The Power of Audacity
Would you name your business after a profane word?
Of course not! That’s total insanity! Nobody would do that! It would absolutely guarantee death and destruction in the marketplace, as well as a storm of lawsuits in this litigious world.
Or would it?
You know, the one thing we’ve lost, in these years where we seem to be hellbent on taking all the sharp corners off of everything, where everything has to offend as few people as possible, where every single sentence is pored over by the marketing team, then management, then the legal team, each seemingly determined to remove any trace of personality, is simply this: audacity.
Nobody has the audacity to come up with something as groundbreaking as the original Ford Mustang, where John DeLorean simply made up the research data to support his gut feeling that this would be a hot seller. The result? 1.2 million cars sold in 2 years. That’s more than today’s Camry, by the way.
It took a broken-backed, near-to-death Apple to bring out the first iPod and set them on a course to dominate the consumer electronics marketplace. If they’d been selling like Microsoft, would they undertaken such a radical strategy shift? Probably not.
In virtually every business realm, insane and incessant benchmarking and comparison against the competition eliminates innovation. “Oh my, they have a “PRODUCTS” tab on their website! Maybe we should have one too!” “They have 1.2 GHz, make sure ours is 1.2 as well!” “They’re doing launches with these marketing components, make sure we do the same thing!”
The big problem with this: it assures is that you look exactly like the competition. And if you look exactly like the competition, why would anyone choose your product or service over theirs?
And yes, I know, I know . . . ya gotta go with the flow, the CEO wanted it that way, you can’t speak up because you wouldn’t work there anymore, you don’t have the authority to do that, the agency decided to play it safe, etc, etc. There are a million excuses, each fit for an age of reduced expectations.
But what if you did take a risk?
What if you decided to really be audacious?
What if you threw away the comparisons, and did what you knew is right?
That’s what we did when we launched a new made-in-the-US headphone amplifier company. Yes, you heard that right. Made in the USA. Not only that, they had an audacious value proposition: “Made in USA, for Chinese prices.”
Think about that. Think about how simple that is. Anyone can understand that value proposition.
But. You have one shot in a crowded market. And that market is full of skeptics, ready to dismiss any and all claims. And you don’t have an infinite marketing budget. In fact, you don’t really have much of a budget at all. So how do you brand the company, and how do you position it?
In our case, we decided to name it after our first reaction to the dead-simple value proposition and great-looking products: holy shit!
That’s right. The company’s name is Schiit.
Crazy, yes. But also very, very smart. As in, “That’s some really cool Schiit.” Or, “You aren’t going to believe this Schiit!” Or, “Everything else ain’t.” Or any number of fun puns and plays on words. It led to a forthright, no-apologies, tongue-in-cheek, we-don’t-take-ourselves-too-seriously tone that influenced everything we did.
And, you know what? It worked.
Holy Schiit did it work. The company exploded onto the scene less than a year ago, and is already one of the top brands in the space. No. Stop. Read that again: in 8 months, they went from nonexistent to a top brand. Yes, it is a small space. But it’s very crowded. And the outreach budget was essentially zero. Word of mouth (and, yes, chatter about the name) on focused internet forums drove pretty much the entire marketing campaign.
And we learned a few very surprising things. One was that the old adage of “people don’t read the website” isn’t necessarily true. You’d be surprised how many potential customers clearly read every single page of the Schiit website.
Why? Because it wasn’t stuffy, boring, pompous, or corporate. Here’s an example from the FAQ:
Why the hell do you need a 6 watt headphone amplifier?
Why the hell do you need 400 horsepower? Why the hell do you need bacon-wrapped hot dogs? Why the hell do you need anything that’s fun and exciting in life? Face it, you don’t need anything. You should renounce all your worldly possessions and become a monk.
“You must have had negative reactions!” You’re probably saying. “How did you deal with them?”
Short answer: we had much less negative reaction than you’d expect. And, you know what? If someone is so humorless as to be offended by a word (that, by the way, is completely meaningless to the vast majority of Earth’s population), and can’t see the value of made-in-USA-for-Chinese-prices, hey, maybe they aren’t such a hot customer to begin with.
So. Throw off the chains. Stop comparing. And start thinking: it’s time for audacity again.
What does this have to do with marketing?






