The Cheat Code

by Brian Wong

  Sometimes it pays to dream in smaller chunks—as long as you dream every day. Devour the world in bite-size pieces. They’ll get bigger all the time.

  Celebrate every new rung on the ladder! If you do—no matter how slow your climb—you’ll have the confidence to keep going. That’s a golden asset. You’ll exude the aura of somebody who’s on the way up, and when you start inspiring that perception, it happens.

  Life is long, and the race, as they say, doesn’t always go to the swift.

  If you want to become the stuff of legends, the key is to do everything just a little bit better than everybody else. That’s how you cheat your way to incredible success, one day at a time.

  No matter what business you’re in or what you’re selling, your promise is your brand, and your brand is your promise. You’re telling people what you will do for them, and your success in large part hinges upon how appealing that promise is. Kiip’s promise is “We create advertising that people actually like.” That’s a huge promise, and it’s a primary reason that our company has been as successful as it is.

  Your brand, though, is only as good as its presentation: how it looks, sounds, and feels. Its presentation is the beginning of your promise. Some people might think that presentation takes a backseat to substance. But like it or not, presentation matters, and if you offer the world a brand that is not sensually attractive, you’re going to have a hard time getting people to pay attention to the substance of what you have to offer.

  Evolutionary psychologists say that humans are programmed to differentiate a threat from a non-threat in two seconds. And today, with attention spans shorter than ever, that’s about as long as you have to make a good visual first impression.

  I started my career in design. I was the kid who got his hands on a copy of Photoshop at the age of eleven and learned from tutorials online. You should have seen some of the cool stuff I handed in during high school, and I’m convinced my strong presentation skills were a big part of what enabled me to leapfrog grades, which landed me in college at age fourteen. Sure, the content of my reports probably had something to do with it, but to be honest, the content wasn’t always as fabulous as the way it was presented. Everything I turned in always looked fantastic because of the design skills I taught myself from tutorials on the Internet.

  My projects didn’t need to be the best in the world; they just needed to look better than the next guy’s (another cheat). I handed in the same report on dinosaurs as everybody else, but mine had an extra-sexy cover page that looked slick and professional. That was the Brian Brand: The Early Years.

  The Brian Brand projects looked so good that they promised to be good, and that became a self-fulfilling prophecy, setting the stage for further achievement.

  I was the kid who always added graphics and perfected the look of all of my class presentations, and it served me so well that I’ve carried it with me throughout my career as an entrepreneur. Of course, I’m in advertising, which is a lot about presentation—but I would argue that presentation is equally important for virtually any other type of business.

  The fact is, we’re visual, sense-driven creatures, and we’re not the only species that is. It’s telling that the phrase “the birds and the bees”—referring to two types of creatures that are both fundamentally animated by beauty, whether flowers, fragrances, or the splendor of colored feathers—has become a euphemism for love and reproduction: the essence of life.

  In regard to people, I’ll be the first to admit that you really can’t, as the cliché goes, judge a book by its cover; it’s what’s on the inside that counts. But that truth simply doesn’t apply to things like presentations, reports, websites, logos, and even little details like how you space paragraphs in your emails.

  When it comes to visual things, we’re all shallow. We make snap judgments. We like beauty—in flowers, in art, in architecture, in bodies, in faces. This tendency is, after all, a part of nature.

  Beauty catches our attention. It seeps into our memory, into our subconscious. So if it’s brand recognition you’re after, good visual presentation isn’t just something that’s nice to have. It’s a must. Who can forget the beauty of a peacock, or even the NBC peacock logo? That’s the brand that helped make NBC an early leader in color TV. The visual signal was so significant at the time—although people don’t remember that, because nobody owns a black-and-white TV anymore!

  This cheat works almost every time, for almost every kind of brand. If shit looks sleek and sexy, people will be primed to see and judge it in a better light. That’s a time-and-time-again truism. The slicker a brand is, the more you trust it—and the better you remember it.

  Visuals matter even in something as simple as an email. If an email is horridly formatted, with big-ass paragraphs, no spacing, and a tiny generic font—or, worse, huge letters and garish, in-your-face colors—you just don’t want to read it, and when you do, you’re already expecting not to like it. You think (maybe consciously, maybe not): “They didn’t care enough to make it look good, so I’m supposed to waste my precious time on it?”

  You can only imagine the response Kiip would get from our pitches if we designed anything that was not aesthetically pleasing. Actually, you probably couldn’t imagine it, because there would be no Kiip. That’s part of why our design director, Amadeus Demarzi, is my cofounder. Design is absolutely crucial to the success of our brand, and to yours as well, no matter what that brand is. When you look consistently good, it helps get you in the habit of being consistently good. People come to expect that from you—and so you come to expect it from yourself.

  So here’s the cheat in a nutshell:

  To be memorable, look good, look different. That’s your brand.

  When you look consistently good, it helps get you in the habit of being consistently good. People come to expect that from you—and so do you.

  One theme that runs through many of the cheats in this book is to be careful never to get complacent. Even once you’ve made all your company’s visuals, from your logo to your website to your emails, look consistently pretty, you’ve got to match the march of time with tweaks that keep your look fresh.

  So once you’ve nailed your presentation, the next step is to tweak it. Don’t get in a rut. Get people to expect the unexpected, and they’ll be more interested in seeing you again. It builds your “you brand.”

  The same thing goes for whatever your product is. Let’s start with emails. I once hired a sales guy who would end all of his emails with a random animated GIF appended to the bottom of his post—something like a dancing chicken or some funny cat video, but always something different and memorable. You always opened this guy’s emails just to see what he’d appended.

  No matter what business you’re in, it’s super-important to tweak your company’s various appearances on a regular basis and to be absolutely certain that your look reflects the forward momentum of your brand.

  If you don’t keep adjusting your company’s visuals, people will think you’re stuck in a rut, even if there’s evidence that you’re not. On a subconscious level, looks don’t lie.

  Similarly, how your company describes itself visually can be as eloquent as the words you choose to describe it.

  If your looks don’t portray progress, it actually undermines your progress, especially in businesses that convey their promise with visuals-driven media, as so many do these days.

  As time goes on and your technology and techniques evolve by leaps and bounds, you want your visuals to reflect it—your decks, your website, your logo, everything.

  In short, you need to constantly update your look in order to signal to your customers and clients that you’re keeping up with their demand for improvement and innovation—that you’re evolving to meet new needs as they arise.

  Kiip’s initial product look was very basic—just an email field and an image—but as we added new functions over time, we aggressively reflected those improvements visually. We also made our design more app
ealing for the larger screens that were beginning to dominate the market, and we tweaked our interface to make it look more like Apple’s design, so it would fit in better on Apple devices. Another thing that told people that Kiip was on the move was our addition of background images for rewards, which made them feel more integrated with the app. We then showed the industry what rewards could look like on the future generation of connected devices—to help our clients imagine the future with us.

  Even as I write this, we’re in the midst of a complete overhaul of the design. And it won’t be the last.

  Facebook is famous for design changes (or infamous, among the customers who love to hate Facebook’s changes). There were so many times when Facebook changed and people went: “Fuck, why did they move the button? Why did they do all this shit just when I’m getting familiar with it?” But despite these complaints, Facebook’s continuous design evolution is a big reason the network has continued to thrive as the uncontested market leader while so many of its competitors have fizzled and died.

  Facebook changes their look to get their users used to the fact that there will always be changes to its functions to meet the demands of the times. Change is absolutely essential, especially in technology. True, some of Facebook’s changes may be of more benefit to the company than to its users, but that doesn’t matter. Facebook is training people to expect change as an organic process of technology as well as of life.However, Facebook tweaks in a controlled way—not too many, not too fast, but always something. That way, they have the ability to introduce and test new options without igniting a big revolt.

  The company I used to work for, the news aggregator Digg, didn’t handle design change nearly as well, and it almost buried them.

  For a long time, as Digg’s success built upon itself, the company took the attitude of “Our user base is so loyal that we might lose people if we change.” Then, with little warning, in the summer of 2010 they pushed out their V4 release, which fundamentally changed the entire look of the site overnight, and it exploded in their faces. They killed their policy of embedding ads that looked very similar to the stories, and started teaming with media outlets and celebrities to create publisher accounts. The too-big-too-fast changes also created a bunch of technical glitches, which of course nobody liked. Their whole community of partners and users got pissed beyond belief. And because Digg’s bet was so big, they couldn’t gracefully back away. Within a few months, they were losing so much money, they had to lay off more than one-third of their staff. It was a bloodbath. Good people lost their jobs. Profits evaporated.

  The point is it was smart for Digg to make some changes to the look and feel of their site, but they shouldn’t have totally overhauled their entire business and design structure all at once. And they sure as hell shouldn’t have bet the farm on it.

  Progress, in other words, is crucial. But it needs to be nuanced and controlled, and its visual presentation should reflect as much.

  Don’t make the mistake, though, of thinking that you can fake the existence of progress with nothing but a new look. There are companies in our mobile advertising space that are still, to be blunt about it, shoveling the same shit, but they have rebranded themselves to try to trick people into thinking that they have a new product when they really don’t. Customers will see right through this. Great visuals or no great visuals, you still need to continue to make the product better, not just the look.

  When you achieve real progress, you don’t have to trick people.

  But you do have to show them—with irresistible visuals—that progress has been made.

  Keeping the look of your company brand fresh and powerful is critically important, but never forget that you’ve got two brands. One is your company, and the other is the brand known as you.

  How you look counts. It always has. It always will. If that sounds shallow, I apologize—but these cheats can’t help you succeed if they’re not brutally honest.

  The good news is that you can project a strong personal brand by following the same rules I just outlined for your professional brand: look good, look different, and keep updating your look, but gradually; no big makeovers overnight. You’ve probably gone back to your hometown at one time or another and run into some guy who looked like he was wearing the same sweatshirt he wore in high school. Not too impressive, is it? You’re afraid to ask him what he’s been up to lately, because he’ll probably say something like, “Same old thing…you know.” He looks exactly the same as he did when he was seventeen and bagging groceries at the local grocery store, and so you assume his career never advanced much further. You’d probably be right.

  What if you actually have been moving ahead in life, though, but still show up in the same old sweatshirt—to work, a party, or a high school reunion? If you present yourself the same way you did years ago, you’re telling people you haven’t changed, even if you have.

  But it’s not enough to just look good. If you want to stand out, you also need to look different. But don’t be different just to be different. Do it to be you.

  Part of my personal brand now is that I don’t wear the same outfits that everyone else wears—not for the sake of making a statement, but just because I wear whatever I want to wear (which I suppose is a statement in itself, but an authentic one). If I’m going to a big meeting where everyone’s going to be in a suit and tie, I’ll come in wearing a blazer or polo or whatever—cool shoes, cool socks. You should have seen the socks I wore on the cover of the Young Millionaires edition of Entrepreneur magazine.

  When you present yourself authentically, people go: “Dude, I have a lot of respect for that, because you’re so comfortable!” People admire you when you’re you. They don’t trust you if you’re trying to look like somebody else—and if you’re trying to look like everybody else, good luck.

  When I started taking business classes, about ten years ago, they trained us to wear our sharpest suits when we went into an interview or any other kind of important meeting, partly to make people take you seriously, and partly so you’d take yourself seriously. The thinking was, if you had a killer suit on, you’d psych yourself into believing you were a mature, hard-nosed business person. It was good advice…back then.

  Today the trends have changed and it’s now cooler to dress as you, not as someone you want to be.

  In my business, advertising, the old-school, cookie-cutter Don Draper look doesn’t cut it anymore because it doesn’t express the creativity people are looking for in their ad agencies these days. Today if you want to be perceived as creative, you don’t need to look like everybody else in the room to make them feel like you’re one of them. In fact, you shouldn’t try, because when it comes to your personal visuals, just as with your company’s, looking different can actually be a plus. (To get all film-theory about it, it didn’t work for Don Draper either. The whole point of that series was that Don didn’t feel comfortable with who he really was, and his tight-fitting suits made him look fittingly uptight.)

  But while the styles themselves have changed, the whole premise of dressing for success still makes sense on many levels, because we’re all shallow about appearance—our own, and others’.

  So how should you present yourself at an important event, interview, or meeting? These days, it depends on who you are—even beyond your job category or your industry.

  “Who you are” literally means who you are, as a person—a party of one. If you were born in a hoodie, raised in a hoodie, love your hoodie, and have some sick hoodies, go ahead and wear the hoodie to that meeting, because you’ll look like who you are. (Hey, it worked for Mark Zuckerberg.)

  Simple clothes can show comfort and confidence, and the more confident and comfortable you are, the better you can perform—and the virtuous cycle continues. Just be sure it looks deliberate, put together, and not like you’re wearing a hoodie because it was the first thing you found on the floor when you rolled out of bed. Even if your look is casual, you still need to acknowledge the fact that yo
u are playing a part.

  But the part is not a cameo. It’s you, in the starring role. Own it, and success will follow.

  When Steve Jobs returned to work after the temporary remission of his cancer in 2007, he made a momentous announcement that effectively memorialized his influence upon the company he cofounded.

  At the Macworld expo, he announced that Apple was dropping the word computer from the company name and becoming just plain Apple, Inc. “Of the Mac, iPod, Apple TV, and iPhone,” Jobs said, “only one is a computer. So we’re changing the name.” It was super-clever because he was telling the world that Apple wasn’t just a computer company but a lifestyle company. And as soon as you make your products part of the lifestyle of people, you’ve made it part of their life, which is to say something they can’t live without.

  This reinvention cemented Apple’s future, making it at least temporarily the most expensive stock of all time.

  Another company that recently reinvented itself is Under Armour, an athletic apparel company that made its fortune selling moisture-wicking T-shirts. But simply by acquiring three apps (to the tune of half a billion dollars) that track health, fitness, and nutrition, UnderArmour transformed themselves literally overnight into a digital sports company. Now they have the world’s biggest network of apps for tracking health and fitness.

  Those who adapt to change can eventually make change. Once you reach that level, adaptation is easy because you’ve not just predicted the future but created it.

  If you tell your own story to potential investors, clients, partners, and customers, you’ll just sound like a desperate self-promoter. Instead, pitch it to reporters. When they tell your story for you, you’ll sound like a rock star.