Emotional Branding
How much of your life story should you use to market your company?
The walls of Rodney Evans's cluttered New York City office give you a sense of who he is. There is the Knicks home schedule scribbled on a whiteboard. There is a certificate of merit that his daughter received at nursery school. There are framed photos of Muhammed Ali with Malcolm X that Evans bought for five bucks from a street vendor, and also a huge poster of Aretha Franklin. And by the door is a photo of the U.S. Capitol taken on October 16, 1995, the day of the Million Man March.
Evans snapped that shot himself, standing on the fender of a truck for a better vantage point. The event lives in his memory as a turning point. "It was good to see so many African American brothers from places like Alaska and New Mexico," he recalls. "We talked about really helping ourselves, so when I came back, I gave two weeks' notice, quit my job, and started a company."
Seven years later, Skyline Connections Inc. [#3] has grown to revenues of $14 million. The company started out as a hardware reseller but has evolved into a business that sells network and information-technology services to clients like Lockheed Martin and Bank of America. Evans says his ambition is to take his business to $100 million. With a five-year compound annual growth rate of 124%, his claim cannot be dismissed.
STRAIGHT-UP COMPETITION: "It's not my style to sell anything other than my services and products."
#3, 2002 Inner City 100
Skyline happens to be the highest-ranked minority-owned company on Inc's fourth annual Inner City 100 list. Many entrepreneurs would consider that credential a major achievement, but Evans has historically approached the "minority" label with some reluctance. "Obviously, when I walk in the door and hand you a business card that says I'm president and CEO, you know that Skyline is a black-owned business," Evans says. "But it's not my style to sell anything other than my services and products. I like to compete straight up." The CEO, 49, asserts the standard Skyline pitch is to "sharpen a pencil and come up with some good numbers."
His way is not the only way, however. Among the entrepreneurs on this year's Inner City 100, quite a few offer a provocative contrast to Evans's "numbers first, identity second" approach. They seem much more comfortable crafting and then selling a story around their own identity, ranging from their background to their skin color. Davin Wedel, who runs Global Protection [#94], a condom manufacturer, wraps his company in slacker slickness by telling people how he started it from his college dorm. Veronica Rose, CEO of Aurora Electric [#5], says 80% of her potential clients want "all the details" about what her life as a female electrician is like. Divorcée-cum-CEO Carol Latham, who employs many former welfare mothers at her polymer manufacturer Thermagon [#16], was cited in Thomas Petzinger Jr.'s The New Pioneers, a noted business book. And Lanre Olotu, who emigrated from Nigeria in 1980, says he details his background on almost every sales call he makes for his company, Printing Methods [#61].
STARTING FROM SCRATCH: "I don't have connections. I haven't lived in this town for 40 years. I was born in Brazil, and my parents are both immigrants. I think I lose a lot because I don't have that network that goes back a generation. That's a very big deal."
#71, 2002 Inner City 100
Using your life story to sell your company is one form of what experts call emotional marketing -- getting customers to take an interest in your business not just because you offer a snazzy value proposition but because they feel something about your company. If CEOs are comfortable talking about themselves -- and can connect their story to their customers' needs -- emotional branding can be a freebie competitive advantage for a small business. "I never wanted it to be about me, but people got such a kick out of me," says Rose. "That's what I needed to do to get my foot in the door." But as Rose and other CEOs on the Inner City 100 can attest, tying a company's identity to its leader can be a tricky proposition, both for the emotional toll it can take on the CEOs themselves and for their companies' long-term growth.
Ivan J. Juzang, CEO of MEE Productions Inc. [#20], is among the most adept of the emotional brand builders on the Inner City 100 this year. His communications-research and media company, located in blighted North Philadelphia, offers its take on the tastes of black urban youth to customers ranging from New Line Cinema to the National Institutes of Health. Like many entrepreneurs who engage in emotional marketing, Juzang honed his story when he was looking for investors. "People like the story of how we started," he says. "I was head coach of a little league basketball team in Pittsburgh -- I went to Carnegie Mellon -- and I saw how young people gravitated to hip-hop music and hip-hop culture."
From there Juzang went to IBM and then to Wharton for his M.B.A. As a class assignment, he wrote a business plan for a company that would make videos that blend hip-hop music with a self-help motivational message geared toward kids. Juzang's team presented the plan to some venture capitalists that his professor brought to class. But their reaction to the idea was negative. "They kept asking me, 'Where's the research?' " Juzang recalls. "They wanted to know what did I know about low-income African American urban youth? I was this guy from Wharton." It was then that he realized there might be a marvelous market opportunity for figuring out what inner-city kids like and want, and why.
