Make Your Brand Legendary: Create Raving Fans With the Customer Experience Engine

Praise for Make Your Brand Legendary

"Wozniak (aka the Wizard of Woz) gives you a rare glimpse behind the curtain on how legendary brands like Chick-fil-A are launched. Make Your Brand Legendary is a must-read for anyone wanting to create a beloved brand."

– Rick Schirmer, cofounder & chairman, Schirmer McCord Media

"If you want to transform or simply ramp up your business’s success, you must read Make Your Brand Legendary. This step-by-step guide will be indispensable in your journey. Over the past years, we have implemented many of these tactics, and our business is thriving. It is now required reading for all new team members!"

– Tim Kennedy, president, Trident Construction

"Customer experience! For-profit, as well as nonprofit corporations, create internal and external customer experiences. In Make Your Brand Legendary, my friend Scott Wozniak will encourage and challenge you with wisdom gained over decades of designing, developing, and delivering world-class customer experiences globally."

– Sam Chand, leadership consultant, author of Leadership Pain

"Inspiring. Insightful. Practical. Make Your Brand Legendary delivers a customizable roadmap for success in any business with great stories along the way that clearly reinforces each component of the Customer Experience Engine."

– John Torres, EVP of Global Leadership Development, Bank of America

"I am 100% convinced Make Your Brand Legendary will positively change the future for any business that follows the systems and commits to creating raving fans. I personally plan to use this book as a guide for our business to ensure we get ahead and stay ahead of our competitors for as long as I am at Trident. I can’t imagine not having this knowledge and plan to recommend this book to any of my business colleagues who truly want to improve. I can’t wait to see what our business looks like in a few years after we implement our Customer Experience Engine!"

– Todd Bulwinkle, vice president, Trident Construction

"Absolutely game changing and mind shifting towards growth and profitability! This book will become your treasure if you are looking to build and grow a Customer Experience Engine. It gives you steps and great examples on how to create raving fans with a focus on excellence vs. success. As a businesswoman, I’ve learned within the last twenty-five years that customers want to do business with brands they trust and can count on. Make Your Brand Legendary is a perfect reflection of business insights with a personal touch of why and how. I highly recommend this book to front-line team members and executives for a high impact on any organization. I’ve known Scott for many years through Chick-fil-A, and he is one of the most genuine leaders I’ve had the privilege and honor to know and work with. I am a big supporter of his work."

– Lana Chumachenko, lead business consultant, Domino’s Pizza International

"Few people understand customer experience like Scott Wozniak. It’s all about creating emotional connections. Make Your Brand Legendary shows not just what the successful systems look like, but how to build those systems that deliver consistently over time and at scale. If your organization wants emotionally engaged superfans, this is the book for you."

– Nathan Magnuson, founder Leadership-in-a-Box®

"In Make Your Brand Legendary, Wozniak’s superior storytelling brings his guidance on a radical differentiation to life. His proven methods are proprietary and backed by loads of experience, examples, and verifiable outcomes. Although a book about business, Make Your Brand Legendary reads lucidly and practically."

– Brian Davidson, chief financial officer, Pepsi Cola Decatur

"Scott Wozniak’s Make Your Brand Legendary is a treasure trove of ways to build a great company. Whether you are direct-to-consumer or business-to-business, you will find big ideas and useful advice. Plus, it’s really engaging and fun to read."

– Tony Jeary, The RESULTS Guy™

FOREWORD

Tim Elmore

In my pursuit to make the world a better place, I have learned the value of two ideals: investing in the next generation and making ideas memorable. Scott Wozniak’s book, Make Your Brand Legendary, is a beautiful example of each of these ideals in action.

I’m excited about this book because Scott and I are both passionate about investing in the next generation of leaders. I’ve spent loads of my personal time and energy mentoring young leaders and creating resources for those emerging leaders. Part of the joy of investing in the next generation is seeing those leaders grow and walking with them over the years. I’m honored to say that I’ve been a part of Scott’s leadership journey.

I first met Scott over twenty years ago when he attended a master’s course that I taught on leadership and generational differences. We crossed paths again when he worked at the Chick-fil-A Support Center. He and his team helped to introduce their franchisees to my Habitudes® courses. For many years, we worked in parallel, running in the same circles and attending the same leadership events. He’s even personally mentored some of the staff that I’ve hired. Over those years, Scott has grown to be a brilliant life-giving leader. His track record of impact is impressive, and he has built a reputation as an expert.

Scott’s personal leadership has blessed my life, and his book has given us new ideas for improving our organization. Our relationship started with me teaching him, and now it has progressed to him teaching me. There are few things more fulfilling than that.

I’ve believed over the years that how you say something matters. While we need fresh ideas, for any idea to have impact, it must be presented in a way that captures the imagination and makes it come to life in the mind of the listener. Two of the best techniques for this are imagery and stories, which Scott delivers in this book. Research from 3M reminds us that visual aids improve learning by 400 percent and 90 percent of information retained is visual. Mind Tools reveals that two in every three individuals are visual learners. When you capture an idea with a vivid image, it becomes more tangible, easier to remember, and most importantly, easier to pass on to others.

I’ve used this principle to create leadership development tools that are used worldwide, called Habitudes: Images That Form Leadership Habits and Attitudes®. Big ideas delivered in brief lessons make the ideas stick. People discuss them again and again, long after the class is over. I work hard to gather the best ideas, but I work equally hard to find a visual to capture each idea.

That’s what Scott did in his book. Not only does he have some truly big ideas on how to create raving fans, but he has also organized them into an overarching image, one that has depth and logic. His Customer Experience Engine sticks with people, making it easy to apply these ideas, whether for a strategic assessment or to make a specific improvement.

Make Your Brand Legendary delivers a colorful portfolio of images, from word pictures to diagrams. Scott’s visuals aren’t limited to just his overall frame idea. Each section of the Customer Experience Engine is loaded with imagery and analogy, helping the concepts in the book come to life.

Another key component to memorable communication is stories. Humans make sense of the world through stories. From time immemorial, people have passed on wisdom by telling stories.

It’s what I’m committed to do in our work at Growing Leaders. In this book, Scott did so as well. From the beginning to the very end, you will find real stories of how leaders are implementing these ideas. It would be worth reading the book for the stories alone. With each story, the insights come to life. With each story, the ideas feel more doable. You’ll be inspired, challenged, and amused. Make Your Brand Legendary is a wonderful example of influential communication.

Scott Wozniak is one of the rising stars in our field. I believe you should read this book for yourself, your team, and your customers. The world needs more leaders. Don’t settle for building an ordinary brand. Build a Customer Experience Engine and become a legend.

Tim Elmore

Founder, Growing Leaders, Inc.

TimElmore.com

CHAPTER ONE

LEARNING FROM LEGENDARY BRANDS

I want to help you build a legendary brand. What is a legendary brand? In each industry, you can usually find companies that stand out. If you run one of these stand-out businesses, your customers don’t just buy from you; they love you. They buy your T-shirts and stickers so they can declare to the world that they are associated with your company. They wait in long lines to be the first to have your latest release. They drive past your competitors’ locations to shop with you. They come back again and again to your store—which they probably consider their store—and engage with the staff like they’re personal friends. Some, like Harley-Davidson’s customers, even tattoo the logo on their body!

I probably don’t have to work too hard to convince you that this is true. I bet you’re a raving fan of someone yourself. It might be a sports team or a music group. It might be a big company or a nonprofit. It’s not all of us. Some of us are more reserved and cautious with our loyalty. But a whole lot of us have a particular brand that we truly love.

Why? What is it that these legendary brands do differently from their competitors? Why do their customers love them so much?

It’s not luck. Some companies have managed to do this year after year, decade after decade. It’s not a fluke; it’s a pattern.

I’d like you to pause right now and think of an actual example, a legendary brand that you get excited about. (If you’re one of the skeptics who doesn’t love any brand, then think of a brand that someone close to you is a raving fan of.) As you progress through the parts of the engine in this book, I will share my own examples to help the ideas come to life—famous ones we can all relate to and some you might never have heard of. But I want you to have your own example too. Test my ideas against your own experience to see if this actually works.

Quick note for nonprofits and mission-driven organizations: The methods in this book apply to you as well. You may have to mentally replace words like customer experience with patient experience or client with member, but whatever terms you use, this engine will get you better results, even if what you aim for isn’t profit—and that’s not just my optimistic guess. I know this because in addition to the business consulting I’ve done, I have spent many years applying these tools in a variety of nonprofit settings, from hospitals to churches to summer camps. However, to make this book more readable, I decided not to use both for-profit and nonprofit language every time I bring up a new idea. I’m just going to say things like company and customer and trust you to translate the terms in your head if it better suits your specific situation.

Whether you run a nonprofit or are a traditional business leader, whether you sell a physical product or deliver services, this book is full of practical methods for building your own Customer Experience Engine. It’s not magic; it’s a set of systems that work together to produce a great result. A lot of other organizations have done this, and you can too.

At this point in the discussion, I’ve learned that many leaders feel both hopeful and exhausted. Many of us have been told that the only way to get exceptional results is to work exceptionally hard. And if you are already tired, imagining all the extra work this is going to require can feel pretty discouraging. It’s all some of us can do to keep up with the business. In fact, many of the leaders I’ve worked with have confided in me that leading their organizations feels like they are riding a tiger. They worry that they can’t let go or the whole enterprise will spin out of control. They constantly feel a nagging pressure that they might have forgotten something important and that they’re always in a tug-of-war contest with their team, pulling on the rope to keep them doing their job with excellence.

As we get started, let me reassure you. The Customer Experience Engine I will teach you to build does not require more effort than running a regular company. In fact, it is actually easier to manage a Customer Experience Engine than a company without these systems. Yes, work is required to make the shift from no engine to engine, but none of the engine systems require you to have a genius-level intellect. None of the systems require a lot of money. Each individual step is something you can do without breaking the bank or burning out. And when you put them all together, they create raving fans—customers who are easier to deal with than regular customers and who make you more money!

I have a lot of respect for the hard work you’ve done. But the way forward is not working harder; it’s working smarter. You’re already working hard. What if you could stop riding a tiger? What if you had your own Customer Experience Engine?

CHAPTER TWO

WHAT THIS ISN’T

This isn’t a book about how to catch a trendy wave. All the examples you will read come from companies who wowed their customers year after year. They didn’t stumble into being the hottest item for a season. Instead, this is a book on how to be like Lego, whose toys top kids’ Christmas wish lists year after year. It’s not luck that caused Lego to grow larger than Mattel and Hasbro put together. In fact, their strong position today came after an intentional transformation. In the late twentieth century, Lego’s major patents expired, reducing their toys to plastic commodities, and their sales collapsed. Why would anyone pay premium prices for their plastic bricks when their competitors sold the same buildings and characters for far less? They had to figure out how to differentiate themselves from multiple copycat companies. They did this so well that today people buy toy sets from Lego for more than twice the cost of competitor brands, without any patent protection at all.

Or consider sports fans. Teams like Manchester United (a professional soccer team in England) have hundreds of millions of raving fans around the world, far exceeding the roughly 550,000 people who live in the city of Manchester. In fact, they have 206 official Manchester United Supporters’ Clubs around the world, from Brazil to Australia. Getting in street fights with fans of rival teams is far too common for some of their most unruly fans. They might love their team too much!

You might think that they have a fan base like this only because they have won a lot of championships (which they have). That can be true, but some sports teams have huge numbers of raving fans even though they haven’t won a championship in years. For example, fans of the Chicago Cubs (an American baseball team) stayed fully committed to their team for one hundred and seven seasons without a championship victory. And I don’t just mean they survived as a club; they survived as a wholly beloved brand.

Every year, Cubs fans walked into opening day truly believing, This is our year! I know this personally because I’ve heard many of my own family members say this year after year. During this record-smashing losing streak, the Cubs maintained one of the best attendance figures in pro sports. In 2007, the Cubs finished second for attendance in Major League Baseball with a 97.7 percent capacity in their stadium. More astounding, they got this high fan attendance even though a large portion of Cubs home games were in the middle of the day, when people