Marty Neumeier

Marty Neumeier is the best selling author of The Brand Gap, a book which has sold more than half a million copies. He was the first person of notoriety to talk about the execution of branding. Not just the theory. But his career didn't start in branding.

In the 90s, Marty ran an award winning software packaging design agency, working with companies like Apple, Kodak and Atari. But at the peak of his success, he got bored. So he launched a magazine called Critique, interviewing design legends like Milton Glaser and Paul Rand. He poured the agency's resources into that magazine, but it consistently lost money for five years until Marty shut it down.

Worse still, it absorbed the business's profits. So when recession hit in the early 2000s, his agency collapsed. But launching that magazine, that turned out to be the best business decision he ever made. In this episode, I'm going to tell the story of how Marty Neumeier became an undisputed authority.

Chapter 1 — Where the Money Is

Liam Curley: In the late 60s, around the age of 21, Marty starts his career as a freelance graphic designer in Santa Barbara, California. Graphic design was still a niche area of specialisation and the few designers targeting the craft are in big cities like New York and London. There are no local mentors. So Marty finds a different way to make connections.

Marty Neumeier: I never sort of rubbed shoulders with the great, great designers that I admired. So I got everything from magazines. I would read these profiles of other designers and get inspired by those and study their work and so forth. And then I thought, well, wouldn't it be great if I could write about these?

Liam Curley: Marty reaches out to Communication Arts, an up and coming trade publication for designers and advertising professionals that would eventually become the industry's leading publication.

Marty Neumeier: I volunteered and it was really easy to get the work because it didn't pay that much. So I started writing about people that I suggested and also a lot of people that I didn't know about who were chosen by the publishers. And I got access to their brains. Basically, you know, I went there and I interviewed them and kind of found out the same things you're finding out. What was the turning point? How did you get here? What's your day like? What kind of work is this? What's your business model? Things like that.

Liam Curley: So Marty learns from these great designers by writing about them because he's living remotely from the industry. But being remote also brings with it advantages. Because he started in Santa Barbara, where there were no graphic designers at the time, he was the first person to call himself one. So he's got immediate differentiation or an immediate unique selling point. He'd see a company could just be a little store that he thought he could do some work for, and he'd just walk in and pitch them.

He actually landed work with a local bank, Santa Barbara Bank, which was just a single office back then. How he did that is he put together a portfolio of sample bank ads. He knew nothing about banking, but he figured banks are where the money is. So he brings in his portfolio.

The marketing manager at the bank loved the portfolio, loved the ads, and asked, can I buy these? Here's Marty speaking on the Creative Shit Show.

Marty Neumeier: I said, no, it doesn't work like that. You have to, like. I have to know what you're doing. I have to know the purpose of this. I have to know how this fits in with your strategy, all this stuff. Strategy? We're just a bank.

Liam Curley: The bank's marketing manager opens the local newspaper to the stock market page. All just grey copy, and points to the bottom of the page. It's a space that's 2 inches high, 14 across. That was their ad space, size of a pencil. It was leftover space offered to the bank at a discounted rate.

So the bank would just cram in copy into the space. The marketing manager wanted to ditch these little ads and get, in his words, proper ones, like the samples Marty had shown him. But Marty saw something he didn't. This tiny space dominated the entire spread. It was the only ad on the stock market page, and that was gold.

Marty went away that afternoon and designed nine long, skinny ads that worked with the space instead of fighting it. Just a headline running all the way across. A small hand drawn illustration. One line of body copy and a logo. They were witty, simple and distinctive. He wrote the copy himself because again, there was nobody in Santa Barbara calling themselves a copywriter.

So it had to be him. Marty brings those ads back to the marketing manager who loves them. Marty asks, which one do you want to go with? The marketing manager says, well, how much for all of them? It's $50 a piece. Marty's broke at the time, with a wife and baby. No furniture, no clients.

His rent for the duplex was $165 a month. So $450 for an afternoon's work was nearly three months of rent. They ran all nine ads, and those ads won awards. So now Marty has awards, more clients follow. And the process of creating that work taught Marty something about copy and design.

He discovered pretty early that he couldn't do great work unless the writing matched the design. It would drag everything down if the copy wasn't good. Words and pictures have to work together. So he started studying how award winning work sounded, how the words and pictures fit together, and taught himself to write. So Marty's building the business successfully in Santa Barbara, and the advantage he has in getting that business off the ground was he was the only graphic designer in town.

But as the business grows, the location becomes a disadvantage. Big clients weren't local.

Marty Neumeier: You know, we were winning lots of awards, so we knew we were good. But it wasn't making any money because clients were not willing to come from New York to Santa Barbara. It just wasn't worth it to them. They didn't see the need for that. So we had to go to where they were.

Liam Curley: I mentioned earlier the ad industry was heavily concentrated in New York and London, so Marty considers both locations. But then he gets wind of somewhere up and coming that's a little closer to home.

Marty Neumeier: I started hearing about Silicon Valley and I checked it out with some people who follow it, and I said, is this really a thing? It's like there's like huge businesses in Palo Alto. Oh, yeah, no, it's serious. It's huge. It's gaining strength. And I was kind of attracted by the idea of, here are these people doing creative things in business, like with products, instead of just the usual things over and over and then trying really hard to sell them. They were like creating the future. And that sounds creative. That sounds like what I like to do. So I decided, even though I knew nothing about technology and still don't, I was just going to go there and get to know it and insert myself into that and add good design to what they were trying to do. And it turned out I was the only one. There are a lot of designers there already. They were making really good money, much more than I was. But they didn't care about technology. They didn't really know how to translate it into communication for other people in technology. And so I had to learn how to do that.

Liam Curley: Marty already had one tech client in Santa Barbara. They did workstations. And that became his first portfolio piece that he could use to position his agency as specialists in tech. Now he'd approached companies like Apple, Adobe, and Atari that were all based within 5 square miles in Silicon Valley. The clients were right there. And in his words, all he had to do was show up.

He got a phone number with a local area code so it looked like he was based in the Valley. And he started cold calling, asking firms whether he could show them his portfolio. That's what he did back then, right? He called Apple's creative team and they said, come in Monday morning.

So he drives 300 miles from Santa Barbara on Sunday night and stays at his friend's house because he can't have the clients knowing that he's not local or they're not going to give him the work. He gets there Monday morning and Apple have forgotten about the appointment, so he has to drive back. But despite that early disappointment, he does make the transition work. He landed Sun Microsystems, got Atari and was doing great work from Santa Barbara with an employee installed in a shared workspace cubicle up in the Valley.

Marty's now making more money with one person in Silicon Valley than he's making with five people in Santa Barbara. So he decides to pack up the kids, the parakeets, the cats and the dogs and moves to Palo Alto. This is the moment when he truly appreciates how powerful specialisation is.

Marty Neumeier: I started applying the idea of positioning, which was very simple to me. It was like, be the only, do something nobody else can do or will do and make sure it's valuable and that everybody knows you have it.

Liam Curley: He starts telling clients, all I do is high tech. Other designers do a little tech, then a museum project, but then not dedicated. Marty was all about high tech. Now, he'd only done one, maybe two tech jobs at this point, but as Marty puts it:

Marty Neumeier: I mean, I knew as much about it as anyone, right? I mean, because nobody knew anything about it.

Liam Curley: The work poured in. Marty quadruples his income in the first year of working in Palo Alto. In his words, and I'll quote him here, all I did was bring my same skills into a different place, into a situation where there was a framework for it.

Chapter 2 — Not Specialised Enough

Marty establishes his firm in Palo Alto by providing a wide range of classic design work, like brochures, identities and posters, often individual pieces of work for different brands.

He's followed the textbook positioning advice. Pick a horizontal, in this case, graphic design, then pick a vertical — tech. That simple act differentiates him from every other graphic design firm working across industries. The problem is, it doesn't take long for the competition to catch on to this specialism in tech.

And once five or ten firms specialise in tech, suddenly Marty has no unique positioning. I've got a quote here that says, I was specialised in technology, but I realised that if I specialised further, I could make higher profits. What was happening that made you think you were not optimally specialised and you needed to go down further?

Marty Neumeier: Oh, yeah. That was kind of one of those boing light bulb moments. Things were going well, but I wasn't getting the kind of work I imagined that I should have. So what my goal was to have maybe six clients where I could do everything for them so everything could be coordinated, right? So the whole brand was seamless. So the logo, the brochures, the packaging, advertising, ad campaigns, not placing ads, but just designing campaigns. And it was hard. I got them, but I wasn't getting the big ones. I wasn't getting really large companies because it was too big for a studio of maybe five people or 10 people at any given time to handle. And they could see that. But it was frustrating because I could see that the specialisation was powerful, but we weren't specialised enough. If we could be more specialised, we could charge more for it, because we'd be the only. Right. We'd be the only ones that were serious about it.

Liam Curley: Without that specialised angle, as Marty says, clients just gravitated towards agencies with big reputations. They'd make decisions based on secondary characteristics, like how long have you been in the business? Or how many people do you have, or how much do you charge? And through this lens, every agency looks the same.

You can't just say, hire us because we do a better job, or look at our awards. It's not really going to cut it because most of these other competitors have awards and saying we do a better job is meaningless. So in this world, you either build your firm to the point where you've done enough great work for great companies that it sells itself, or you differentiate yourself in a way that's irrefutable. And that's what Marty tries to figure out.

How can we differentiate ourselves in a way that's irrefutable?

Marty Neumeier: I really couldn't think of anything except this new thing of retail software packaging. Computers. Everyone liked them. But the software business was booming because people were all coming up with different ways to use those computers. And software was sold in stores and the main place it was sold, I don't know if you had these in the UK, but it was a store called Egghead Software. And that's where you win, because they had all they had was boxes of software, but they did it in a really weird way and it made it hard to actually design a package for it. So they had shelves that were slanted. So instead of being flat, where you could put packages in with the faces out, let's say like in a supermarket or even sideways. They didn't do that. They showed the face of the package laying back on a shelf with another one layered above it and another one layered above it. So you could see the bottom of the box, most of the bottom, and you could see half of the front of the package, half. So he said, okay, this is dumb, we can't change Egghead and this is how they do it, so why don't we design for Egghead? So we had a set of rules like, okay, the name, at least the name of the product has to be on the bottom of the front, like at the lower part, where you could see it, instead of some weird graphics or tiny little pictures of people in offices. And the bottom actually had to say the name of the product too, because you're seeing the bottom half of the time. So we had to design it for that store and that gave us a set of principles that no one had even thought of. They weren't even considering it. They're design studios, like big ones like Landor. They were designing packages to look good in design shows or something, or just stand in a photograph, like from the front, and they didn't even know what to put on the front. There was no strategy, there was no communication strategy, there's no organisation to what they were doing. They just do whatever and they had the ability to get it printed. And that was about it.

Liam Curley: What Marty's doing here is drilling down into a vertical specialisation. He's selecting one area of responsibility within a product manager's remit, one that's important to get right, and he's mastering the delivery of that one responsibility, paying far closer attention than anyone else is prepared to.

This method of isolating one task within a product manager's to-do list and being the best at that one thing. It reminds me of something April Dunford said.

April Dunford is an authority in positioning for early stage tech. In a conversation with Louis Grenier on Everyone Hates Marketers, she made the point that you can get really good at something very narrow in a short space of time if you just focus on it, study it and do a lot of engagements on it. She tells the story of a friend called Alan who was doing fractional chief product officer work and was getting frustrated with the fractional element and the fact that he wasn't particularly differentiated. So he decided to specialise.

He pulled out a diagram showing all 59 things a product manager is supposed to do and he just picked win-loss analysis. It was a thing the companies were supposed to do, but rarely did internally. And within three years of focusing on win-loss analysis, Alan was the authority on it. Running a big agency, making great money. He developed a methodology and a system around it. And when he was talking about the subject, he was talking about it far more interestingly with unique frames and references than anyone else, because that's all he's thinking about.

Marty uses this same approach to present a new specialised positioning as the agency for software packaging. And here's how they do the work. They take two or three design options, mock them up and put them on the store shelf looking like real software packages. Then they talk to customers in this real life setting where the customer is legitimately considering buying the software. The key was in the questions. He never asked a question like, which one do you like? Because that would bring you back to the focus group territory that he's trying to move away from because it's not particularly effective. Instead he'd ask questions like, which one did you see first? Why do you think you saw that one? What do you think it does?

He'd ask 20 or 30 people. And then when you start getting the same answers over, he'd recognise what was winning, why it was winning and how he might iterate to help it stand out further and sell on the shelf. That process leads to effective results. Designing packages made for the environment in which customers buy them, designed with customers to develop the packaging they'll actually notice and buy.

Word gets around about the work Marty is doing. The first time around that he works with Apple, he was just treated like any other supplier. He'd go to meetings with 20 people in the room asking you to pitch. But this time it was different. Apple approach Marty.

Marty Neumeier: They came to us, they heard about this company that's specialising and they needed to have us in the mix. They needed to know, like, these guys only do software. You know, we're looking at Landor, we're looking at some agencies. Our agency said they could do it, but these guys, this is all they do. We want to hear what they say.

Liam Curley: So Marty goes away, prepares some ideas and then comes back to Apple.

Marty Neumeier: We did the craziest packaging ever for them. At the time it was insane, but it was right. And we got to the point where some people thought this crazy one might be the one. But are we going to risk our whole business on some crazy idea just because we think it's good? And so the CEO is really good. CEO said, okay, yeah, it might be the one. Or one of these more ordinary ones might be better for us. How can we tell? And I said, I think you could put it into the market and maybe in some stores and see how it does. Or maybe you could test it, because that's it, I want to test these. And I said, can we test them?

Liam Curley: So Marty does the work he's already been doing, all the type of work that I described earlier, puts together the design options in mock packaging, sitting them on store shelves alongside actual competition, all of that. He brings the results back to Apple to make a selection. Selection is made. Marty and his team roll out the design. Marty then goes on to do the packaging for more Apple products.

Later, when he's putting together his portfolio, he goes back to that CEO at Apple to ask how the software was selling. The answer blew him away. A 40% increase in sales across 15 products without changing a single product. It was just the packaging.

The CEO, Bill Campbell, told Marty, that's an extra 40% with no extra work. Marty asked if he could quote him, and Campbell said, yeah, absolutely. So Marty starts putting together this portfolio on software packaging as something he can share with clients.

Marty Neumeier: Mainly it was the aesthetics. Like, it looked really good. We looked focused. I didn't show them anything that wasn't software packaging. I said, this is what we do. And that right there was plenty. If nobody else is doing it and you just claim that you're the only ones doing it, you get the work, you get a chance. And we did well with our chances. And as we started to get more and more chances and successes, then I built — I think you probably read this somewhere because I've been saying it a lot — we built a slideshow and it was sort of new at the time to bring a carousel projector into a meeting because nobody did that. They just hand out sheets and stuff. So I had, I bought myself a brand new carousel and we made all these beautiful slides. And I'd go into a meeting and show the 22 Ways to Sell More Software.

Liam Curley: Now the slideshow is together with this framing of 22 Ways to Sell More Software. Marty shows it to a friend, a retail computing consultant.

Marty Neumeier: We made a lot of money helping people sell their products at high tech, products at retail. And so I showed him the slideshow and he's going, wow, it's great. Wow, man, great. And then get to the end. And he goes, that's it. I said, what do you mean? Well, that showed you everything. And I showed you our principles. And he says, no, but you left out the main part. And I said, what is it? It's like, how did these do in the market? Oh, well, I said, this one increased prices five times, this one completed three times. And he goes, well, what's wrong with you? That's what they're — that's the end. That's the end of the show is when you say, look, these did really well. And so I went, oh, my God, I am like so focused on aesthetics that I forgot that I'm actually doing something else. You know, my thought was, of course it's doing well. I wouldn't be getting all this work. And so I had to be more specific with my clients and ask them how we did. And the numbers were off the charts.

Liam Curley: So now Marty revises that slideshow and includes the numbers at the end. Well, business was good before this edition, but with this kind of proof of impact, it's about to get even better.

Marty Neumeier: I ended my slideshow with, okay, you've seen everything we've put into these. You know how we know our way around a package. We've invented all these things. No one else has learned how to do this. And so how much does this cost? And then I put up a number that made me gasp like it was twice what we'd been getting. And people, they would gasp because they'd been getting prices from these big design firms that weren't charging this much. And I said, so that's a lot of money. But you know now why it takes that much money. We're testing it, we're doing a lot of work. We take this seriously. We think this is important. I said, so is it worth it? And everybody's like, the room gets quiet. All 30 people, however many are in there. And then I lay the statistic — five times, three times — this amount of money just took from all the numbers. And they're like, whoa, thank you. We'll get back to you. And within a week, they would say, we had the job. And I would say, why did you award it to us? And they would say, because it's important to us that these succeed. So I realised I was giving them a strategic product and the cost didn't matter.

Liam Curley: Selling subsequently became easy because he's cold calling software companies with the ultimate pitch. Here's Marty with Chris Do on The Futur.

Marty Neumeier: I'll say, okay, hey, you don't know me. I'm Marty Neumeier and I do software packaging. And you're in the software business. And I'm the guy who has kind of helped shape how a software package works in store. And I think we should know each other. And I have this slideshow called 22 Ways to Sell More Software. And I'll share it with everybody for free and you'll know all my secrets. Tuesday. Yeah, 15 people. Good. Yeah, cool. I'll be there. See ya.

Liam Curley: He'd show up expecting 15 people and find 30. The slideshow was designed to run for 45 minutes, but it would go on for hours because they just wanted to know everything. And once Marty has done that, who else are they going to hire? If they go to one of the large design agencies and those firms can't answer basic questions about how packaging works on the shelf or how you know the design will actually perform in store, it's over, right?

They're going to pick Marty. Now. Marty's team owned the category. And when you own a category with no real competition, your margins go up. He starts pricing software packaging at $6,000 a project. And over the course of the next 10 years, his team gets better and faster and the price increases to $60,000.

That increase is important not just because of the increased profit margin, but because of the premium story it tells the market regarding Neumeier's positioning. But, and this is important, Marty develops and establishes value first through his work in mastering packaging design. Then he increases price. It's not the other way around.

Herman Simon, author of Confessions of the Pricing Man and visiting professor at Harvard, Stanford, MIT and London Business School, has spoken about this dynamic. Here he is speaking on the Sleeping Barber marketing podcast. Usually you have to create value through innovation, through branding, through the right distribution channel, and then you can charge a higher price. And that is, by the way, a long term repositioning.

Simon uses Lexus as an example. When Toyota launched Lexus in the US in 1989, it started at a low price, but because the quality and service was so good, they built a positive reputation and increased the price every year over a decade. Still selling more cars and closing the gap on Mercedes and BMW because they delivered the value first and then increased the price over the following years.

Chapter 3 — Critique

Marty focuses on packaging design for 10 years and business is great. But the success leads to unexpected challenges.

Marty Neumeier: We started to repeat ourselves because we knew so much about how to make products sell that if we did something different than what we'd done before, it would be a disservice to the client because it wouldn't sell as well. Just so it looked like it was different from everybody else's. But there were certain things that had to be the same and within that you could make variations.

Liam Curley: Now, while some people can do the same thing over and over for an entire career, creatives tend to burn out. Marty gets tired, bored and a little distracted, which leads to errors. He creates a package for a client that looks very similar to a competitor Marty had worked with previously. He makes it similar because that design is what sells best.

Marty Neumeier: I was kind of pushed into doing it that way because the client knew that if we didn't do that, it wasn't going to sell. And I did it. And I should have said, I really shouldn't be working with you because you've got competitors. I already did their product. It's just, I was just working so fast. I just took it and it turned out to be a big fiasco. I made a lot of people unhappy. So at that point, I went, all right, I think this is it for us. I think we've done everybody.

Liam Curley: And after 10 years, add to this fatigue with packaging design, he recognises that the market is changing and he needs to pivot.

Marty Neumeier: I decided that this software packaging business was not long for this world because everything was now being streamed into people's computers. They didn't need to go to a store to get it, they would just go to a website, right? And they would learn about it and order it and it would come to their computer.

Liam Curley: Do you remember at the start of this episode, I shared that Marty started his career writing profiles on famous designers for Communication Arts? He has an idea to do something like that again with a new magazine. And when he says, after 10 years, we're done, I think what he really means here is, after 10 years, I'm done. Business keeps going. Everyone in his team knows how to do the work.

But Marty switches his focus to this new magazine. It's called Critique, and he launches in 1996.

Marty Neumeier: And I got access to anybody I wanted. Everybody wanted to be in Critique because it was smart, and it was edited well, written well, it was beautiful, it was expensive. It was $18 an issue for a magazine. That could have been a mistake, but that's what it costs to produce and potentially make a living from. So I did five years of interviews with people and articles and thought pieces and all that. So that really strengthened my writing muscles and my thinking muscles about design.

Liam Curley: Sounds good, right? Problem is, the magazine loses money for the entirety of those five years. Maybe the market is too small to sustain a luxury magazine in this space. Maybe it's something else. But either way, Marty redirects profits from the agency into this magazine. Throughout the five years, all of his personal energy and focus is on this loss-making area of the business.

Then 9/11 hits.

Marty Neumeier: So all that confusion, chaos, just made it very difficult to continue with the magazine. And I remember the day, I mean, three years in, it wasn't doing the numbers that I hoped it would do. And so I told my wife, what should I do? Should I just pack it in? I mean, I hate to pack it in after three years because maybe that's not long enough. I don't know enough about the magazine, the arc of magazines to know if that's — I mean, is this supposed to take off from day one or does it take five years to build an audience? And I sort of felt like maybe it takes five years with something like this. So I kept going after three years and at the end of five, we were losing money a little bit, not a lot. I mean, we were busting our butts so we were actually doing okay. And then I needed to print the next issue. We had it completely designed, which is a tonne of work to have a perfect magazine designed the way we did it, ready to go to press. And I didn't have the cash in the bank because of the effects on the other part of the business that was suddenly hitting a bit of a slump. And so I called up the printer who'd been very good to us, and I said, look, I think this next issue could be the one, could be the one that does it. We've amped up the design a bit to make it just more edgy. And we think this could do it. Could you front us the money for this one? He says, well, I haven't been paid for the last one yet. I said, yeah, but that's guaranteed. We're in the process of paying you. He says, well, yeah, I could front you the money for the next one if you could give me some collateral, like maybe your mortgage. And I was thinking, am I going to go home to my wife and say one more time we need to get a second or third mortgage on our house to keep the business going? Because that would be a constant thing in running your own business — you get in trouble and you got to take a loan out on your house. We'd always been able to pay it back, but now we're paying it back with a magazine that doesn't have a guaranteed future. So I just came home and I said, this is it, we're done. We have to close the magazine.

Liam Curley: In that turbulent market, it wasn't just the magazine Marty had to close down. The design business was in trouble too.

Marty Neumeier: So Critique went out of business because it was strained, financially strained, and I couldn't go on with it. But also, there was a dot-com bust and a recession at the same time, all in the same area. So I lost a lot of clients from the profitable side of the business. The design business, which was supporting the magazine, and everything collapsed.

Liam Curley: The other thing Marty discovers is that the whole time they were working on the magazine, the office manager was stealing money from the till. It started small, but as they got more and more subscribers, the manager takes more and more money. The magazine may have been profitable the whole time. Regardless, Marty has to let everyone in the business go.

And it's the first time in his life where he experiences this type of professional reversal. But at the same time, it represents an opportunity.

Marty Neumeier: I had to do something fast. And I thought, well, this is my chance. I will write a book about what I want to do, The Brand Gap, bring in some new ideas, try to reframe the whole profession of branding, and then execute on that.

Liam Curley: Okay, let's reverse up on this idea of branding. During those five years of writing Critique, Marty notices something. He's profiling design firms across different cities for a feature in the magazine, mapping where all the hottest firms are and showing what they do. One of the questions he'd ask each firm was, what's your speciality?

And almost every single one said the same thing. Full service. Marty would push back and ask, are you sure you want to compete with everybody else on this map? And they'd insist, we don't want to leave anybody out. We can do it all. But when Marty looked at their actual work, often they weren't really full service anyway.

One firm's entire success was built on annual reports. So he'd say to them, why don't you just say annual reports? You'd be the only one. But they couldn't do it. They wouldn't do it. And that's when Marty realised the design industry was in bad shape.

There were talented firms that didn't know the first thing about how to position themselves. And he started thinking, there's a business here. Throughout his five years of writing the magazine, he's noticing this disconnect. Smart, talented designers making the same mistake over and over.

Marty Neumeier: I was pretty ready to start selling my expertise, and people were urging me to do it. And I thought, no, no, I'm not good enough yet. But the magazine convinced me that — well, wait a minute, nobody's arguing with what I'm saying. I think sometimes they're baffled by it because they don't think that much about what they do.

Liam Curley: You might call this specialisation or positioning. Marty thinks about this strategic mismatch as branding. Branding was already gaining traction from a strategic point of view. David Aaker being one of the main drivers behind that traction.

He's known as the father of modern branding, but he didn't have any of the ground experience of making brands. He hadn't done any of the design or communication. That's what Marty figured was missing in the market.

Marty Neumeier: There was a gap between business strategy and customer experience, and the gap was where brand belongs. And so thinking about it only from a strategic direction only gets you halfway. You still have to execute, and if you execute badly, it doesn't matter how great your strategy is, it's just not going to hit people, it's not going to land. So we have all these designers who don't know what they're doing. Essentially, strategically, they don't know what they're doing. So that was my first audience, other graphic designers who realised something was missing and they wanted to have a seat at the table with business people. But at the same time, business people were very receptive to hearing this, so that was the surprise. They actually love the idea of design. They love working with designers and writers and TV people and all kinds of creative people. But they were intimidated because they didn't know what their role was supposed to be. It just seemed like a different race of people to them.

Liam Curley: Whilst Marty's writing the magazine, he starts speaking on stage, which was something he'd never done before.

Marty Neumeier: I always avoided giving speeches my whole career until I was 50, because I just thought, who needs it? You do all this work and then what for what? You say something stupid and regret it for the rest of your life. So I just thought, I'm going to not do that. And then when I had a magazine, I realised I better do it. I got to promote the magazine, right? And so I started going to AIGA meetings and things like that, giving talks. And it was at some talk where I was talking about the magazine and strategy and what was missing in design. And somebody came up to me and they said, I'm from Pearson, I work with an imprint called New Riders, and if you ever want to publish, make a book out of anything you said tonight, we'd be open to that. I said, really? He said, yeah, I mean, I think you've got some things I've never heard before. So why don't we think about what to publish? Why don't you come back to us with an idea?

Liam Curley: So let's think about what happened here. Through publishing Critique for five years, Marty had developed interesting, unusual perspectives because he was studying designers and their businesses. Then, through the act of writing these thought pieces on each design studio, he's developing opinions on patterns of what's working and what isn't. This is where he lands on this idea of how and why designers are terrible at positioning.

But it's not just that, because he's also reading widely outside the market, which is where he notices that business people seem to have a good strategic grasp of branding, but they don't actually know how to execute. He's taking all these insights and presenting them on stages run by organisations who already have the trust and attention of the people Marty wants to reach. He's not wasting time trying to build audiences. All of his time is spent developing interesting perspectives.

And with those interesting perspectives, existing authorities, in this case an organisation, give Marty their stage. He does that often enough that he gets lucky and presents to a book publisher. Let's get back to that publisher. They make a date for Marty to present his book ideas.

Marty Neumeier: And so I had two, and I even had the book covers done because we had a whole staff. One was The Brand Gap and the other was Zag. And I said, I don't know which one is the most important. This one is more generally all about branding and this problem we're facing of the gap. And this one is purely about positioning and strategy, which is also — and it's the hardest part of what's in this first book, and people really need to hear it. And he goes, oh, okay, so we have to decide. I said, yeah, I thought maybe we could talk about it. And he says, okay, well, we're gonna do this one first and we're gonna do this one second. That was it.

Liam Curley: Marty goes to write the book and he intentionally makes it snappy and concise. In his mind, business books were boring, full of words, no illustrations, way too long. He'd do the complete opposite on all those counts. Here he is speaking with The 2Bobs.

Marty Neumeier: Get to the point. Grab somebody with a headline and after about 100 words, you've got them to buy something or at least be open to buying something. And I don't see why a business book should be any different.

Liam Curley: Why throw 100,000 words and 10,000 ideas at people when they can't remember more than 4 or 5 anyway? Take a big idea, compress it down to something small enough to get your head around, but with all the information still in there. He'd heard Steve Krug, author of Don't Make Me Think, say that the perfect book length is something that can be read on an aeroplane. So he makes a book just for that, designed to be read in two hours on a plane. A book that he calls a whiteboard overview. Rich enough with insights that you can keep going back to it. And when you need to talk to a client about something in the book, you can easily find it.

He writes The Brand Gap, continually polishing until, in his words, you get the simplest possible expression that's true and useful.

Marty Neumeier: Pearson published it. They gave it the royal treatment. I mean, they didn't give me a big advance, and I didn't care about that at all. I just wanted it to be published well. And they have a full sales force that goes out into all the bookstores and gets it in. So it was in almost every decent sized bookstore. There'd be at least one copy of it, maybe four or five copies, and so that helps. And I think word of mouth just happened really fast. I think the need was so strong that people just started recommending it to each other. And so that's why I took a month and said it wasn't on day one. All this publicity suddenly unleashed the book. Not at all. It was kind of like we couldn't tell how it was doing. Then in a month, suddenly it just started to accelerate. That's the network effect, essentially. Real life people telling each other about it.

Liam Curley: By the end of the month, the book is number 15 on the bestsellers on Amazon. For context, Bill Clinton's new book was 25, and it never got above that.

Marty Neumeier: And so I talked to my publisher about it and I said, this is just a fluke, right? He says, no, no, your book is an evergreen. I never heard that term before. What is that? Because it's just going to sell year after year. It's just good forever. And so here we are, 22 years later, and it's selling better than it was even in that first year. So it's slightly increasing. I mean, that just doesn't happen.

Liam Curley: At the time of making this podcast, The Brand Gap has sold more than half a million copies. And as Marty says, it keeps selling a little better each year. It's based on timeless principles. Not hooked on particular tactics or technologies that become obsolete. And aside from Pearson's early sales push of the book, something else spiked sales and awareness.

After the book comes out, Marty starts delivering brand workshops for clients and designers. These workshops used a series of 200 slides and he included them on a CD in the workbook. He wanted the ideas to spread, so he didn't restrict how people used them. But at some point, someone uploaded the slides to SlideShare without him knowing.

SlideShare's homepage featured whatever was getting the most views and Marty's slides were more polished than almost anything else on the platform. So they shot to the top and stayed there, effectively becoming the face of SlideShare. For years, people kept telling Marty they'd read his book online and he had no idea what they were talking about. Here he is speaking with Brand Design Masters.

Marty Neumeier: People kept saying, I read your book online. And I said, what do you mean? How do you read a book online? I mean, there were no ebooks or anything. And then like two years after I went to SlideShare and here's 2,500 comments and requests for workshops. I had no idea.

Liam Curley: The view count kept climbing and at the time of recording, it's past 25 million. From here on, Marty writes several books over the next two decades. And though none quite hit the numbers of The Brand Gap, they're successful. His second book, Zag, earns endorsements from Seth Godin and Al Ries. And he gets commissioned by Google to write The Dictionary of Brand, which he later updated and released as Brand A to Z.

In 2017, he becomes a global thought leader, delivering keynotes and workshops on branding. And he also co-founded Level C, a five-tier brand certification programme that delivers masterclasses in major cities across Europe and North America. All of this happened really because Marty followed his instinct, his curiosity and a pursuit of mastery. The obsessive drive to build the magazine Critique arguably pulled down his design agency, but simultaneously it formed the launch pad for his thought leadership business on brand, which catapulted him to an entirely new level outside of Silicon Valley.

That is how Marty Neumeier became the undisputed authority.

Thanks for listening. I'm Liam Curley and I help experts develop, package and publish unique insights. I hope you enjoyed this episode and if you did, consider subscribing.

One other thing: I've created a free email series called the 10 Patterns of Disruptive Wisdom. In my research of undisputed authorities, these are the consistent behavioural patterns I noticed among those who rise to the top. To get the email series, head to liamcurley.co.uk. Link is in the description.