The good ship Trader Joe's, sailing the (air)waves

The local NPR affiliate here in Kansas City, KCUR, shot me an email yesterday saying, "We had a last-minute cancelation for our 11 a.m. show Up To Date. Can you come in and talk about your book for an hour?" I had a great chat with journalist/host Steve Kraske, which you can listen to by clicking the player below (or, if you want to listen on KCUR's own page, follow this link.)

 I was surprised when callers were more or less evenly split between rapturous fans of the brand and Kansas Citians who were left cold. The lesson in this is, if try to ensure that no one hates you, you'll also be ensuring that no one really loves you. One of the real examples of Trader Joe's genius is that the brand doesn't try to be all things to all people.

As I was leaving the station, Steve Kraske, producer Stephen Steigman, Mary and I chatted for a couple of minutes and it occurred to me that the closest Trader Joe's gets to what we in the ad business call 'brand advertising' is the radio ads the company runs in some markets.

Trader Joe's says that it carefully chooses radio stations that emphasize news, talk, classical and jazz music -- stations that appeal to customers with better-than-average educations. That made me wonder, why doesn't Trader Joe's sponsor NPR programs? NPR delivers that demographic/psychographic profile in spades.

If you're an NPR listener, and have heard local programming sponsored by Trader Joe's, please let me know when and where.

Dark matter and the matter of Trader Joe's advertising

I've been thinking about 'dark matter' a lot lately. Dark matter, for those of you in the, uh, dark, is undetectable, invisible stuff that so far exists only in theory. If it's undetectable, you may think, there's no reason to even think about it. But there is if you're an astronomer, because when you look out at the universe, the known laws of physics (mainly gravity, in this case) can't explain the rate at which the universe appears to be expanding.

To explain the current rate of expansion, the universe basically has to weigh far, far more than the weight of all the stuff in it that we can detect. So, for the observed universe to make sense to physicists and astronomers, they now all agree that most of the universe's mass is made up of something they're calling dark matter.

I'm not usually preoccupied with astrophysics, but lately I've taken a bit of heat for the subtitle of my book. A comment that I get a lot is, "But Trader Joe's does advertise! I get their flyers," or "I hear Trader Joe's radio ads," or "Isn't their web site a kind of ad?"

Yes, you're right. So am I. To learn why, click 'Read more' below.

Five days to #1

Hey now. I was confident that over time, I could build an audience for Build a Brand Like Trader Joe's (yes, using some of the same techniques described in the book.) But nobody saw this happening.

Phew. It's been a hell of first week already, and it's not even over. First The New York Times' food maven Julia Moskin pointed to "Build..." in the paper's What We're Reading blog before she'd even finished the book.

Then, LinkedIn's Chip Cutter started a discussion about Build... by including it in the networking site's 'Social Media Marketing' update. 40+ commenters jumped in and I spent pretty much all day responding to them. It was a lively discussion. Steve Hall's Adrants (an AdAge 'Top 150' blog) also linked to TraderJoesSecrets.

Yesterday evening, while my head was spinning, I got an email from a friend pointing out that I was, briefly, in the top 2000 overall on Amazon, which is astonishing for a book that is about as far from Fifty Shades of Grey as you can get. Thanks Julia, Chip, and Steve for being early adopters! Now hopefully things will slow down a bit, so my marketing and PR plan can get ahead of the buzz...

How it all began: Friday, July 15, 2011. The first Trader Joe's store opens in Kansas City

☞ Opening a new store in a new market ☞ Drawing a huge crowd without Grand Opening ads or specials ☞ A brand built without ad agency help

My alarm went off at 3:45 a.m. My breakfast was pre-made; my coffee waited in a thermos on the kitchen counter. I got up and out to the motorcycle as quietly as possible, to let my wife sleep.

I did not come across any other traffic on my ride through Kansas City, but there were already a few cars in the parking lot of the Ward Parkway Shopping Center. I parked the bike in the far corner of the lot, as I’d been instructed, and walked up to the store.

Twenty or thirty people waited by the doors. They were wrapped in blankets, and slouched in a ragged line of lawn chairs. 

"When did you get here?" I asked the first in line.

"About 3:30," she said laughing.

And we're live!

It's always a bit weird putting out an e-book, since the publisher (yes, that's me too) has such imperfect control over the buyer's reading experience. Since Kindle users set font size, for example, I have no way of knowing where line breaks will fall. Still, I've had no complaints from the many buyers of Riding Man; hopefully, that trend will continue with Build a Brand Like Trader Joe's.

If you buy this book, and find a typo or experience other problems that make you think, "Is this what he wanted it to look like?" please contact me. Within a few days, there's going to be a page on this site that will make that easy.

What is 'cultural branding,' and how did Trader Joe's do it?

Douglas Holt, the author of "How Brands Become Icons,"  divides brand theories into four broad categories...

• Mindshare
• Emotional
• Viral
• Cultural

How Brands Become Icons is a deep, scholarly book, and I won't try to provide a functional summary. I do recommend that you download and read the relevant chapter here, if you want to learn more.

My take on it is that Holt's first three categories are all variations on traditional 'strategic' branding. 

I think he'd agree with me that the first three are, usually, progressive stages in brand evolution. Don't get me wrong; brands don't inevitably evolve along this path, but a brand that fully succeeds at each level moves to the next one. My interpretation of Holt's theory is that if you do a great job building mindshare, you will in the process make an emotional connection with the consumer. Once you make that emotional connection, you enter their social conversation--that's 'viral' in this age of Facebook, Twitter, etc. but the difference is in the way we communicate, not what we communicate. That glowing screen is just the new water cooler.

Cool enough for Anthony Bourdain, without the slightest hint that it's gone to the proprietor's head.

What's the quantum leap from that to a cultural brand? Click that 'Read More' link to find out...

Cover design by Mark Eimer

It's funny that even in this age of e-pub, a book doesn't seem real until you can see a cover. The cover design for Build a Brand Like Trader Joe's was created by Mark Eimer. I love the way he's greyed-out my name, and blurred most of the photo, leaving only my ear and eyeglasses really sharp. It creates the impression that I was a low-key presence in the store, all eyes and ears.

Eimer's treatment of the word 'like' also captures the message of the book. Small and greyed-out, but set off by the row of stars, it's at once subtle and highlighted. By using a script font, he reinforces the 'personal' nature of cultural brands. As Lee Clow says (see the post below this one) the goal is to a brand the customer likes to spend time with. If anything, Trader Joe's goes further; its customers 'like' Trader Joe's in the same way they like their friends.

Build a Brand Like Trader Joe's will be live on the Amazon Kindle site soon.