This is a transcript of the conversation with Rohit Bhargava about his book, "Personality Not Included."
Chip Griffin: Rohit Bhargava is a Senior Vice President of Digital Strategy at Ogilvy Public Relations. He is also an expert at helping companies navigate the new media waters.
He is the author of the book, "Personality Not Included: Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity and How Great Brands Get It Back."
Welcome to the show.
Rohit Bhargava: Thanks Chip. Glad to be here.
Chip: I guess the first question is, do we really want companies to have personality or do we just want them to give us the product or service we are paying them to give us?
Rohit: That is a great question to start with because it is a very common one. I think that essentially, the idea of the book is that having a great product or service is a given. You really do need to do that. Personality is never going to be a replacement for that. So, I try very clearly to say that to people. You can't replace having something good to sell.
But, the problem is that a lot of companies are in this category where they are selling something that is useful or good and somebody else is selling something that is useful or good. And they are competing against one another. That is where the vast majority of companies are.
The idea of the book is that personality is the difference that allows you to stand out among your competitors. It is also the difference that makes you the place that people actually want to work with and for So, it is an employee, an internal, focused idea as well.
Chip: Explain exactly what you mean by a company personality. Is it the same as the personality that a date or a kid might have? Or is this something different?
Rohit: I am glad you asked that, actually, because it is definitely different. One of the things I knew in writing a book about personality is that I would have to redefine it for people because we all have our perceptions of taking those personality quizzes online that tell us our perfect match or what is going to happen in our lives next week. That is really not what I wanted to talk about with personality.
The definition I used in the book was a very simple, three core elements of personality. Number one, you have to be unique. Number two, you have to be authentic. Number three, you have to be talkable.
And so, within each one of those, I really try and describe, well, what makes a business unique? It is offering something that somebody else doesn't offer.
Authenticity is this big idea in business right now, which is actually meaning what you say and doing that. That is very difficult for a lot of companies, particularly when it comes to their marketing messages. I really lay out some principles for how to do that.
Talkable is kind of the secret element. It is really the word-of-mouth phenomenon. It is based on this idea that you need to give people something to talk about. You need to be talkable. Before you can get your brand, product, or service to be something that people connect with and tell other people about, it needs to have that element of talkability.
Chip: When a company starts, I mean, if you are a one-man-band, if you will, you are a start-up in the early stages; these are all things you have at one point in the beginning, right? It is hard for a company to get off the ground and become even moderately successful without having some of these elements. So, presumably somewhere alone the line as the company grows, it loses its personality.
Rohit: That is a common phenomenon for a lot of companies. I think, that when you talk to a group of people about the companies that they would consider faceless, chances are a lot of them would be large companies. But, one of the things I really talk about in the book is that small businesses and small companies are not born with personality, either.
So, it is really not this idea where everybody is born with these core elements and they lose them along the way. It is these elements that some businesses have and some businesses don't.
If you think about it, if you look at statistics for example, the restaurant business and these wild and crazy stats that say that 90 percent of restaurant businesses fail within the first two years. Part of the reason why, and obviously not the whole reason why, part of the reason why is because they did not focus on these three core elements and they never had them from the beginning.
I think, that it is certainly a phenomenon that happens in big companies because it is very difficult to keep that human connection as you do get bigger. But, I definitely would not say that every small business has that to start with.
Chip: If I am a small company or a large company, how do I figure out what my personality is and communicate it?
Rohit: One of the first things to do is to figure out what the story is, the back-story. One of the things that I spend a lot of time talking about in the book is really based on the idea of screenwriting and screenplays.
Because a lot of times when I deal with people in marketing, or people who are describing their businesses, whether they are in marketing or not, one of the things they tend to do is they tend to describe it how they think a business needs to be described. I think, a lot of people in marketing tend to call this "marketing-speak."
It is so pervasive that that's how we believe that we need to describe companies. The reason why I pulled it back to the idea of screenwriting is because if you think about the job of a screenwriter, it is to write words to be said, not words to be read.
So, what you want to try to do with your marketing is do the same thing, which is, capture the actual dialogue of how people describe what they actually do.
That does two things. Number one, it makes you sound more human, obviously. Number two, it actually makes you think more clearly about whether what you are describing is something that is actually useful and actually sellable, or whether it is just "marketing-speak," and not actually something useful.
So, one of the big lessons there is that if you focus on that story and you come up with that way for somebody to connect, that is the first step to getting that personality out of the history of your company and in front.
Chip: Now obviously, a lot of companies out there will hire a wiz-bang marketing person or the more modern elements, maybe a social media community manager seems to be the popular title. Can you bring in these people and really see change? Or is it something that you really have to more institutionalize; it has to seep its way into the entire company culture?
Rohit: I think that what you tend to find is that you can't just hire in a few people and expect them to remake the culture, regardless of what they are trying to do.
I think that really what successful brands that are building this personality from the ground up are able to do is a very important thing. What large companies, in particular, have gotten very bad at, which is embracing the people that I call their accidental spokespeople. Which are the people who are not trained on all of the marketing messages, but who are actually speaking about the brand.
They are blogging, perhaps. They are on social networks. They are active in their local communities. So, it is not necessarily an online thing, it could just be somebody who is just influential in the local community, who happens to work for a brand, who is talking about that brand.
I think, that the real lesson there is that anybody can be that type of spokesperson. They often come up from very interesting places within an organization. In order for you to embrace that personality, it really becomes, the challenge becomes not figuring out who are these one or two rock stars that you can get in, but how do you foster this within your entire company.
Chip: Well, I guess we have talked a little bit about some of these principles. Can you name names? Can you give me some companies that are doing it right? And maybe even some that are doing it wrong.
Rohit: Yeah. I think, one of the great stories in the book that I really enjoy is about Dyson Vacuums. The reason why I single them out is because they do have a unique product. And they do have something that a lot of people associate with.
But if you look at how James Dyson has promoted that business, it is basically been that business has been about innovation and about invention and not necessarily about their product.
Chip: Mm-hmm.
Rohit: And so even today if you go onto their website and you look at a specific section is all about invention. It's got tips for inventors and how to get a patent. It's got tricks on what to look out for. It's got essentially all of the learning from a guy who describes himself not as a brand person or a vacuum person, but as an inventor. That's what he does.
And so he's managed to make that part of their community and part of the description of the story, the brand. I think, that's a great example.
Chip: And you actually-you spend quite a bit of your time in this book talking about specific examples. It's not-you haven't written a book on fear, you've written a book with concrete examples.
Rohit: Yeah, actually one of the things that I did is I've been writing a blog for a long time. And what I do on that marketing blog is I focus on a lot of different companies, examples, campaigns.
And so as I thought about writing this book, I wanted to write something that I would want to read as a reader. And the lesson that I kind of got from the books that I enjoyed is that they are the ones that told a lot of different stories.
And so, what I put into this book is more than 100 different case stories of brands that are doing different elements of this personality that people can learn from.
And what I found interesting about doing that and talking to people about the book since it came out is that because there are so many examples in there, people are always able to find one that relates to their business. And I'm always interested to see which ones stand out for people because they're very different from somebody who's working in one industry versus a different industry.
But the nice thing is that people are finding examples that relate to them So, much so that I've actually went out-a lot of times when I go out and I speak, I tell people I say, "Look there's a lot of examples in there. If you don't find one that relates to what you do, send me an email and I'll find one for you."
Chip: [laughs] That's great. Now, I mean obviously you mentioned the blog. But, you know what is it that made you write this book? I mean it seems like everybody's writing a book these days about you know either word-of-mouth marketing or new media-social media.
You know, it's a flooded marketplace, you know. What made you decide to do it and you know what distinguishes your book from everything else in the pack?
Rohit: Yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking about that because I've been in conversations with people who didn't have an answer for that. Whether it was describing their business or whether it was describing their book.
Chip: Right. And essentially it's talking about giving your book the personality that you're talking about, right? The unique authentic topic... [laughs]
Rohit: Yeah, exactly. It's, I mean you've got to have something that's unique. I mean I wanted the book to be the three things, right? I wanted it to be unique, authentic and talkable.
And so the way that I did that is Number one I focused on an idea that was bigger than what a lot of people were talking about. And so the way that I did that is I work in an agency and so I work on a lot of different brands, a lot of different industries.
And so my experience is not based on building one brand or one thing and making it really big. It's based on building a lot of different things So, the lessons that I see in the trends that I pull out are based on the industry and the culture, not necessarily on my one thing that I launched.
And the idea that I started to pull out of this is that you know it's not about every company starting their blog. It's not about companies getting onto Facebook. All of these things are pointing to a bigger trend. And that bigger trend is that people are looking for more humanity from the companies that they deal with.
And so the book that I wanted to write was about how companies can give that to people. How they can become more authentic by actually enabling the people who work for that brand and the customers that buy things from that brand to talk to one another.
So, my big kind of positioning for this, and there's actually a-I share a lot of this stuff openly on the book website-so there's a whole making up section where I share a like the original proposal for how I got to deal with the publisher and rejected cover designs and...
I mean, one of the things I share in there is that the way I was thinking about the positioning of the book is that it really had to fit in between three big categories, which basically are described by what you were talking about. Which is one big category is this social media blogging books.
Another one is the marketing niche books. There's search marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, guerrilla marketing, all of those fit into one category in how I described these.
And the last category was sort of a self-help personal branding career advice kind of category because part of the idea of the book is that personality is what enables you to get a better career, a better job and build your personal brand.
What I really tried to do is I tried to write a book that fit in between those three categories and brought those three things together. And that was something that I didn't see out there.
Chip: Mm-hmm. You know there's obviously a lot of people out there who are you know enthusiastic. And I suspect you'll have a lot of people who are-who really want to adopt what you're talking about in this book.
But you know a lot of particularly larger companies-although you mentioned small companies, too-but you know larger companies and mid-size companies tend to be a little bit more slow moving. They tend to be a little bit less willing to adopt some changes like these.
What advice would you give someone in a company if they're trying to sell this to their bosses? You know that this really is important to develop this personality.
Rohit: Yeah, that is-you know I have spent a lot of time with brands and companies that have certain inertia against change. I think, that a lot of companies are in that situation and probably a lot of your listeners are working for companies in that position.
So, one of the things that I wanted to do is I wanted to give people a real tool book and essentially a play-by-play on how to deal with those types of situations. So, I dedicated one entire chapter to basically overcoming roadblocks, which is essentially what you are saying.
Which is people maybe don't believe that they need a personality. In some cases they may think that's it's useful but they are afraid to change for whatever reason.
So, what the book really lays out is that there are four big barriers to personality. And they're essentially that you know the first one is success. Which is what we are already doing and it's working So, why would we change; which a lot of businesses are in that category.
The second one is uncertainty, which is you know, you don't know what is going to happen. The Third one is tradition which is what we've always done So, we're not going to change now because we've got a tradition; we always do it that way.
And the last one is precedent of sort of that copy-cat model of, "Well, we think we should do it, but who else is doing it?" Like if nobody else is doing it, we're not going to do it first. And really the core idea of overcoming roadblocks is about first of all identifying which of these categories of fear your organization is in.
Chip: Right.
Rohit: So I don't really treat it as simplistically as saying, "OK, if you're afraid, then let's overcome fear." I say, "Where's the fear coming from?" And then I kind of take it back to this whole kind of guidebook step-by-step approach and say, "OK, if the fear is precedent in your organization then do this, this, this, and this."
And it is very, you know very four-step, five-step oriented to hopefully to help people get past those things.
So, really what I try to do is take some of the lessons that I learned from blogging in terms of creating very useful content. Because a lot of blog posts are this list type of content and people are very-they find that very useful. And I've tried to bring that into a book environment without necessarily just kind of taking a bunch of blog posts and sticking them together and making a book out of it.
Chip: Mm-hmm. Is personality something that is a new concept or, I mean have companies always really needed to have personality?
Rohit: That's a good question. I mean, I think, that to a degree anytime you're writing about something as basic of a word as personality, there's always going to be...you're always going to kind of think in the back of your mind, "Well, companies always needed to have a personality, didn't they?"
But, I think that some of the most powerful books-and I've spent a lot of time reading a lot of other books in terms of preparing for this book. The books that I found most profound for me personally as a marketer were not necessarily the ones who kind of made up a new word and said, "Oh, well you need to care about you know, this thing."
It was the ones that took something that you kind of knew but really turned it into that core lesson that could drive a business forward and gave you something actionable to actually do out of it. And that's the kind of book that I wanted to write. I didn't want to invent a new world necessarily.
I wanted something that was a very basic idea and say, "You know what? With all this stuff out there with Wikis and blogs and podcasts and all of these things that we hear about, let's get back to what the actual core idea is of marketing and what we should be doing." And that's what I wanted to try and write about.
Chip: Well, yes, you know getting back to the point of whether you called personality or not - I mean, unique -that kind of talk below those things that you know you've just - the people should focus on more now because of all the media out there or is it something that they should have been doing all along and people just didn't realize it?
I mean I guess that's what I'm trying to get at. Is this something...?
Rohit: Oh, OK.
[cross talk]
Chip: Are you struck on new thing or is it something you just managed to figure out in a neat package today?
Rohit: I think that it is more important today than it was in the past. And the reason why I think, that is because today personal opinion and individual opinion can travel much further, much faster. And because of that people are expecting and are sharing the word about who's authentic, who's doing something right and who isn't.
So, right now for example one of the things I talked about is Hollywood movies and Hollywood releases. And this idea that 10 years ago you used to be able to release a movie and count on that opening weekend to cover the cost of the entire movie before Monday around the cooler when everybody kind of learned that the movie was bad and it sucked.
And now what I describe in the book is the window of suckiness is shrinking. I mean, now if a movie is really bad people know about it on Friday night and you know longer have that big weekend to count on.
And so it becomes that much more important to create something good and to actually promote it in such a way so that people do get what it is and what they're talking about. And you can't pull the wool over people's eyes anymore.
And if you thing about a Hollywood movie, it's the same thing as if it is you know, any other brand or any other product. Consumer opinions travel much further, much faster. And in that environment authenticity is really the new thing that companies need to focus on.
Chip: So, really the new communications environment you know weeds out the phonies much faster and so you really have to achieve that authenticity much more quickly than you have in the past.
Rohit: Exactly right. And if you look at any of the horror stories that people pass around about social media whether it's the bike lock that got cracked by the pin or the you know-or any of the other-kind of like the whole food CEO getting outed for being on the message boards.
I mean, all of those examples are based on this idea that people can share these things and find you out much more quickly in this new media landscape.
Chip: I imagine in your role at Ogilvie you do a lot of work with companies in this very area and I'm assuming that you do try to apply the concept of personality when you're working with your clients. What do you see as the biggest obstacles in your own consultancy?
Rohit: I think, that I definitely do. I mean, a lot of the ideas of the book are based on the work that I've done through the Ogilvie additional influence team here. And I think, one of the things that I see most often as a fear or a barrier is this idea of the loss of control.
Because a lot of times I working with clients who are in the PR roles and so they're very used to the corporate messaging and what the brand stands for and being able to control that. And so the idea of losing that or letting people talk about your brand who aren't necessarily trained on all the brand messages is a very scary idea.
So you know, because of that I think that part of the fear factor in what we need to get past is that, you know what? It's going to be OK, Number 1. And Number 2, this is not something new. People are already talking about your brand.
The new thing is that social media is giving you a way of listening. And that's scary because now all of the sudden you know what people are saying about you. And that's always more scary than not knowing.
Chip: Right.
Rohit: But, it doesn't mean that there's this new shift and all of a sudden people are talking about you. It just means that now you're actually really able to listen.
Chip: Now, obviously there are a fair number of companies out there that people aren't talking about. And I'm thinking you know primarily of sort of you know old time manufacturing-type companies that you know, primarily sell to other manufacturers, or, you know raw-materials type companies.
Does every company need this kind of personality? Does every company need to worry about this or are there some companies that really can get by without paying attention to it?
Rohit: I think, every company does need to worry about it. I think, that there are some cases probably where it may be less important. I think, that one very common case is if, for example, you invent something or have a product that is so game-changing that it really-nothing else matters. In that particular case, it really-I mean a lot of things that usually matter in business wouldn't matter.
So only let's say you've got the cure to cancer. You know, the cost of what you're selling that at, it doesn't matter; if the company messaging, it doesn't matter. The personality, to a degree it probably doesn't matter as well because if you've got something that is so revolutionary that it just re-invents a certain space...
[cross talk]
Chip: Mm-hmm. So, you can be an absolute jerk and people still want to be cured of cancer, right? I mean..
Rohit: Yeah, that's right. That's right.
[laughter]
Rohit: And those situations are very, very rare; very rare. It may seem like they happen frequently but when they do it's not a-you know, the cure to cancer is a long-lived thing. It's not a, "Oh, we have something new today, " and then next week somebody else has something new.
Chip: Sure.
Rohit: That's not the situation I'm talking about. So, that situation is very, very rare. But, I think, for pretty much every other business, every other industry, every other situation, personality and authenticity is key.
Chip: Excellent. Well, my guest today has been Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvie Public Relations. He is the author of the book "Personality Not Included, Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity and How Great Brands Get it Back." Thanks for joining us today.
Chip Griffin: Rohit Bhargava is a Senior Vice President of Digital Strategy at Ogilvy Public Relations. He is also an expert at helping companies navigate the new media waters.
He is the author of the book, "Personality Not Included: Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity and How Great Brands Get It Back."
Welcome to the show.
Rohit Bhargava: Thanks Chip. Glad to be here.
Chip: I guess the first question is, do we really want companies to have personality or do we just want them to give us the product or service we are paying them to give us?
Rohit: That is a great question to start with because it is a very common one. I think that essentially, the idea of the book is that having a great product or service is a given. You really do need to do that. Personality is never going to be a replacement for that. So, I try very clearly to say that to people. You can't replace having something good to sell.
But, the problem is that a lot of companies are in this category where they are selling something that is useful or good and somebody else is selling something that is useful or good. And they are competing against one another. That is where the vast majority of companies are.
The idea of the book is that personality is the difference that allows you to stand out among your competitors. It is also the difference that makes you the place that people actually want to work with and for So, it is an employee, an internal, focused idea as well.
Chip: Explain exactly what you mean by a company personality. Is it the same as the personality that a date or a kid might have? Or is this something different?
Rohit: I am glad you asked that, actually, because it is definitely different. One of the things I knew in writing a book about personality is that I would have to redefine it for people because we all have our perceptions of taking those personality quizzes online that tell us our perfect match or what is going to happen in our lives next week. That is really not what I wanted to talk about with personality.
The definition I used in the book was a very simple, three core elements of personality. Number one, you have to be unique. Number two, you have to be authentic. Number three, you have to be talkable.
And so, within each one of those, I really try and describe, well, what makes a business unique? It is offering something that somebody else doesn't offer.
Authenticity is this big idea in business right now, which is actually meaning what you say and doing that. That is very difficult for a lot of companies, particularly when it comes to their marketing messages. I really lay out some principles for how to do that.
Talkable is kind of the secret element. It is really the word-of-mouth phenomenon. It is based on this idea that you need to give people something to talk about. You need to be talkable. Before you can get your brand, product, or service to be something that people connect with and tell other people about, it needs to have that element of talkability.
Chip: When a company starts, I mean, if you are a one-man-band, if you will, you are a start-up in the early stages; these are all things you have at one point in the beginning, right? It is hard for a company to get off the ground and become even moderately successful without having some of these elements. So, presumably somewhere alone the line as the company grows, it loses its personality.
Rohit: That is a common phenomenon for a lot of companies. I think, that when you talk to a group of people about the companies that they would consider faceless, chances are a lot of them would be large companies. But, one of the things I really talk about in the book is that small businesses and small companies are not born with personality, either.
So, it is really not this idea where everybody is born with these core elements and they lose them along the way. It is these elements that some businesses have and some businesses don't.
If you think about it, if you look at statistics for example, the restaurant business and these wild and crazy stats that say that 90 percent of restaurant businesses fail within the first two years. Part of the reason why, and obviously not the whole reason why, part of the reason why is because they did not focus on these three core elements and they never had them from the beginning.
I think, that it is certainly a phenomenon that happens in big companies because it is very difficult to keep that human connection as you do get bigger. But, I definitely would not say that every small business has that to start with.
Chip: If I am a small company or a large company, how do I figure out what my personality is and communicate it?
Rohit: One of the first things to do is to figure out what the story is, the back-story. One of the things that I spend a lot of time talking about in the book is really based on the idea of screenwriting and screenplays.
Because a lot of times when I deal with people in marketing, or people who are describing their businesses, whether they are in marketing or not, one of the things they tend to do is they tend to describe it how they think a business needs to be described. I think, a lot of people in marketing tend to call this "marketing-speak."
It is so pervasive that that's how we believe that we need to describe companies. The reason why I pulled it back to the idea of screenwriting is because if you think about the job of a screenwriter, it is to write words to be said, not words to be read.
So, what you want to try to do with your marketing is do the same thing, which is, capture the actual dialogue of how people describe what they actually do.
That does two things. Number one, it makes you sound more human, obviously. Number two, it actually makes you think more clearly about whether what you are describing is something that is actually useful and actually sellable, or whether it is just "marketing-speak," and not actually something useful.
So, one of the big lessons there is that if you focus on that story and you come up with that way for somebody to connect, that is the first step to getting that personality out of the history of your company and in front.
Chip: Now obviously, a lot of companies out there will hire a wiz-bang marketing person or the more modern elements, maybe a social media community manager seems to be the popular title. Can you bring in these people and really see change? Or is it something that you really have to more institutionalize; it has to seep its way into the entire company culture?
Rohit: I think that what you tend to find is that you can't just hire in a few people and expect them to remake the culture, regardless of what they are trying to do.
I think that really what successful brands that are building this personality from the ground up are able to do is a very important thing. What large companies, in particular, have gotten very bad at, which is embracing the people that I call their accidental spokespeople. Which are the people who are not trained on all of the marketing messages, but who are actually speaking about the brand.
They are blogging, perhaps. They are on social networks. They are active in their local communities. So, it is not necessarily an online thing, it could just be somebody who is just influential in the local community, who happens to work for a brand, who is talking about that brand.
I think, that the real lesson there is that anybody can be that type of spokesperson. They often come up from very interesting places within an organization. In order for you to embrace that personality, it really becomes, the challenge becomes not figuring out who are these one or two rock stars that you can get in, but how do you foster this within your entire company.
Chip: Well, I guess we have talked a little bit about some of these principles. Can you name names? Can you give me some companies that are doing it right? And maybe even some that are doing it wrong.
Rohit: Yeah. I think, one of the great stories in the book that I really enjoy is about Dyson Vacuums. The reason why I single them out is because they do have a unique product. And they do have something that a lot of people associate with.
But if you look at how James Dyson has promoted that business, it is basically been that business has been about innovation and about invention and not necessarily about their product.
Chip: Mm-hmm.
Rohit: And so even today if you go onto their website and you look at a specific section is all about invention. It's got tips for inventors and how to get a patent. It's got tricks on what to look out for. It's got essentially all of the learning from a guy who describes himself not as a brand person or a vacuum person, but as an inventor. That's what he does.
And so he's managed to make that part of their community and part of the description of the story, the brand. I think, that's a great example.
Chip: And you actually-you spend quite a bit of your time in this book talking about specific examples. It's not-you haven't written a book on fear, you've written a book with concrete examples.
Rohit: Yeah, actually one of the things that I did is I've been writing a blog for a long time. And what I do on that marketing blog is I focus on a lot of different companies, examples, campaigns.
And so as I thought about writing this book, I wanted to write something that I would want to read as a reader. And the lesson that I kind of got from the books that I enjoyed is that they are the ones that told a lot of different stories.
And so, what I put into this book is more than 100 different case stories of brands that are doing different elements of this personality that people can learn from.
And what I found interesting about doing that and talking to people about the book since it came out is that because there are so many examples in there, people are always able to find one that relates to their business. And I'm always interested to see which ones stand out for people because they're very different from somebody who's working in one industry versus a different industry.
But the nice thing is that people are finding examples that relate to them So, much so that I've actually went out-a lot of times when I go out and I speak, I tell people I say, "Look there's a lot of examples in there. If you don't find one that relates to what you do, send me an email and I'll find one for you."
Chip: [laughs] That's great. Now, I mean obviously you mentioned the blog. But, you know what is it that made you write this book? I mean it seems like everybody's writing a book these days about you know either word-of-mouth marketing or new media-social media.
You know, it's a flooded marketplace, you know. What made you decide to do it and you know what distinguishes your book from everything else in the pack?
Rohit: Yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking about that because I've been in conversations with people who didn't have an answer for that. Whether it was describing their business or whether it was describing their book.
Chip: Right. And essentially it's talking about giving your book the personality that you're talking about, right? The unique authentic topic... [laughs]
Rohit: Yeah, exactly. It's, I mean you've got to have something that's unique. I mean I wanted the book to be the three things, right? I wanted it to be unique, authentic and talkable.
And so the way that I did that is Number one I focused on an idea that was bigger than what a lot of people were talking about. And so the way that I did that is I work in an agency and so I work on a lot of different brands, a lot of different industries.
And so my experience is not based on building one brand or one thing and making it really big. It's based on building a lot of different things So, the lessons that I see in the trends that I pull out are based on the industry and the culture, not necessarily on my one thing that I launched.
And the idea that I started to pull out of this is that you know it's not about every company starting their blog. It's not about companies getting onto Facebook. All of these things are pointing to a bigger trend. And that bigger trend is that people are looking for more humanity from the companies that they deal with.
And so the book that I wanted to write was about how companies can give that to people. How they can become more authentic by actually enabling the people who work for that brand and the customers that buy things from that brand to talk to one another.
So, my big kind of positioning for this, and there's actually a-I share a lot of this stuff openly on the book website-so there's a whole making up section where I share a like the original proposal for how I got to deal with the publisher and rejected cover designs and...
I mean, one of the things I share in there is that the way I was thinking about the positioning of the book is that it really had to fit in between three big categories, which basically are described by what you were talking about. Which is one big category is this social media blogging books.
Another one is the marketing niche books. There's search marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, guerrilla marketing, all of those fit into one category in how I described these.
And the last category was sort of a self-help personal branding career advice kind of category because part of the idea of the book is that personality is what enables you to get a better career, a better job and build your personal brand.
What I really tried to do is I tried to write a book that fit in between those three categories and brought those three things together. And that was something that I didn't see out there.
Chip: Mm-hmm. You know there's obviously a lot of people out there who are you know enthusiastic. And I suspect you'll have a lot of people who are-who really want to adopt what you're talking about in this book.
But you know a lot of particularly larger companies-although you mentioned small companies, too-but you know larger companies and mid-size companies tend to be a little bit more slow moving. They tend to be a little bit less willing to adopt some changes like these.
What advice would you give someone in a company if they're trying to sell this to their bosses? You know that this really is important to develop this personality.
Rohit: Yeah, that is-you know I have spent a lot of time with brands and companies that have certain inertia against change. I think, that a lot of companies are in that situation and probably a lot of your listeners are working for companies in that position.
So, one of the things that I wanted to do is I wanted to give people a real tool book and essentially a play-by-play on how to deal with those types of situations. So, I dedicated one entire chapter to basically overcoming roadblocks, which is essentially what you are saying.
Which is people maybe don't believe that they need a personality. In some cases they may think that's it's useful but they are afraid to change for whatever reason.
So, what the book really lays out is that there are four big barriers to personality. And they're essentially that you know the first one is success. Which is what we are already doing and it's working So, why would we change; which a lot of businesses are in that category.
The second one is uncertainty, which is you know, you don't know what is going to happen. The Third one is tradition which is what we've always done So, we're not going to change now because we've got a tradition; we always do it that way.
And the last one is precedent of sort of that copy-cat model of, "Well, we think we should do it, but who else is doing it?" Like if nobody else is doing it, we're not going to do it first. And really the core idea of overcoming roadblocks is about first of all identifying which of these categories of fear your organization is in.
Chip: Right.
Rohit: So I don't really treat it as simplistically as saying, "OK, if you're afraid, then let's overcome fear." I say, "Where's the fear coming from?" And then I kind of take it back to this whole kind of guidebook step-by-step approach and say, "OK, if the fear is precedent in your organization then do this, this, this, and this."
And it is very, you know very four-step, five-step oriented to hopefully to help people get past those things.
So, really what I try to do is take some of the lessons that I learned from blogging in terms of creating very useful content. Because a lot of blog posts are this list type of content and people are very-they find that very useful. And I've tried to bring that into a book environment without necessarily just kind of taking a bunch of blog posts and sticking them together and making a book out of it.
Chip: Mm-hmm. Is personality something that is a new concept or, I mean have companies always really needed to have personality?
Rohit: That's a good question. I mean, I think, that to a degree anytime you're writing about something as basic of a word as personality, there's always going to be...you're always going to kind of think in the back of your mind, "Well, companies always needed to have a personality, didn't they?"
But, I think that some of the most powerful books-and I've spent a lot of time reading a lot of other books in terms of preparing for this book. The books that I found most profound for me personally as a marketer were not necessarily the ones who kind of made up a new word and said, "Oh, well you need to care about you know, this thing."
It was the ones that took something that you kind of knew but really turned it into that core lesson that could drive a business forward and gave you something actionable to actually do out of it. And that's the kind of book that I wanted to write. I didn't want to invent a new world necessarily.
I wanted something that was a very basic idea and say, "You know what? With all this stuff out there with Wikis and blogs and podcasts and all of these things that we hear about, let's get back to what the actual core idea is of marketing and what we should be doing." And that's what I wanted to try and write about.
Chip: Well, yes, you know getting back to the point of whether you called personality or not - I mean, unique -that kind of talk below those things that you know you've just - the people should focus on more now because of all the media out there or is it something that they should have been doing all along and people just didn't realize it?
I mean I guess that's what I'm trying to get at. Is this something...?
Rohit: Oh, OK.
[cross talk]
Chip: Are you struck on new thing or is it something you just managed to figure out in a neat package today?
Rohit: I think that it is more important today than it was in the past. And the reason why I think, that is because today personal opinion and individual opinion can travel much further, much faster. And because of that people are expecting and are sharing the word about who's authentic, who's doing something right and who isn't.
So, right now for example one of the things I talked about is Hollywood movies and Hollywood releases. And this idea that 10 years ago you used to be able to release a movie and count on that opening weekend to cover the cost of the entire movie before Monday around the cooler when everybody kind of learned that the movie was bad and it sucked.
And now what I describe in the book is the window of suckiness is shrinking. I mean, now if a movie is really bad people know about it on Friday night and you know longer have that big weekend to count on.
And so it becomes that much more important to create something good and to actually promote it in such a way so that people do get what it is and what they're talking about. And you can't pull the wool over people's eyes anymore.
And if you thing about a Hollywood movie, it's the same thing as if it is you know, any other brand or any other product. Consumer opinions travel much further, much faster. And in that environment authenticity is really the new thing that companies need to focus on.
Chip: So, really the new communications environment you know weeds out the phonies much faster and so you really have to achieve that authenticity much more quickly than you have in the past.
Rohit: Exactly right. And if you look at any of the horror stories that people pass around about social media whether it's the bike lock that got cracked by the pin or the you know-or any of the other-kind of like the whole food CEO getting outed for being on the message boards.
I mean, all of those examples are based on this idea that people can share these things and find you out much more quickly in this new media landscape.
Chip: I imagine in your role at Ogilvie you do a lot of work with companies in this very area and I'm assuming that you do try to apply the concept of personality when you're working with your clients. What do you see as the biggest obstacles in your own consultancy?
Rohit: I think, that I definitely do. I mean, a lot of the ideas of the book are based on the work that I've done through the Ogilvie additional influence team here. And I think, one of the things that I see most often as a fear or a barrier is this idea of the loss of control.
Because a lot of times I working with clients who are in the PR roles and so they're very used to the corporate messaging and what the brand stands for and being able to control that. And so the idea of losing that or letting people talk about your brand who aren't necessarily trained on all the brand messages is a very scary idea.
So you know, because of that I think that part of the fear factor in what we need to get past is that, you know what? It's going to be OK, Number 1. And Number 2, this is not something new. People are already talking about your brand.
The new thing is that social media is giving you a way of listening. And that's scary because now all of the sudden you know what people are saying about you. And that's always more scary than not knowing.
Chip: Right.
Rohit: But, it doesn't mean that there's this new shift and all of a sudden people are talking about you. It just means that now you're actually really able to listen.
Chip: Now, obviously there are a fair number of companies out there that people aren't talking about. And I'm thinking you know primarily of sort of you know old time manufacturing-type companies that you know, primarily sell to other manufacturers, or, you know raw-materials type companies.
Does every company need this kind of personality? Does every company need to worry about this or are there some companies that really can get by without paying attention to it?
Rohit: I think, every company does need to worry about it. I think, that there are some cases probably where it may be less important. I think, that one very common case is if, for example, you invent something or have a product that is so game-changing that it really-nothing else matters. In that particular case, it really-I mean a lot of things that usually matter in business wouldn't matter.
So only let's say you've got the cure to cancer. You know, the cost of what you're selling that at, it doesn't matter; if the company messaging, it doesn't matter. The personality, to a degree it probably doesn't matter as well because if you've got something that is so revolutionary that it just re-invents a certain space...
[cross talk]
Chip: Mm-hmm. So, you can be an absolute jerk and people still want to be cured of cancer, right? I mean..
Rohit: Yeah, that's right. That's right.
[laughter]
Rohit: And those situations are very, very rare; very rare. It may seem like they happen frequently but when they do it's not a-you know, the cure to cancer is a long-lived thing. It's not a, "Oh, we have something new today, " and then next week somebody else has something new.
Chip: Sure.
Rohit: That's not the situation I'm talking about. So, that situation is very, very rare. But, I think, for pretty much every other business, every other industry, every other situation, personality and authenticity is key.
Chip: Excellent. Well, my guest today has been Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvie Public Relations. He is the author of the book "Personality Not Included, Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity and How Great Brands Get it Back." Thanks for joining us today.
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