Andy Cunningham 00:00
Changing your DNA as a company is possible, but it's a lot like a sex change.
Ben Kaplan 00:04
Today on top CMO, we're chatting with Andy Cunningham of Cunningham Collective, the marketing strategist who helped Steve Jobs launched the original Apple Macintosh, a Silicon Valley legend and the author of get to a ha discover your positioning DNA and dominate your competition. Creativity is viral, great ideas packaged a certain way want to spread, they want to be told to someone else positioning, branding execution to spread your message one across our brands to spread it will be simple, surprising, and significant. This is top cmo with me, Ben Kaplan. This is the podcast where we go around the globe to interview marketing leaders from the world's biggest brands, fastest growing companies and most disruptive startups. Today on top CMO, we're chatting with Andy Cunningham of Cunningham Collective. This is Andy Cunningham and she's a legend of PR. I've known Andy for probably four or five years now. And when I first started PR hacker you were someone I look to for advice and recommendations and tips. Because you had a storied career, including you worked on the launch of Macintosh for Apple, you are Steve Jobs as publicist and not only at Apple, but also next in I believe Pixar, Pixar as well. Also, you've worked with basically the who's who of of Silicon Valley tech companies, really at the sort of almost the golden age of Silicon Valley being born, it remind me but it's like IBM, Kodak,
Andy Cunningham 01:31
Cisco and Sun Microsystems and Borland International and PageMaker, and Adobe. And yes, and
Ben Kaplan 01:39
all the companies that really established witless Silicon Valley was went to Andy for guidance, you have some interesting things we'll talk about one being fired by Steve Jobs five times. But that also means being hired by Steve Jobs by five times as well. And now, after you scaled your first company, Cunningham communication to a large PR agency sold it. Now you have a positioning agency, we'll get into that called Cunningham Collective, where you help position companies and that relates to my long winded way of saying this book, the book, we have it up there, get to a ha which is discover your positioning DNA and dominate your competition. I was excited to talk to Andy about her new book get to a halt in this concept that too many business leaders need to ask basic questions about their company. Who are we? Why do we matter before they leap into branding? And if you don't ask those questions, how can you find the authentic branding position that you need? Start out with? Tell me like forget to haha, you've had a long career, you've advised countless companies. First of all, what did you want to accomplish by this book? You didn't have to write a book? Why did you sort of codify everything you've done into into a book,
Andy Cunningham 02:47
I wrote this book because I developed a framework that really helps companies figure out how to position themselves. It is a it's a challenging thing to do. positioning, it's a strategic exercise. It involves understanding the market through many different lenses. And I had a client that really didn't understand how we were going to deliver a new position to them and asked me, So what do you do? How are you going to do this? And I said, Well, I'm just going to do what everybody else does. I'm gonna go and I'm gonna listen to you. I'm gonna listen to your customers, I'm gonna lock myself in a room and come out after three hours of creative thinking and give you a big, great big Tada. And he said, No, that doesn't sound right to me, I don't I don't want I don't understand what you're going to do. I want to know exactly what you're going to do to get to this, because this is a really important thing for me. And you can't just like go create it on a black box. So tell me what exactly are you going to do? And frankly, I didn't know, I didn't know what I
Ben Kaplan 03:37
was going to do. That's the Genesis and you develop that methodology to do it. And so people understand what does it mean? Issei positioning is distinct from branding overall. And positioning goes back to like, I mean, even kind of a seminal book, I think in the 70s Martin Rees called positioning, talk about what the difference is and why if you're watching now, you're, you're like, Okay, I want a great brand. I want to build a brand. I want this brand to be like, you know, like another apple or something else. But why you have to start with positioning and not not just Brendan,
Andy Cunningham 04:08
right. So back in the 70s, two consultants named Jack trout and Al Ries wrote this book called positioning, they discovered the concept. And what it means is it means owning real estate in the mind of the customer or the potential customer. How do you actually move everything else aside in the customers brain to make room for your company?
Ben Kaplan 04:28
It's like movie Inception, right? That was like, going into the mining into the brand. If it's real estate there. It's like the mantra from actual real estate work is like Location, location, location, right? So how do you you want it right? Yeah. How do you get like right there? And how is that? Is it an art? Is it a science? Like what is
Andy Cunningham 04:44
it it's an art and a science? And I think that's the beauty of it. And that's what trout and recently discovered back in the day, but back in the 70s, they were dealing with the only mechanism we all had available to us to get our messages out primarily was advertising. And so they were talking a lot about how you position Your product in an ad, which of course, we all know, we have complete control over. So you can say anything you want, whether it's correct or not. Today, you have to say something that's correct. Okay, it has to be authentic. So
Ben Kaplan 05:12
it might not even be a traditional ad anymore, right? Any number of platforms that people could experience your brand or your product in different ways. So is it harder to then is it harder? Or is it? Is it easy to have the position? Or is it easier because you have more tools that you're just I think
Andy Cunningham 05:27
it's a lot harder today, because you have, yes, you have more tools available to you. But there's also a zillion more competitors in your space today, and a zillion more vehicles for getting the message out there. So back in the day, you're competing only with who else can afford an advertising campaign. Today, you're dealing with everybody on social media and blogs and websites, and you name it, it's out there. So now what you have to do is you really have to find the whitespace in the market that matches up with the assets that the company has. And also, which is new in my book for this particular practice, is it has to also match up with the DNA of the company.
Ben Kaplan 06:02
Well, it's really interesting, there's this notion of DNA, which is kind of like, you kind of are who you are at a core level. And this is interesting, because we've even talked about this. It's not just, you know, like people love taking, like the Myers Briggs Personality Test, right? Like, like, I think like I'm trying to, I don't know if you know it, you are I am an E N T P,
Andy Cunningham 06:24
I think I think at the nominee and tf if
Ben Kaplan 06:27
it's okay. We get along, we're sort of similar. But this is kind of interesting is you have this notion of DNA of a of a company, right? And which kind of company are you and you've distilled this down to there's three main types in the world. There's, there's the mothers, there's the mechanics, and there's the missionaries, right. So so that's kind of one, it's interesting to know your type. And where did that that come from? And why why are there only three types of companies.
Andy Cunningham 06:52
So companies are like people, that's where this whole thesis sort of starts, companies are very much like people. And that shouldn't surprise us because they're made up of people, and they serve people, and people live in them and work at them. So I decided to start looking at them as people as people types. And when I locked myself in my rainy weekend, I reverse engineered my whole process for positioning that black box process that I used to do. I had to reverse engineer it for this client, I started to realize that I was categorizing companies in these three places all the time, just automatically in my head. So
Ben Kaplan 07:24
the mothers, they're like, the customer centric Customer Center. What's example of companies like mother
Andy Cunningham 07:31
lift is a great example of
Ben Kaplan 07:32
a mother kind of Uber Definitely not. Definitely not right. Yes, Nordstrom. Yes. But what's a what's a Walmart, Walmart? No. Okay, so So companies that are customer centric, their entire orientation is around serving the
Andy Cunningham 07:45
right now, the interesting thing about these three companies, and the reason that I kept categorizing them this way, is that they actually do things differently. And that's really where this model came from. So customer centric companies hire different kinds of people measure their success differently, structure themselves differently, talk about different things in meetings, they're just very, very different. And then product oriented companies, same thing,
Ben Kaplan 08:08
if mothers are the customer centric companies, what about the ones that are more product focused, those, according to Andy are the mechanics, and they solve problems, not with amazing service. But by releasing version two, version three, version four, version five of a product and using that method to solve a customer's problems.
Andy Cunningham 08:27
They solve your customer service problem service problems with a system whereas Zappos solves your customer service problems with people. So they actually do things very, very differently. They run themselves differently. They structured differently, they talk about different things, in meetings, they measure success differently. And more importantly, though, deliver their service or their product in a very different sort of way. So I was doing this in my head, just categorizing them like this, before I would go in and do a positioning exercise, I would say, Oh, that's a product company. So therefore, they're going to they're going to measure themselves this way. They're going to do things this way. So these are the types of positions that work for product companies. So then I would create I
Ben Kaplan 09:02
see because it because it's sort of a grant. But now the third type is probably the most fascinating which you call the missionaries. Right. But there's something bigger they're trying to defend and it's it's it's quite a lot of iconic companies in Silicon Valley are like this, like probably like, I don't know, the Googles of the world, the Tesla's of the world, the apple, although you say there's a little bit of shift in Apple, we can talk about that in a second. But what what why are they so different? Why are they I mean, a lot of huge companies in Silicon Valley and what gives them their unique DNA.
Andy Cunningham 09:34
So these missionary companies exist to change human behavior on a fundamental level, and that's what makes them different. A lot of companies in especially in the tech space exist to do something better, faster, cheaper than someone else, but they don't exist to change behavior on a fundamental level. So Starbucks is a great example of a non tech oriented missionary company they existed to create the third space for people
Ben Kaplan 09:58
not home not work this Other than their Starbucks coffee,
Andy Cunningham 10:01
that idea of the third place and they created this whole new experience around coffee drinking, everybody drank coffee before Starbucks, but nobody paid five bucks for one. Okay? So now what we have is we have a company that has existed and has actually successfully changed human behavior on fundamental level. And that's what Apple did in the early days. That's what Tesla's doing. That's what FedEx did also is another great example.
Ben Kaplan 10:25
For a third and final category of company missionaries. It's interesting to think about how the type of company you are influences the metrics that you use. Consider Facebook, in its early days, and CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg, for Zuckerberg, he didn't care a lot about how much ad revenue they were generating, even though all of their competitors did for missionaries. It's all about changing behavior. Right. And so those kinds of companies, I feel like now, especially with a lot of startups, we see it pure hacker, it is kind of like invoke or shift to be like, we want to change the world. And we want to do that. So what's what's the difference between like someone who sort of pays lip service to that, you know, like, we want to change the world through our like, dating app, or you swipe and bubble, you know, whatever the maybe it could, but what is the difference between actually like backing in your DNA as opposed to being like, yeah, we'd like want to be world changers that you put on like your, I don't know, LinkedIn page or something like
Andy Cunningham 11:14
that. Yeah. So I think that missionaries are often driven by cult of personality leaders. I think Richard Branson is one of these people. Elon Musk is one of these people, Steve Jobs is one of these people, and they don't really care about the typical metrics of success that a normal company would care about. They don't look at market share.
Ben Kaplan 11:31
Well, that's really interesting. Because that's, I mean, you think of a lot of those people as visionaries as bold, but I had never thought about them as different metrics of like, they have like a different set of KPIs.
Andy Cunningham 11:42
They have a different set of metrics they do they have a different set of metrics, and it's all around behavior changing. It's all around changing the way people actually do things. It's not like, you know, I did a lot of work in the semiconductor industry, and you know, every semiconductor, they're all the same, right? They may be slightly differentiated. But what I would always hear from one of these companies that I've talked to about mine is really faster. Oh, really? Is that your differentiator? Yes, really? Is my differentiator. Okay, and that's not you know, that is not a game changer that doesn't change the way the way humans behave. And people like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, are people who really measure their success by how quickly are they changing behavior? How quickly are they establishing the third place? That's what Howard Schultz was looking at Steve Jobs was looking at how quickly are we actually penetrating the the business world with this computer? That seems to be very attractive to artists, right? Can we get business people to feel an identity with their computer? So those are the things they think about? They don't think about market share, they don't think about product development, really, to be honest with you, they don't think that much about product development. It's more about behavior.
Ben Kaplan 12:48
I see. Well, and can you be something that you're not? Or is it truly a reflection of who you are, because you get all these and you and I have chatted about this, where some some kind of brand strat strategy agency comes in and gets a whole thing doesn't hold a beautiful package, a beautiful logo, a beautiful message. And it's this like, beautiful, like customer centric brand. And then you like you go like, and then like the company has like a bunch of engineers and a room who like really don't care about the customer at all. But they they're putting on this this front, like Will that work? Or do you have to kind of, you know, make the, you know, like, I don't know, the sizzle reflects a
Andy Cunningham 13:21
steak. An example I love to use on this front is Comcast, I think we we've all probably had a lousy experience, we've
Ben Kaplan 13:28
been like on hold, like a long time at a talk just to talk to your supervisor. Yeah.
Andy Cunningham 13:33
Basically, they they give you internet for cheap. That's, that's their value proposition. But what they decided is they decided to start listening to what the market was saying about them. And everybody says bad things about their customer service. So instead of changing their customer service, what they decided to do was put several million dollars into an ad campaign, telling people that they have, which they have not touched at all, it's exactly the same customer service that they used to have. And so that's what happens when you try to market yourself as something that you're not deep down, it becomes a joke, almost. And in their case, it goes all the way to a joke. But in other companies cases, it's just not authentic. And when you're not authentic in today's world with all of the social media and everything, you can't pull it all for very long. It just It doesn't. It doesn't hold water. Well. And
Ben Kaplan 14:15
that's why I think we see sort of a ton with companies we see. It's much easier to to get it right at the beginning to kind of define who you are than to try to write to change into something you're not right. It's like you can't undo stuff so quickly. Right? What's it set? So so how did why should? How can more companies think about these kinds of issues like earlier on, when maybe they don't have a ton of money, they don't have a lot of things, but they want to get it right.
Andy Cunningham 14:40
If you're a really small company, you can actually make this decision kind of although it's largely a reflection of who the CEO is, but you can actually engineer your own DNA if you're small enough. So the first thing is to think about that, do we really do we really feel like we are so compelled to be all about the customer, then you should sort of structure yourself as a customer oriented company as a store. Arda, or if you're like, we are going to build the world's best product that does XY and Z. And we're going to hire engineers to do that. And we're going to let the customer service thing, you know, create another system for that. That's more technology. You can do that. And when you're young and little, but when you get to be a little bit bigger companies, again are like people and they have their own DNA. Once you're I would say 20 people is probably the number of which your DNA is sort of fixed, and your behaviors are sort of fixed. So you're either so customer focused, you're so product focused or so concept focused, that you begin to start behaving in that in that way. And
Ben Kaplan 15:34
is it is it possible to change so for bigger than 20, Kenya, Kenya Chase,
Andy Cunningham 15:39
you and I talked a little bit about this before, but what I like to say is changing your DNA as a company is possible, but it's a lot like a sex change.
Ben Kaplan 15:46
Okay, meaning it's gonna take a lot of effort, a lot of
Andy Cunningham 15:49
a lot of thought. And you're gonna have to do
Ben Kaplan 15:52
that. That's the quote, we need. Andy Cunningham PR legend says that if you want to change your brand's positioning just just undergo a second. Think of it. Think of as Yes, yes.
Andy Cunningham 16:01
You know, yes, it's possible people do do that. But it's, but it is not done without a ton of thought and a ton of understanding of what different behaviors you are going to have to exhibit if you make those those kinds of changes. And that's what companies don't realize. So you and I were chatting a little bit about this earlier, but Amazon is a company that is very purposefully driving itself to a new DNA model, right?
Ben Kaplan 16:23
So so first of all, where were they before they were a product, right? Because they're just like, cheap books are gonna you're gonna get it for a discount. You didn't we don't need the bigger the markup. And then they weren't just books and they were like write everyday suddenly. And
Andy Cunningham 16:35
I love to say that Amazon eats the world or the universe, one bite at a time. But they started with online books. That was their first thing right, and they were very product focused about that very mechanic. What has happened in recent years, though, in addition to them eating the universe, one bite at a time is Jeff Bezos has purposefully decided he wants to be Earth's most customer centric company, right? And he's gotten there on his website. Now it's his new mission. So he's doing a whole lot of things differently in order to make Amazon, your company and your company in your company. And this is why they bought Zappos. They didn't buy Zappos because Jeff Bezos didn't know how to sell shoes online, he could sell anything online. They bought Zappos because they wanted Tony Shay's customer centric culture, to infiltrate all of Amazon. Well, and
Ben Kaplan 17:17
I wonder because like, to me, this starts, you know, your DNA also likes start sending, like your company values are your north star that sort of helps make different business decisions easier when you know who you are? Well, what I mean by that is, like, you know, it, just like the recent Amazon example is, okay, they have this Amazon Prime service, and you get really, you know, inexpensive two day shipping, but then they start, you know, why are they adding movies and music and all this, but if you're, if you're serving the customer, and even if you have a successful product that just causes people to order more stuff, you're constantly trying to serve the customer better. And that kind of gives you a north star to guide yourself that in the military, they caught commander intent, whether you're a mother or a mechanic or a missionary, in the end, you have to know who you are, because you need to align the team, consider the concept of Commander's Intent, which comes from the military, if you're trying to take a hill, everyone needs to know that the goal is to take that hill otherwise, in the chaos of battle, it's easy to head the wrong way. Right aligned?
Andy Cunningham 18:20
Exactly right. So I like to say if you know what you're made of, you can make something of it. And that's about knowing your DNA. So for example, when I was a little girl, I wanted to be a ballerina. Okay. So when I realized that, and I examined what the assets were, that I did have inside me, once I knew what I was made of, then I was able to make something of it. And what I and what I do today is much more around strategy and writing and the things that I'm actually good at ballet is not one of them.
Ben Kaplan 18:46
But what about the company, here's the flip side of that, which is let's say you know who you are, you know, kind of what you're about. But, you know, you can be a product driven company, you don't want to have lousy customers. And so So is there something to be said for sort of like, understanding this is your natural inclination and focus. So you kind of like make a little extra effort, because it's not in your DNA. So if we want to have like, great customer service, and we're a b2b enterprise company, that's all about the product, but we need that service. So we don't, you know, lose all our clients because they didn't know how to use our product. How do we address that with not in our DNA? Sure.
Andy Cunningham 19:19
So just like humans, we have a facing DNA that is supported by lots of other DNA, right? So if I happen to be a person who is good at playing the piano, and not at ballet, the facing part of me is the piano. But that doesn't mean me in particular that I can't dance at. All right? So what we're looking for is what's the facing DNA, it's going to be supported by other things. So if you're a mechanical oriented company, and you're going to build the world's best product, of course, you have to have customer service. But the way you approach that customer service is going to be very different than if you design yourself, or you come out as a customer oriented company. So in other words, you're never going to see Microsoft holding the world's record for the longest customer service call, which is what? Zappos? Okay? You're never going to see that I'm not
Ben Kaplan 20:05
going to celebrate that either.
Andy Cunningham 20:06
Celebrate the absolutely, absolutely not. So that's that's the whole thing. But Microsoft does have a very good system in place for dealing with your customer service issues. It's just not going to be handled the same way, with quite the same hand holding and touchy feely Enos that Zappos is going to do it Sure.
Ben Kaplan 20:24
Is there? What's a mistake you made? This is a theme of success is contagious. That so let's talk about failure. Yeah, that failure that, you know, we talked about the highlight the aha moment, but what's a sixth mistake you've made that that propelled you in some ways or something on early on in your career, or later, that mistake that caused you to grow in some way?
Andy Cunningham 20:43
Right, I think. So, of course, like everybody, I've made tons and tons of mistakes, but I think that the ones that sort of stick in my head are choosing to work with the wrong kind of people, either as mostly as a client, choosing to work with somebody who is just not, you know, not going to get it not going to work with us not going to be a great partner and, and creating a situation where it's just incredibly challenging to work with that person. Unlike working with Steve Jobs, where yes, it was challenging, but working with him was a rewarding experience. Every minute of the day, I've worked with a number of CEOs where they just made everything, everything difficult, you know, they they didn't have the vision, they didn't have the skills, they didn't understand how to motivate people, they just they just didn't quite get it
Ben Kaplan 21:29
well. And and that's one of the things where it's like, you can take a great job or a great client and you put it with kind of the wrong people and it's it's not going to be great, but you can take an okay, job or okay client you put with great people, it's fantastic, right? It's like so much of the people influence a lot and
Andy Cunningham 21:49
if you if you're working with the wrong, you know, any team is it is a is a combination of the different people involved in that team. And if the leader of the team or in my case, the CEO of a client company, who is essentially the leader is, is either I won't say evil, but sort of on the evil side or somebody who doesn't actually deal in truth as a currency. They they are they make it really difficult for you to be successful. So I try now to to figure those people out before I actually agreed to work with them.
Ben Kaplan 22:21
Okay. And that's, that's good advice for anyone. But also, it's, it's fun to work with, and I'll use the Steve Job for extremely insanely great people, right? Is that fun to work with insanely great people on Life is short, so why not do insanely great things with insanely great people? Andy, you're one of those insanely great people. Thank you so much for coming on. Success is contagious. You know, this episode of marketing is contagious is all about how you can do better positioning, branding, execution to spread your message. And every week, we love to explore that with interesting kind of changemakers and thought leaders, check out get to a ha the book, go to Cunningham Collective.com.com as well. And remember to keep things simple, surprising and significant. Thanks for joining us, Andy. And we wish you all that kind of success. Thanks so much to Andy Cunningham for the great conversation. So are you a mother? Are you a mechanic? Are you a missionary? I would love to know the answer to that question. You can reach me at our agency website top agency.com or my personal website, Ben kaplan.com. Until the next time, this is Top CMO.
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