be automated. The companies that find the right balance of automation and human touch will win out.” [emphasis mine]

related:

• ChangeThis Manifesto:  It’s Still About the Experience
• Design Your Brand Touchpoints
• Customer Service Ain’t What It Used to Be

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Sand castle construction and brand building have a lot in common. If the foundation isn’t solid, it doesn’t matter how strong the structure is. It’s going to fail.

The single most important element of brand building is most often (erroneously) assumed to be in order: Whether you actually own your brand?

Without legal ownership, brand equity is zero and will remain zero forever.

At the core of every brand is a legal right called a trademark. Trademark law is a complex body of laws to sort out who owns what with respect to brands. It is possible to boil down trademark law into two simple rules. If you follow those you will have the foundation you need for a viable trademark:

1. If the brand is not capable of being owned, then it can never become valuable.
2. If the brand is capable of being owned, but you aren’t the owner, then you are brand building for someone else’s benefit.

On the surface, these are pretty easy concepts, but experience shows that most companies fail at one or both.

Rule 1: Own Your Brand

Brand ownership is very counter-intuitive. Strong brands are completely abstract. They tell you nothing about the product/service to which they pertain. The more the brand tends to describe the product or even a feature of the product, the weaker they are. If they are weak they can be copied, until they become so diluted by other brand imitators, that they are eventually worthless. Many branding experts believe one can block the competition by “owning a descriptive brand”. Nothing in branding could be more misguided. Think about it. Can one own the word Soap for soap products and thereby block others from using the name? No, but that hasn’t stopped uninformed companies from trying. In the sandcastle comparison, it amounts to sand on sand.

The brand spectrum (above) shows the world’s most valuable and ownable brands on the left/strong side, and weaker or non-brands on the right side. It is no accident that the most valuable brands are stronger. Weak brands, or the worst of all, descriptive and generic terms, are words not capable of being brands, so they can be legally used by anyone. Notice that The Weather Channel® is a weaker brand. Although not generic, the brand is difficult (and expensive) to defend against competitors. Weather Nation™ is vying for the same space on cable and satellite networks, but The Weather Channel brand is unable to prevent such similar usage. This is the ultimate problem. A weak brand becomes diluted by the crowding of similar brands, until the public can’t remember one from the next. Strong brands can be defended against dilution. This weak brand strategy is a classic mistake which violates Rule 1. I am sure that it seemed like a really great idea at the time to use a descriptive name and own the category, but it is and always will be a legally impossible strategy. Google, on the other hand is an entirely made up word, so its strength is supreme. What would have happened if Google had made the wrong choice and called their company SEARCHCO?

Violating the second rule of trademark law is just a bad as violating the first.

Rule 2: Verify That You Actually Own Your Brand

Companies routinely assume they own their brand because they have registered it with the Secretary of State and/or they own their web domain. Again, nothing could be more legally false. Even owning a Federal trademark registration is not absolute proof of clear title.

For example, even if you are the owner of the domain, the true trademark owner, with superior title can take your domain from you. Here’s how Amazon.com almost lost its name.

In an informal survey of privately held businesses, I found that about 65% of them did not have clear legal title to their company or brand names. Many of them had no hope of ever getting clear title. Virtually none of them knew of their predicament.

Why does it matter whether you own your brand name or not?

First, if you aren’t the true brand owner, i.e., you don’t have clear legal title to your trademark, your trademark (brand) and domain can be taken away at any time by a claimant with better title. If you have spent years building brand equity, in a brand you don’t own, imagine how devastating that could be. If your company is one of the 65%, or you don’t know whether you are in that group, you will find out when you when you try to sell your business or bring in investment money. I am regularly authorized to conduct due diligence on companies for sale. More than half the time, my buyers are able to buy such companies at steep discounts, because the brand ownership is not solid. The seller receives much less money for the business than they would have made with clear brand ownership.

The bottom line is that if you want to build a valuable company or product/service brand, it has to be your first priority to make sure you can and do own the brand. The traditional model of engaging trademark counsel at the end of your brand creation process is way too late. A great trademark/brand lawyer will know both branding and trademark law and can provide immeasurable value in avoiding an ownership disaster. The time for intervention by a trademark/branding lawyer, is before you even start the brand ideation process. At the very least, bring the brand spectrum chart to your ideation session and plug your brand ideas into the chart. If they don’t fall on the ownable/left side of the scale, toss and regenerate.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Michael Lasky, an intellectual property attorney at Altera Law Group and Schwegman Lundberg law firm. He is the author of the new book The Good Brand – How companies create valuable brands.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Licensing Audit

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

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In this webinar video, learn about the recently released ANA independent study from K2 Intelligence that found rebates and other non-transparent practices to be pervasive in the U.S. media ad-buying ecosystem.

In this webinar video, the presenter took attendees through the digital shopping experience and shared key ways to excite consumers with retail offers.

John Feldman discussed the upcoming FTC workshop on the testing and evaluation of various disclosures that companies make to consumers about advertising claims, privacy practices, and other information.

ANA’s General Counsel, Doug Wood, discussed the findings of the K2 report on transparency and also shared new information on what advertisers need to do to protect themselves in light of the report.

Jim Bechtold of the ANA’s Alliance for Family Entertainment (AFE) discusses how the #SeeHer initiative will work with industry to accurately portray women and girls in advertising and how marketers can get involved

A couple of weeks ago I started a blog post series on how to scale-up your brand.  Today I’m going to discuss five critical dimensions of brand power.  These dimensions indicate the strength of your brand to establish and maintain competitive advantage, command a price premium, and win customers’ loyalty.  They provide a simple way to assess your brand power.

Refer to these five dimensions as you scale your organization.  If you’re just starting out, use them to shape your brand vision.  If you’re in the early stages of scaling, use them as a filter for decisions about what to do and what not to do.  If you’re in the later stages, use them for periodic assessment and course correction.

Consider rating your brand on a scale of 1 to 5 for each of these dimensions and tracking if your ratings improve over time.  Also ask key stakeholders — partners, employees, primary customers — to rate your brand and then work together to address differences in responses.

By no means are these the only dimensions of brand power, but in my experience, I’ve found that they are the most fundamental ones.

1. meaningful — A meaningful brand is relevant and compelling to a valuable customer target(s). Let me break that down a bit:
   • relevant — Your brand should connect to a customer need or want.
   • compelling — Your brand should prompt action or reaction.
   • valuable customer target — Your brand should appeal to customers who want to buy your product/service or add value to you in some other way.

2. differentiating – A brand should be distinct from other options. And here’s the important part, it should be distinct in a way that customers perceive is important.  Your brand differentiation can’t be negligible or simply a veneer.

3. believable – Your brand should be grounded in the natural and inherent strengths of your product/service. I always say,

   A brand can’t just be a promise; it must be a promise delivered.Click To Tweeta brand can’t just be a promise; it must be a promise delivered.  A corollary is, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  Customers must believe that you can and will deliver on your brand promise — and sometimes you have to earn their permission to even make a claim.

4. transcendent — A transcendent brand conveys value beyond a specific offering. This means it connects with customers at a higher level.  In my book, What Great Brands Do, I write about how great brands avoid selling products.  I explain that people are emotional creatures and we make purchase decisions based on our feelings.  So your brand should satisfy customers’ emotional needs and/or offer access to an identity they want to experience and express.

5. sustainable – A brand should be based on an enduring idea that enables your business to resonate and compete now and in the future. The appeal of a brand that is tied to a fad or fleeting trend is short-lived and entirely dependent upon circumstances outside your control.  You should conceive of your brand to make both an immediate and a long-lasting impact.

I’m curious to hear which of these brand dimensions resonates with you the most — and which one(s) you think are the most difficult to achieve.  Please leave your comments below.

In my next post, I’ll start introducing you to different tools and exercises you can use to develop or refine your strategic brand platform.  Consider subscribing to my feed so you’ll be notified when the next in this Scale-Up Your Brand series is ready.  (And here’s the link if you missed my first post, How to Conduct a Brand Diagnostic.)

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ANA’s Dan Jaffe provided an update on the advertising impacts of the 2016 election and discussed major court cases and two important and potentially damaging rulemakings at the FCC – and how ANA is responding.