Supercharge Your Brand Story, Part 3: Deliver on Your Value Proposition and Watch Your Personal Brand Take Flight

  • His name’s been on everyone’s lips over the last few years.
  • He’s a world-famous entrepreneur whose net worth stands well in excess of several billion.
  • He’s a savvy investor with fingers in every pie, from tech to aerospace to construction.
  • He’s a visionary savior with a clear-cut public persona and a roaringly successful brand (although occasionally, uncomfortably, we’re offered a too-real glimpse of the fragile man behind the mask).

And while he might be the hero humanity deserves, he’s not the hero we need right now.

Nope, we’re not talking about Elon Musk — not just yet anyway.

We’re talking about none other than Bruce Wayne, aka. the Batman.

If that’s not a personal brand, I don’t know what is.

If there’s one thing Bruce Wayne does better than cleansing Gotham’s streets of crime, it’s crafting and disseminating a formidable personal brand.

In the first piece of our three-part brand story series, we watched branding giants Cadillac and Ford battling it out in a war of words, not necessarily to win over customers but to suck up to the ones they already had.

In our second piece, we looked at two of Rafael Nadal’s sponsors, Nike and Babolat, and a politically misjudged PR gaffe on Nike’s part that saw them lose control of their brand conversation across their digital media.

In this final piece, we’ll be tying together some of the themes we’ve been looking at so far, focusing on how to create and deliver on your value proposition, craft a convincing origin story, and keep your brand connection sharp, simple, and relevant.

And the character who’ll be guiding us through this is none other than Mr Bruce Wayne himself.

The success of Batman’s brand comes from the clarity and deliverability of his value proposition — the service he offers a hungry world.

The raison d’être behind Wayne’s Batman brand is simple: to rid Gotham of the crime and corruption that’s rotting the city from within.

Whether by having his famous, omnipresent brand symbol projected into the night sky, taking on Gotham’s criminals in hand-to-hand combat, or charging through the streets at night in a pointy spandex costume and scaring his adversaries into submission, the Batman brand is laser-focused on making Gotham a safer place. That’s his value proposition.

And as he hews through his enemies, from the Penguin to the Joker, he delivers on his value proposition and thus justifies his existence.

Now that’s what I call “delivering on a value proposition.”

Now, this “Batman value proposition” is not without its problems.

For a start, the guy’s a vigilante, acting outside the remit of the law and implementing his own unique idea of justice that stems from intense childhood trauma (more on this later).

Another problem is that Bruce Wayne is a billionaire who’s chosen to invest his vast time and resources in state-of-the-art military technology and martial arts training, instead of investing it in Gotham’s schools, prisons, and hug-a-hoodie initiatives.

In a world where research shows more and more of us seeking out ethical brands, one fails to imagine this going down particularly well.

Then there’s the biggest elephant in the room: the world Wayne and his brand inhabit is completely fictional, existing only as their roster of comic-book artists and big budget directors see fit to portray.

Unlike our world, there’s no live Twitter feed distorting the Batman brand’s core message.

But we all love the Batman story, and there are lessons to learn there about real-world branding:

Namely that the more Batman delivers on his value proposition, the more he gets people onside.

Right now, people aren’t exactly rooting for real-life world-saving billionaire Elon Musk.

Elon Musk is maybe the closest thing we’ve got to an actual Batman, or a Tony Stark. But his public presence has been suffering some sharp blows lately.

He’s been involved in a public scandal due to calling the British cave diver who rescued a group of Thai boys a “pedo” after he’d refused his help.

He’s come under fire for his labor practices, and he’s been a little too cozy with the ever-controversial Trump White House, which could be seen as a betrayal of his climate-conscious, future-focused brand ethos.

Couple Musk’s brand fragility with his fun loving, flamethrower-peddling, car-launching personality, and it’s easy to see him as a detached, frivolous, and even potentially dangerous one-per-cent-er.

In other words, Mr. Musk needs a few branding lessons from the Batman.

His value proposition must flow from within and from his unique interactions with the world.

Brand purpose flows from within. Part of the reason the Wayne’s brand is so effective is because his character has a believable backstory that drives his vision of a crime-free world.

The whole reason for the Batman value proposition is the the fulfillment of a vow made after Wayne witnessed the brutal murder of his parents at the tender age of eight.

Now, Wayne has a unique position in the world, not least because through inheriting his parents’ fortune he became filthy, stinking rich.

Wayne’s vast personal and corporate wealth give him the resources to stay one step ahead of the criminal element both technologically and athletically.

As we noted earlier, this could easily be seen as a strike against Wayne. But because his narrative has been framed for us by the best minds of comic-dom and Hollywood, we experience his story alongside him. Batman’s emotional trials are our own.

Elon’s aims are comparably far more ethical; we can get on board with his long-term planet-saving goals.

But his origin story is difficult for most people to relate to: he helped build PayPal, pioneering the online payment space with Peter Thiel, and then sold it for 1.5 billion.

That money was his Tesla-launching superpower. It’s all a bit cold and impersonal.

“I built a company and sold it” is less humanizing than “I experienced and am motivated by the tragedy of my parents’ death, and by the reflection of that tragedy in the plight of my city.”

There’s a reason we laugh at the following scene. It doesn’t gel with our usual heartfelt perspective on Batman’s story, and it plays on our anxieties about the uber-wealthy:

In a strange way, Elon’s supposedly authentic public persona actually more closely resembles Batman’s “mask”, Bruce Wayne.

The public Wayne is an intentionally frivolous character, created specifically to diffuse suspicion that he might be the Batman.

Musk, with his flamethrowers and whimsical Twitter presence, might think he’s showing the “real him”; telegraphing affability and relatability.

But in light of the world’s pressing and serious problems, this frivolity dilutes Musk’s value proposition. It doesn’t solidify it.

If Musk shared his true concerns, his deep and heartfelt mission for humanity, in the form of a more vulnerable story his critics could understand, he might be able to build a more sympathetic public brand:

You see, public moments like that one accomplish, in the long run, far more for Musk than launching cars into space ever will.

The latter creates a momentary wow factor, but the former foments long-term emotional investment in his brand story.

We enjoy a double lens on Bruce Wayne. We know he’s Batman, so his sacrifices and strategies seem like a noble manifestation of his emotional truth.

But if all we saw was Wayne, or Batman without the Bruce Wayne backstory, we might see exactly the same two things the people of Gotham do: a frivolous billionaire, and a dangerous vigilante.

The cohesiveness, rootedness, and multidimensionality of the Batman brand allow him to come out on top, despite all his shortcomings– and these qualities flow from his ongoing, painful, and organic process of relating to the world– not from some shallow stunt or performance.

Our real heroes deliver on their value proposition in an authentic way.

We have to emphasize, again, that Batman’s story is fictional. But one of the reasons we love it so much, one of the reasons we cheer him on, is because he’s a hero.

Heroes embody qualities we want to see in ourselves. Batman is lucky because when he sacrifices, when he puts his mission before himself, we know it.

The people of Gotham don’t always know, and he has to make peace with being hated by many of them. But we, the audience, see his heroism.

Being a hero in the real world is much more difficult. It’s not enough to perform sacrifice, or to talk about the great things you’ll do. Like Batman, you have to actually deliver. You must give yourself to the cause, like Nelson Mandela or Michael Phelps.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Delivering on your value proposition is a two-part project. Many people focus on the “delivery” part, the extraordinary execution, but what value proposition you pick will have a huge impact on your ability to deliver.

This also leads directly to your brand identity: what do you want people to know you for?

As we’ve discussed, Batman’s value proposition flows directly from the core of his identity, and he has the skills and tech to carry it out.

Musk and his companies have extraordinary capacity for innovation. But Musk also has a habit of setting insanely high benchmarks.

This motivates his team and inflates his reputation as a world-changer, but it also leaves him open to criticism when those benchmarks aren’t met.

Instead of seeing a hardworking man with a heartfelt mission, we see an empty showman who consistently fails to deliver– whether that perception is accurate or not.

It might help Musk to define his value proposition differently, and to connect that proposition to the genuinely-felt core of his identity, his deep care for the planet and his youthful excitement about the wonders of technology.

Instead of reciting benchmarks like an aspirational robot, and then playing billionaire games, he could tell a story– the way Batman’s comics and films do.

Instead of promising the moon and failing to deliver, he could define his value proposition closer to home.

For example, he could set himself up the ethical conscience of industry, forcing other companies to think about the future of the planet.

He could show what it looks and feels like when someone gives themselves completely to make the world a better place. He’s already halfway there.

Just a couple of bros talking about climate change.

Deliver on your value proposition, and let the story spread far and wide

Another area where Batman excels is in his ability to turns people into brand ambassadors. In some cases, he quite literally brands them.

Now, we wouldn’t advocate that back-to-basics approach to branding for every company. But where the service you offer is essentially one of fear-mongering and vigilantism, it’s pretty effective. Criminals tell other criminals about Batman, and stories about his heroism spread.

By converting others, Batman can spread his symbol organically. He engages in the most authentic version of brand dissemination: getting people to talk about the brand among themselves.

Think of it as seeing a really fast runner wearing Reebok trainers, only instead it’s a really evil human trafficker branded with a bat symbol. If nothing else, it certainly offers a talking point.

What’s more, the literal branding technique ties into Batman’s origin story. It was while coming home from a screening of “Zorro” that his parents were murdered. He’s taken a moment of intense personal significance and incorporated it into the nuts and bolts of what he does.

But what is it that gives the bat-brand its significance? It wouldn’t really matter if Batman ran around branding people for no reason.

Batman’s brand (literal and figurative, now) is connected to his value proposition, his fulfillment of his brand promise: people know that brand means the Batman has come for you. And he might come for them next.

The consistency with which Batman delivers is everything.

We’re not suggesting that Elon Musk go around branding people with an iron.

But as in the Reebok example, if your brand is associated over and over with best-in-class performance, your logo can take on the depth and significance of a bat-symbol etched in flesh.

The Batman brand is a dark, dramatic example from a dark, dramatic hero. It flows directly both from Wayne’s trauma and from his goals, and he continues to infuse it with meaning through his consistent actions.

We, the audience, feel Wayne’s pain, and we hop on board for his journey.

This is how you build an unshakeable personal brand, even if you’re an eccentric billionaire with bizarrely outsized ambitions and an arsenal of gadgets. Anyone reading from that demographic (*ahem* Elon) would do well to take some notes from the Batman.

The Ben Thomas Agency

Written by

We write content that clicks. | BenThomasAgency.com

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