Joan Rivers and the Secrets of Brand Building

Tuesday April 05, 2005

It was another star-filled night on the Academy Awards red carpet when Jennifer Lopez va-va-voomed her way over to thank Joan Rivers for having publicly praised her voluptuous curves.

Joan’s red carpet “pre-show” awards on cable’s E! Entertainment had become a pop culture staple, and the unsolicited cooing of stars like J. Lo seemed like the final, hard-earned seal of success.

I watched the exchange with delight. As an executive producer and writer, I’d worked with the network as its reach exploded from around 40 million homes to more than 80 million.

Much of that success had to do with building a strong brand that attracted viewers and advertisers. And much of the brand building was attributable to Joan Rivers. Edgy and in-the-know, Joan embodied the promise of fun, insider access for which E!, the brand, stood.

Now that’s changed. Joan and her daughter Melissa Rivers jumped ship this summer to the TV Guide Channel reportedly for up to $8 million over three years.

But the brand lessons from the early days of E! still hold true and, in fact, apply to just about any kind of business. So, though there’s no J. Lo on hand to add sex appeal, I give you now the central laws of brand building as demonstrated by the one and only Queen of the Red Carpet…

Go to extremes

E! wasn’t playing it safe when tossed a caustic comic into the very exclusive pond of celebrity schmoozing. Stars were used to “You look mah-velous” not “You look like Dr. Kevorkian’s next patient!” But in making an extreme move with Joan, E! aced the first rule of branding — it differentiated its product from the softer “Entertainment Tonight” and the rest of the competition.

It’s remarkable how many companies fail to differentiate. Instead they play it safe. They avoid extremes. They worry about making too strong a statement. They fail to stand out.

If the Joan Rivers example doesn’t persuade you, consider another dish — Hardee’s, a fast-food chain that just several years ago seemed on the fast track to the bottom of the deep fryer. But then Hardee’s went extreme. First came the gargantuan Six Dollar Burger, followed by the one-third-pound Angus burgers, followed by heftier sales.

The Hardee’s brand, which had no identity, suddenly emerged flexing its muscles and pounding its chest, staking its claim to being the most macho of burger joints. Sure, the mammoth meat patties slow down the drive-through line and may flatten some compact cars, but now, when carnivores think, “Where’s the beef?” many think Hardee’s.

Or consider Apple Computers, which, back in the ‘80s, decided to brand itself as nothing less than a revolutionary force. To get the point across, it borrowed the repressive atmosphere of George Orwell’s “1984” and threw in a kind of Amazon warrior taking down Big Brother, all in a spot directed by future “Gladiator”-guy Ridley Scott. Apple made its statement in a Super Bowl ad that still gets airtime. Now that’s extreme … and unforgettable.

Any size brand can differentiate. It’s about bold choices, not big bucks. When Capstrat wanted to build awareness of the NC Treasurer’s escheats program, we developed an over-the-top nerd character with a metal detector who frantically searches for “lost treasure.” On the set of the TV spot, we told the actor, “Play it like Jim Carrey trying to out-Barney Barney Fife.” He did and the NC Cash campaign went on to exceed expectations by spastic leaps and bounds.

Real wants, speedy delivery

Before you stake out extreme ground, though, it’s important to make sure that you understand what people really want out of your product and that you only make promises you can deliver on.

Joan’s red carpet escapades appealed to America’s aspirational interest in the rich and famous as well as the flip-side desire to cut the beautiful people down to size. The E! brand that Joan helped to build had a solid base in a real human want and could, through celebrity access and Joan’s barbed approach, deliver on its promise.

When a brand miscalculates on either count — the want it is supposed to satisfy or its ability to deliver satisfaction — it runs into trouble. Even Coca-Cola and Pepsi, titans of brand building, have occasionally missed on the precise calculus.

Both pushed their brand images far beyond the limits of their products — to the point of risking seeming meaningless. Sure, I’d like to teach the world to sing, but I’m not convinced that eight ounces of fizzy sugar water will kick start the choir. And yeah, I’d like to think I’m cool enough to be part of something called “the Pepsi generation,” but is this caramel-colored concoction really my ticket?

Pepsi seemed to recognize the stretch and this summer refined its brand identity by going back to the basics of want and delivery. The want that soda satisfies, it turns out, isn’t to time-travel through glitzy dance numbers with Britney Spears (as a previous Pepsi campaign promised). No, it’s the basic desire to taste something both sweet and bracing while chasing down fast food. And on that simple but important point, the company’s recent campaign claims, Pepsi delivers.

Keep good company

Though a successful brand should be able to stand strong and alone, isolationism is usually not the best strategy. At E!, we worked to surround Joan with big names in the fashion industry acting as commentators, including Vera Wang and Michael Kors. If you’re going to compare a powerful celebrity to a bag lady, it helps to have a major designer nearby nodding in agreement.

In the PR biz, such associations are called third-party endorsements. Launching a health initiative? Wouldn’t hurt to line up a few words of support from the current or a retired US Surgeon General. Launching a health initiative aimed at teens? Ditch the Surgeon General and get Usher or Brandy to endorse you during a tour stop. Getting ready to unveil a new high-tech product? If a relationship with an established force, like IBM, isn’t already in place, your gizmo probably won’t get much respect.

This is just one of the many brand-building elements Target has successfully employed to make the cash registers sing. Promoting partnerships with well-known designers such as Philippe Starck and Isaac Mizrahi made the retail giant look not so much like a cheap option, but the smart choice — a key brand distinction.

Controversy and change are your friends

Detractors, competitors and the unstoppable erosion of time always chip away at a brand. But each can also work for you.

E! had its share of critics. “Saturday Night Live” took to parodying our shows, portraying Joan as a smart-aleck skeleton. But Joan was unflappable. “Everything I say, I say out of love,” she’d quip. The producers held fast to the notion that there's no such thing as bad PR. An irate caller to E! proved the point when she shrieked, “I can’t stand that Joan Rivers! She was out of line for the entire show, and I watched all four hours!”

The brand-keepers at Abercrombie & Fitch may have had a similar experience as controversy roiled around their in-store magazine — you know, the clothing catalogue that featured young hard-bodies mostly wearing no clothing.

As a differentiating device, the “magalogue” was extreme and effective. The outcry from "decency" groups, which went on for years, only served to make the retailer ubiquitous. Then, having achieved differentiation, A&F wisely dropped the Playboy-ish approach. Literally stripped bare, the brand had nowhere left to go. Now it's time to dress it up with some mystique.

In E!’s case, critics and competitors couldn’t stop the Joan juggernaut, but a better deal eventually did. E! now has major shoes to fill (Manolo-Blahniks, no doubt), but also a chance to re-introduce itself to TV watchers.

Re-introductions are a golden opportunity to keep a brand fresh and relevant. Imagine if, during the gas crisis of the '70s, American car-makers had introduced a more efficient automobile. The Detroit brands might not have had to soldier through the marketing equivalent of World War III with Honda and Toyota.

In moving ahead, E! should follow the playbook discussed here: assess the want its programming serves in a marketplace that’s changed since Joan’s debut, determine the goods it can actually deliver, then milk the differentiating qualities for all they’re worth.

Joan, meanwhile, will do wonderfully. Once, when the lights suddenly went down in our studio, she shook her head and sighed, “I should’ve never pissed off Johnny Carson.” It was a keen bit of self-deprecation, but also a tad disingenuous. Getting people’s goat is one of the many things Joan does very well … and very profitably. And that last part is certainly worth emulating.

Billy Warden is an account director and television producer at Capstrat. His accounts include TRU (Tobacco. Reality. Unfiltered), Fit Together and NC Cash.