Ben Ard00:00 — Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Bill. Bill, welcome to the show.
Bill Harper00:05 — Thanks so much for having me, Ben. I appreciate it.
Ben Ard00:07 — Yeah, Bill, I'm excited. This is gonna be a fun conversation. Looking through my notes, I genuinely am excited to hear everything you have to share here. But before we dive into the subject, let's get to know you. If you don't mind sharing just a little bit about your background, all that kind of fun stuff. Let's let the audience get to know you.
Bill Harper00:23 — So I fell madly in love with the idea of helping businesses stand apart early on in my career. And I was kind of classically trained as visual communications originally, but then once the business aspect of it came into play, that like all bets were off, you know, all bets were off. So my goal in the world is to help businesses figure out what story they have to tell to scale, and most businesses don't get that, which is the whole no story, no glory thing behind me. Once they understand how people buy and how they choose, it always makes great sense to them when they hear it. That is like the number one thing that I hear most often is, my gosh, that like, yeah, that totally makes sense. It's just it's not taught well. And it's not taught in MBA programs. And I personally blame Harvard on that, but that's a whole different soapbox.
But basically, you know, you're taught all about internal mechanisms of business. And I became very enamored with the idea of engagement of external. So, you know, business mentality is I want to invent something new and I want to work on my operations and I want to streamline my efficiencies and this and that. And most businesses completely miss the fact that somebody with a wallet or purse has to open that and decide to choose your product and purchase it in a way that keeps you profitable as a business. The bridge between those two, that Rosetta stone that gets them, the buyer, to be as excited as the person selling, that's what my whole career has been at. And we're 35 years this year. So this has been a lifetime commitment to it.
Ben Ard01:57 — Congratulations. I love that.
Bill Harper01:59 — Yeah, it's good stuff.
Ben Ard02:00 — And I love this phrase. I was actually gonna ask the no story, no glory, where that all came from. So I love that you addressed that. I think that's super cool. And I love how you're talking about the idea that the story is what's gonna help you utilize and ultimately grow in understanding how people think and how they buy. That's so cool. I think that's exciting stuff. Well, Bill, what we're gonna talk about today is the myth of overnight success. So we're talking about brands like Liquid Death and Dollar Shave Club. How they seem to explode out of like literally nowhere. But how maybe that is kind of a myth. And how the overnight
Bill Harper02:34 — Yeah.
Ben Ard02:35 — success isn't overnight. So talk us through that. Like, why is this myth something maybe we need to bust a little bit? Why is it not truly overnight success? And what's kind of that background and what's going on behind the scenes?
Bill Harper02:49 — So the truth of an overnight success statistically is about eight to 12 years. If you look at most businesses, like Amazon wasn't profitable for the first, I think, 15 years, Tesla wasn't for the first eight or 10, something like that. Most businesses, when you hear about them, are in the rise. And so everybody's like, my gosh, I haven't heard anything about them. Look at them go, right? And that becomes this sort of fantasy that I think propels a lot of the visionaries and the founders of companies is, my gosh, I want to perform like that. If I had a dime for every CEO I've sat in front of that said, Hey, Bill, I wanna be like Apple one day, I'd be a wealthy guy. So when you think about what makes groups like Dollar Shave Club or Liquid Death different.
The primary thing is that they understand one piece of information that everybody else doesn't. And that is that people don't buy the best products. They buy the products they like the best. And that notion is incredibly absent from MBA mentality. Like they people are like, no, no, no, you've got to innovate, you've got to have the best product. I could point to a dozen things off the top of my head, like Microsoft products, like McDonald's hamburgers. I could point to a million things where the product is clearly inferior to other ones in the marketplace, and they're humming along just fine. And the truth of the matter is that what these brands realize is they have to solve a pain point that is not being addressed in order to get the cult following. And both Dollar Shave Club and Liquid Death did an exemplary job of that. And I'll use Dollar Shave Club just because it's so well known and everybody understands it. Dollar Shave Club did what everybody says is impossible. They went into a completely saturated dominated marketplace. On the one hand, you have Schick and Gillette, which are both billion dollar entities. And on the other hand, the option was BIC disposable razor. Okay. So either you're caught between a rock and a hard spot. You can either pay 20 bucks to get a replacement razor, which is highway robbery, or you can cut your face to ribbons with a 99 cent BIC disposable razor. And for most people, that's an untenable choice. They're like, okay, I'd rather get robbed blind by Schick and Gillette than I would for the other. And Dollar Shave Club recognized that. And the founder came out and was like, look, this is dumb. You need something in the middle because you don't need vibrating heads and battery-operated shavers and 14 blades and aloe vera strips all over it. What you actually need is a blade that stays sharp. So for guys like my dad, who was one of those people that would drive halfway across town to save five cents on a gallon of gas, so like if dad was still alive, he'd be all over that.
That was the mentality that they went after. And they said, look, for the people that are in the middle, the ones who are sick and tired of paying Schick and Gillette all that money to stay rich, and the ones that don't want to get their face cut up anymore, we're the solution and we're going to make it really easy. We're going to do a loss leader in the handle. We're going to send you the handle for nothing in the beginning. And then we're going to send you a blade in a box that comes about this big once a month. And it's going to cost you a buck a month. Who's in?
And for all those people who felt like no one had ever been in their corner, all of their hands went up and they were like, Me, I'm in. And thus a hundred million dollar company was built. Now, important things to pay attention to. Was the blade the best? No. And no consumer in the world has a measuring stick that can show them whether one blade is better or not. That is completely subjective. There is literally no consumer out there that has a little micrometer that's like going out to test whether the blades are sharper or they bend less or whatever. None of that exists. So saying that you've got a better blade is completely useless. What made them skyrocket is they made a group of people that felt they had never had somebody represent their interests feel seen, heard, safe, and important. And when they did that, they were rewarded with what appeared to be overnight success.
Liquid Death is in the process of doing the exact same thing by having solved the fact that you've got an entire generation that doesn't want to drink alcohol at social gatherings, and yet they felt like a dork holding a Dasani bottle instead of a beer. And so what they did was they came out and they said, Look, you don't have to do that. We're gonna put a skull and crossbones and put it in a tall boy, and it's just flavored water that's got some fizz to it, but you don't feel silly at a party holding it in your hand. The next thing you know, they go from zero to one and a half billion dollars in valuation in seven and a half years. That is a Harvard case study that 99% of businesses would cut off their left hand to be able to achieve. Both of those were based on not the product. Both of those are heavily commoditized marketplaces. Nothing was unique about razors, nothing was unique about carbonated flavored water in a can. But because of how they positioned themselves, the story they told. Shave time, shave money. We're not gonna, you know, quench your thirst. We're gonna murder your thirst. In doing those stories, they created something that was of such surprise and delight by the consumer that they came in and rewarded them with their dollar, their loyalty, their following, and blew those companies up into things no one could have foreseen.
Ben Ard07:49 — Well, and I love what you're talking about here. They found the opportunities, they found this group of people. But really, what was interesting, and you started out the whole podcast talking about no story, no glory, was also the way they told their stories. I remember to this day, I can't remember very many advertisements I've seen back in the day. I vividly remember like showing people on YouTube Dollar Shave Club ads, as if it was like some comedy SNL skit, you know, I was like, okay, you
Bill Harper08:21 — Yeah.
Ben Ard08:22 — gotta see this. This is brilliant. How did the storytelling like play a role in this whole process? They understood their story, but it feels like they were expert storytellers and got their story out there. How did they do that and how did that contribute to their success?
Bill Harper08:35 — Both of those brands have a unique advantage and a little bit of an unfair competitive advantage. In the case of Dollar Shave Club, the founder was a stand-up comedian. So he and his buddy wrote that script, that spot that everybody saw. They did that together. Now, I think it's interesting that it was basically a one-off. You never saw an act two. And therein lies the biggest challenge in marketing: is what do you do next?
Anybody can write a one-off spot. Okay. There are people that do it all the time. The last Doritos spot that won all of the attention, that Nike ad that just came out that everybody thought was a real ad but wasn't with the super tall player, like all of that. Those things are now being generated by people sitting at home who just have a cool idea and access to Midjourney and they like throw something together. But for the consistency of the story, being able to do that.
Dollar Shave Club had an advantage in the fact that their original kickoff was done through the lens of comedy. And two of the four founders for Liquid Death come out of one of the most successful advertising agencies in the world. It isn't that every business in the world doesn't have access to the same thing. It's just that each one of those groups understood that surprise and delight is the number one attractor. It is not about the product or service. And both of them put it secondary. What they understood was that the story about the problem you solve, reflecting the need of the consumer first and then backing it with the product is how you make those stories so interesting. And the way that I think about it that makes it easy for people is you need to get people from the basically from the hole to the goal, right? So they're in a hole and they need to be able to get out of it.
And you've got the ladder or the rope that makes their journey successful. And both of those brands understood what that meant. So for the person that didn't want to spend as much on a razor, they became the ladder to get out of being shafted by the two big giants. And for Liquid Death, they became the answer or ladder to getting out of the hole of I don't want to feel embarrassed at a party. Both of them understood that it's the story about we see you, we get how you feel, we're gonna change your circumstance for the better. That's what made them work. The product was just how they made that thing happen. And that's why both of those brands have succeeded that way. And every other one, like Geico, like Chick-fil-A, like, you know, I could rattle off a whole bunch of them. And they all did even Apple's 1984 spot, which only ran one time. Most people don't know that. That one time that it ran gave a story of you don't want to become a cog in the wheel. You don't want to just become a numberless automaton. And that thing of keep your creativity, keep your individuality alive is what that whole idea was about and why Apple became the concept that it is today.
Ben Ard11:26 — I love that. So we're gonna have people that are listening to this episode who are thinking, those are great examples. That's so cool, so novel, all that kind of fun stuff.
Bill Harper11:33 — They're huge companies. Yeah.
Ben Ard11:38 — How can they take that back to their workplace? How can they go back to their daily job and say, Okay, well, what do we do with this? How do we actually tell the right story? How do we develop our overnight success inside of our business, what's kind of like the game plan for those individuals?
Bill Harper11:56 — So the truth of the matter is that you probably won't be able to deliver on it independently. But from a strategy and an explanation and a getting people on board standpoint, I would actually use, and this guy should send us a check for all the times that I use his business as an example. But there's a local plumber in the area in Raleigh in the triangle that does this exceptionally well for a very small thing. All that they do is plumbing, right? Now, all Nike does is sell shoes, right? But I mean, all that they do is this one thing that's seemingly a service business that isn't flashy and glitzy like those other two brands are. Although when you really look at them without the flash and glitz, they're just as commodity as anybody else. What they did was they locked in on one problem, one pain point, one hole that they could be the ladder for. And the hole that they did was being on time. And so the line that they use is we're on time or you don't pay a dime. Now, how does that relate to being able to go back and tell your boss, hey, this is a path that I see for differentiation so that we can start charging what we're worth, attracting more people, generating more profitable revenue? Okay, good, great question. The answer is they sat down and said, What is it that people hate about plumbing? And they said, Okay, they hate that they don't show up on time. They hate that they say that it's going to cost one thing and then there's something else. They hate that they make the house smelly when they're working on the work because of the nature of the job. Whatever. And they said, okay, of all of those pain points, here's the one thing that we want to own. I'm willing as the CEO of the company to say, if we're not where we said we would be, when we said we would be there, we'll do the job for free because it's on us, not on you. Every single person that heard that, for whom time happens to be the biggest important factor, lines up outside of them. Because they say, you know what? I can't just be given a four-hour, we'll be there sometime between eight and noon window. I've got kids I've got to get to school. I've got a job I have to do. I've got meetings with clients. So you can't just give me this nebulous thing. I can't work with that. I need to know when you're gonna be here. Well, too bad, says the standard plumber. I'll be there when I get there. So this group instead says, no, no, no.
We're gonna be there by eleven fifteen. We will be there at eleven fifteen to start the job. That's it. So you can expect us then. For all the rest of those people, they're like, finally, finally, somebody understands that I just can't live according to the fact that you can't keep a schedule. Thank you. And they say everybody else can take second place. I'm gonna go with the people that'll be there on time. Now there's somebody else who says it for money, and there's somebody else that says it for don't make my house messy, or keep my house from smelling bad while you're doing the job, or whatever. But the point is, a business can't serve all of those things. It needs to decide to serve one. And every industry has those. Volvo only sells safe cars. Mercedes only sells luxurious cars. Prius only saves the world one gas tank at a time. If you understand the construct of storytelling, you understand that every single one of these super successful brands locks in on their single story that gets the customer out of the hole and helps them reach their goal. That thing is what makes them so successful and memorable and repeatable, which leads to loyalty and revenue and profitability.
Ben Ard15:10 — I love that. That's so cool. I'm going to throw you a little bit of a curveball. We have a lot of listeners on our podcast who work in B2B businesses. A lot of the examples that we all hear about that are these expert storytelling moments are typically, you know, direct to consumer, B2C, things of that nature. Does the same principle apply to B2B? And are there any nuances inside of that system?
Bill Harper15:30 — Yes. No. Thank you so much for asking. I'm so glad you did. And I'm going to give a couple of very specific examples. The first one everybody knows, and that is Federal Express. And while you think of them today as a consumer-facing brand, when they began, they were straight B2B. Okay. And their whole thing was look, the United States Postal Service, God bless them, as they say in the South, couldn't get there on time if, you know, you helped them.
And UPS didn't care about time, nor did DHL. So the whole point of FedEx as a concept was when you absolutely positively have to have your package there overnight. They took one pain point that existed and they said, we're going to be the group that's for the people who are sitting there wringing their hands, going, I'm going to lose the deal if they don't have the contract tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. And they built their entire empire on that construct. It can be in the case of compliance.
Let's say we had a client not long ago that was working in the compliance universe that most solutions in compliance are fragmented and therefore there's a continuity problem. I hire this guy to do this part of compliance and this group to do that, but this group is five times the size of this one. They're modern and have efficiencies in place that this group doesn't, and because they don't talk, I've got a disconnect between how those two Lego pieces fit together.
Well, if I come down and I say, Well, we've created something that has continuity, that single point of difference is more than sufficient for the person who's sitting over there juggling all of those specialty compliance groups and going, my God, if Tom is late again, I'm gonna go nuts and these guys can't do their job until Bob gets me the thing and I'm waiting, I'm waiting, I'm waiting. Then hey, that one thing that says we are contiguous from start to finish across your compliance need, that's suddenly super, super valuable.
So it doesn't matter. And in fact, I would go so far as to tell your listeners: labels don't matter. Your person, your target audience, your buyer, whether you call them a client or a customer or a consumer, they don't change being a consumer just because they go to work. They're a consumer in every other aspect of their life. So the thought that they somehow change their behavior or their decision-making process simply because they put on a tie and sit down at a desk is completely erroneous. The people that are sitting there make emotionally driven decisions the exact same way that they do for everything else, find the pain point that you're solving and wrap everything that you do around that promise. And then all of those things that you love to talk about, your years of experience, your super fantastic proprietary process, all the rest of it, are the supports for how you deliver on that promise. That's where you get your scale.
Ben Ard18:14 — Okay. I love everything about what you're saying. Bill, we have run out of time. We like to keep these episodes short, letting people get back to their daily, you know, needs and things today. But for anyone listening who wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Bill Harper18:30 — Two places that I would suggest they look. The first, if they'd like free input on how to continue to think about building brand, I have more than 2,500 videos on TikTok at BrandBossHQ. You can find me there. And if you'd like more specific help or to find out how working with us works, then I would encourage you to visit brandbosshq.com.
Ben Ard18:51 — Perfect. For everyone listening, scroll down to the show notes. You will see the links right there in the description. So you can click and check those out and connect with Bill. Bill, again, thank you so much for the time and insights today. This has been wonderful.
Bill Harper19:02 — I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks again.
