Branded for Life

Myles Murchison | | Published: July 01, 2005

Harry Hammer used to take breakfast with me in a little café across the street from where he retailed mattresses and furniture at The Warehouse at Nine! Nine! Nine! Homer Street – the address he made briefly famous, shouting on his radio commercials.

“Sell to the masses, eat with the classes,” Hammer would exclaim to me over fried eggs and hash browns. I’d keep my newspaper open at the ready because Hammer often spat food when he exclaimed.

(Hammer’s real name was Bernard Cobin before he had it legally changed. He worked at The Warehouse and when the owner died, Cobin married the owner’s widow. I don’t know if the widow changed her name to Mrs. Hammer.)

Hammer would do most anything for publicity. He yelled on radio stations, waved his arms on TV, conducted an on-air wedding ceremony for contestants in a Sadie Hawkins contest, and spoke rudely at celebrity roasts and publicly supported charities. I didn’t know the word ‘synergy’ back then, but Hammer probably did.

Most people perceived him as strictly shlockmeister, a crass huckster, a guy from the Bronx prepared to do whatever it took to make a buck – which is pretty much what Hammer wanted them to think. Although no one thought much about the science of it at the time, Hammer was branding himself. If you were looking for a bargain in mattresses or furniture, Hammer had earned ‘top of mind.’

“Stack ’em high, watch ’em buy!” Hammer would spout philosophically, leaving the hash-brown splatter pattern on my sports page. According to Al and Laura Ries’s business bestseller The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, “a brand should strive to own a word in the mind of the consumer” (Law No. 5). Ergo, Hammer had earned first position: You wanted cheap, you thought ‘Hammer.’

But if you thought that’s all there was to Harry Hammer, you would have been wrong. The private man was quite something else. He was well read, socially progressive and surprisingly sensitive. He was also very loyal. Years later, when I really needed it, Hammer brought his advertising business to the advertising agency where I toiled as creative director and VP – simply because I asked. After I got to know him, I saw that the public Hammer was only part of the composite, the part he played out for the crowd.

A lot of Bernie Cobin was still buried in

there. Today, as a brand, Christine Magee, president of Sleep Country, would represent mattress retailing’s Second Coming, the Anti-Hammer. Although no one’s ever bought a mattress that wasn’t on sale, Sleep Country isn’t about price. It’s about “the in-store and home delivery experience.” Visit a sleep Country store, ask a few questions and you become aware that, after your home and car, a mattress is clearly the most important purchase of your life – or maybe just after your home and ahead of your car.

What happens in the store – the experience – is precisely what Magee attempts to embody. She consistently projects product knowledge and cheerful professionalism in her company’s radio-heavy media buys that make her virtually omnipresent in this market, even though she has recently moved the head office to Toronto.

“I’m not acting,” she says of her work. “I have the utmost respect for people who act. I’m just being the president of this company.” Unlike Hammer, the branding of Christine Magee, 45, did not happen serendipitously. It was a decision consciously made with considerable financial and personal risk.

Magee was enjoying a successful 13-year career in commercial, corporate and merger and acquisitions within the banking industry in Toronto when she and two of her clients decided to buy Simmons Canada from its U.S. parent and create Sleep Country. She was 34. She gave up her career, she and her husband sold everything they owned, and they moved to Vancouver in 1994 to launch their business plan.

The plan was “to elevate the experience” of mattress retailing and make Magee the brand’s identity. “Women make the buying decisions in the mattress category,” explains Magee. “What better way than have one of the partners who’s a woman in the key target demographic [25 to 54] make the appeal? It made strategic sense.”

The strategy was essentially Law No. 8 of the immutable laws of branding: The Law of the Category. To quote the Reis manifesto: “You have to launch the brand in such a way as to create the perception that the brand was first, the leader . . . Invariably you should use one of these words to describe your brand.” The Magee brand sold a new category. It was called sleep.

With Vancouver as the test market, Sleep Country opened with four stores, a sales concept, a very heavy media investment and with no broadcast background – “If you listen to those first ads, you know that to be true” – Magee stepped up to the mike.

“If the company had failed, there would have been financial loss,” Magee says, but that wasn’t the real risk. “I kept telling myself I would have still gained tremendous insight and business acumen. I had to believe that.” More serious is what might be called the ‘soft’ risk. “It would have been a very public failure for me personally,” Magee admits now. “One of the mitigating factors was that we were starting the business out in Vancouver where nobody knew me. Believe me, these things layer in your ability to manage risk.”

Magee, who is as cheerful in conversation as she is on air, became a brand without broadcast or even previous experience in her retail specialty, a rare species. She says she simply believes in what she’s doing and her blessing seems to be that – in her public persona at least – she can present her best self authentically.

Head start or not, being born the child of a role model isn’t by itself enough. Thane Stenner, First VP and investment advisor with the T. Stenner Group of CIBC Wood Gundy, now arguably B.C.’s best-known and most celebrated investment guru for the wealthy, grew up in the shadow of an investment-advisor father most famous for his radio, television and personal appearances. Gordon, his father, was (and is) a natural, but for Thane, the eldest son, being out there was a learned art.

His first public appearance was in a rented meeting room at a White Rock golf club in 1991. He introduced Louis Rukeyser, then of PBS’s Wall Street Week, for a seminar that Thane Stenner had organized. “I was,” Stenner remembers, “very bad.” Financial service is a highly competitive marketplace, based greatly on name recognition and client endorsement. The conventional approach to success didn’t appeal to Stenner, now 40: “I didn’t want to be networking four or five nights a week, so a big part of it was how else could I leverage my time. I told myself that if I was going to get into this business, I would need to overcome my fears.”

Stenner chose to brand himself, principally through advertising. Based initially in the South Surrey area, he bought local newspapers heavily, often multiple pages and full back covers. His first-year advertising budget was 15 per cent of gross, unusually large for the financial services industry but as his success grew, so did his advertising investment. He promoted his seminars through direct mail, wrote investment columns, and – once and for all – overcame his fears to host a Saturday morning CKNW radio talk show which ran for about a year until he finally rebelled at getting up at 6 a.m. to prepare for the 7 a.m. spot – even though he did the show from the comfort of his home, the first morning using the kids’ Mickey Mouse telephone and, as he says, “keeping it all in perspective.”

As a brand, Stenner presents an extraordinary visual identity: he crops his hair so tightly it looks like a yarmulka and proffers the serene countenance of a soft-spoken, blue-eyed holy man, wise in the mysteries of the esoteric world of finance. He, in fact, personifies Law No. 19 of the laws of branding: Consistency. “A brand is not built overnight. Success is measured in decades, not years.”

Stenner isn’t afraid to show a philosophical side. He is aware, for example, that self- promotion isn’t normally associated with the Canadian character. Aside from his father, he thinks he may have been influenced by his time in Arizona where he went to university. “There,” he says, “my efforts at raising my profile would have seemed modest in comparison.”

He also believes his profile is synergistically raised by the company he keeps, extremely wealthy men and women – the rich, about whom author F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously said, aren’t like you and me. Stenner also tithes to his church and is a large contributor to local and city charities, which puts him on boards and, once again, in the public eye.

He also believes that, as a country, Canada has grown more assured; the cliché of the quiet, humble Canadian is perhaps wearing a little thin in a nation of evermore independent and multi-ethnic world citizens.

To help him with this, Stenner says he has two role models: Anthony Robbins and Jesus Christ. Robbins taught him to look inward into self and maximize his gifts; Christ teaches him to reflect and serve others. He never falters in his belief in himself: “Oh, there were times when I felt beaten up…when the markets headed down. That happened in 1994. I’d been in the business about five years. Interest rates went up. Some stocks came down 10 or 15 per cent. I felt that responsibility for my clients. In a month and a half, I lost 15 pounds. But what that teaches you is that you have to be persistent. You can’t run from it.”

Or, to quote Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill: “Every adversity, every failure and every heartache carries with it the Seed of an equivalent or a greater Benefit” (The 4th Step Toward Riches).

By the end of the 1990s, the Stenner brand was recognized province wide. In 2001, he invested $300,000 to self-publish and publicize True Wealth: An expert guide for high-net-worth individuals (and their advisors). The book, co-written with James Dolan and diligently promoted by Stenner, became a Canadian bestseller and established Stenner as a national player. He now competes with New York and Swiss banks for clients.

Some people are born to brand.
Wendy Lisogar-Cocchia, the founder and CEO of Absolute Spa Group, Canada’s largest spa chain, would be an example. Before she and her husband Sergio built their resistless empire of marble and wood-paneled masseuse-guided escapes into Austrian Moor mud jet-lag baths and Ayurveda health care, she was a kid listening to her father.

Roy Lisogar created the first rodeo in Canada, he ran a traveling circus and later a traveling ice show where he met the ice dancer who would become Lisogar-Cocchia’s mother. “He was very colourful and full of life,” she recalls. “He loved people. He was a promotions guy, a one-man show, and from absolutely nothing he created a downtown Vancouver skyscraper hotel.”

Becoming a brand was, she says, “a conscious decision. I learned it from my father. He branded himself as the Century Plaza Hotel. It was very successful for him and I wanted to roll that lesson over.”

Housemaid, busgirl, the young Lisogar-Cocchia, 40, grew up in the business. On her first day on the job delivering corn flakes and orange juice, she was so surprised to see Lawrence Welk answer the door, she dropped the tray.

Lisogar-Cocchia has since gained considerably more composure. She now drops names such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Elle MacPherson as smoothly as applying her Chinoiserie nail polish. She has become an extraordinarily charming woman about whom you imagine the ideals of family and social life, exactly as the brand dictates.

Ten years ago, she saw a trend developing: spas were becoming a fixed amenity in the hotel business. She convinced her father to give her 600 square feet at Century Plaza. Today, four expansions later, the flagship spa is 16,000 square feet and with the purchase of the spa at the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver, the Absolute Spa chain has eight links, not including a mobile at Vancouver International Airport.

In case you have the wrong impression: this isn’t the company her dad drove. She is her own person and from what I have heard, charm aside, she can be as hard-nosed as any other CEO running a multi-million dollar retail business – just as tough as I imagine former banker Christine Magee is with her corporate mattress suppliers. A defining moment for Lisogar-Cocchia – who displays a photo of Olympic figure skater Dorothy Hamill and herself on her office wall – came when she opposed her father and mother and decided to stop competitive figure skating. She was at the national level and had the right DNA. The next stop was to give up school and train full time.

Stephen Covey hadn’t yet written The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People but she already instinctively knew the Second Habit: begin with the end in mind. “It was a business decision,” she says. “I didn’t like the options – Ice Capades or teach. Nowadays I would have continued because there’s a lot of wonderful professional choices out there but back then there were no Stars on Ice with Kurt Browning and I didn’t want to get up at four in the morning and stand on the ice. I wanted to go to school.”

And she did – the school of business and branding . . . and self-promotion. Lisogar-Cocchia agrees with Stenner that Canadians are growing more self-confident but frankly, she doesn’t see it as an issue. In her case, she says she absolutely separates the personal from the professional: “I work hard to be knowledgeable about my products and I’m just doing business. For me it’s just getting my message across. I try to give as little personal information as possible because I’m a private person.”
Unlike Stenner who began with paid media, publicity was a necessity for isogar-Cocchia, conforming to the third immutable law of branding: “The birth of a brand is achieved with publicity, not advertising.” Or as Lisogar-Cocchia sees it: “Branding Absolute Spa, especially in the beginning, I couldn’t afford advertising. Anyway, publicity is more credible. It’s the reporter’s opinion, not what I paid to put in an ad. What would the reader believe more? That’s why I love publicity.”

However, when I press her, suggesting that most of us have self-esteem issues and feel too unworthy to go out there and present ourselves as pitch-perfect brands, she
retorts “unworthy? low self-esteem?” and reflects for some time as if the concepts are unknown to her – and I suspect they mostly are.

Christian Chia is a newer brand, based more on Virgin Atlantic’s Richard Branson model. Chia, 35, is the CEO of the OpenRoad Auto Group, a B.C. car dealership that primarily sells Toyota and Lexus automobiles in the Lower Mainland. But Chia doesn’t just sell cars – he races them.

These cars aren’t beat-up stock cars but the real thing – Formula Renault, one class beneath international Grand Prix. He’s not only behind the wheel as an investor but as the team’s driver. Now in his second year on the track, Chia will compete next season in the F1 Asian circuit, including Shanghai’s Jackie Chan Celebrity Cup in May.

In the bland sameness of Lower Mainland’s current car dealership marketplace, this could make the Chia brand distinctive. You just have to drive out to the Richmond Auto all to see how that would work. Except for the giant auto logos outside, the dealerships in their plate-glass big-box buildings surrounded by fleets of new and euphemistically bannered ‘pre-owned’ automobiles look the same, interchangeable – all but for the one that is Chia-branded.

In the calmness of the spacious air-conditioned showroom, walls display huge posters of Chia, casually posed, expensively but casually dressed, with a ton of casual attitude. Chia will tell me later that his mother was Belgian and his father was Chinese from Indonesia, but the first impression is that in Chia you have seen the future, this is the new face of global Vancouver, and it couldn’t be more confident. In person, in his large but carefully intimate wood-paneled office, I realized I wasn’t going to get to know the real Chia any more than I had the real Lisogar-Cocchia. When they’re ready, they should both run for office. They’re smart, young, photogenic and stay on message in a way that Paul Martin’s handlers could only dream.

With Lisogar-Cocchia, it was all about guiding the nice reporter: “We are very fortunate that the ‘at the Century’ tag line for Absolute Spas is being dropped by the media,” she says so I get that. “We’re very excited about our new Hotel Vancouver location. It’s going to be Canada’s first men’s spa. And I have to ask you when you write the article to please put in immediately after that we still welcome women.”

With Chia, the persona is friendly and unassuming but his conversation is all about customer focus,” transparency and the value of communication. It’s not that you don’t think he means it: he seems impeccably trustworthy. It’s just when the conversation moves to Formula Renault, you get a glimmer of the real enthusiasm for life that Chia seems to keep controlled just beneath the surface.

Chia became the brand because his brothers didn’t want to. Both are investment bankers, just as Chia once was, but the family owned a couple of auto dealerships and Chia had been employed by Toyota for a while, so he was the logical choice. Plus, he likes cars. Plus, who could imagine his brothers look as good?

He is aware naturally of the inglorious history of dealership pitchmanship, particularly the video hucksters (and their dogs) who preceded him, but he speaks and appears entirely removed from that genre, evolved, a new kind of 21st-century brand, who can personally sell his product in no less than seven languages.

They have some characteristics in common, the brands. First, there’s the laser – a single-minded focus about who they are and what they do that appears unassailable. These people do not know the meaning of ambivalence. They are committed to the 2nd immutable law of branding: “The most important aspect of a brand is its single-mindedness.”

Stenner puts it this way: “It’s about having a strong vision and communicating that vision. People who are looking for that vision are attracted to it. People who aren’t, don’t.”

Stenner also allows there’s some ego in it, particularly in the beginning. He admits to being competitive, although he says the competition was always against himself – striving to beat his own best time, stretching to go the extra distance. Yet, to be sure, he was always the captain of the sports teams. Leadership came naturally to him. He says he felt he was driven to succeed.

Chia says the competitiveness is there for him too, only he saves it for the track. Business, he says, is about teamwork and a shared mission. Magee, with whom I spent the least time, speaks of her “passion,” particularly at the genesis of Sleep Country. “We were a green field. It was an adventure.”

Another commonality is the support the brands receive from their spouses – Magee’s husband originally dropped everything to come with her to Vancouver; Sergio Cocchia is a hands-on partner who directs Absolute Spa construction and product marketing; Stenner’s wife Darci was his original business partner and his continuing inspiration.
There’s also peer group support. For example, two of Lisogar-Cocchia’s best girlfriends are Patrizia Leone, socialite fashion-store heiress, and Pamela Martin, glamorous CTV news anchor – celebrated and talented women who, like Lisogar-Cocchia, are committed to careers and high-profile charitable causes, and who both demonstrate they have certain undeniable expectations of life. One imagines they’re just the people you’d want as pals if you ever had a moment when you faltered,
although it’s difficult to imagine Lisogar-Cocchia unsure and huddled at home in her housecoat.

Stenner is very strong on the need for mentors and peer groups, something he discovered later in life. He cites such groups as the Young Presidents’ Organization, the Young Entrepreneurs’ Organization, the World Presidents’ Organization and Virtus. He directed me to LifePilot, a workshop that enables fulfilling, meaningful and valuable lives.

“Who you are is with whom you walk,” Stenner advises. Christian Chia, on the other hand, is about to challenge the 14th immutable law of branding: “What branding builds, sub-branding can destroy.” Chia will remain the spokesman for his new 90,000-square-foot, $15-million Toyota and Lexus showcase in Port Moody, but will hand the PR duties surrounding his upcoming North Shore dealership to GM Darlene Hyde.

And the Stenner brand? It’s about to meet the 21st immutable law of branding: The Law of Mortality: “No brand will live forever.” Ironically, it is his success that is leading Stenner out of the spotlight. His group now deals exclusively with ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) families in what is known as a ‘family office.’ Stenner himself deals only with families with a net worth of $10 million or more, and most of his client list is definitely on the more side. He offers an extremely personalized service, advising on everything from the purchase of a personal jet to plotting a philanthropic mission.

It seems, however, that UHNW families deem their financial advisors take a lower profile and that suits Stenner, who now prefers family time to business fame. For the first time in his career, Stenner, who’s always done it himself, is looking for a public relations company – not to promote his famous name but to contain it – as he begins the process of rebranding himself: the blue-eyed wunderkind replaced by the ensemble that is The T. Stenner Group.

The last word on branding belongs to Harry Hammer who inadvertently taught me an enduring lesson about being who you are. When Hammer kindly brought his business to the agency where I then worked, we missed the point about what he represented as a brand.

We built wonderfully creative and comic campaigns that made good old Harry Hammer funny. He wasn’t. We had changed how customers conceived of the brand – not as a shlockmeister but as your kindly old uncle.

After two months, Hammer came to me and gently said that he was going to have to take his business back and do it himself. It seems that The Warehouse had had the worst two-month sales period in its history.

We should have looked to Law No. 6, the Law of Credentials: “The crucial ingredient in the success of any brand is its claim to authenticity.”