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Part Wizard, Part Nerd, and one Heck of a Great Brand

Guest post by: Ed Delia

Article Overview: When most people talk branding, they usually point to well-known consumables: restaurants (McDonalds), beverages (Starbucks Coffee), foods (M&Ms), home products (Bounty), cars (BMW) and the like. What many don’t realize is that brands are all around us. We’re encountering and experiencing brands all the time in the form of products, services, causes, businesses and personalities.

Part Wizard, Part Nerd, and one Heck of a Great Brand

Let’s take a close look at Harry Potter. If you’ve never heard of Harry Potter, then you should crawl back into that cave you’ve been residing in for the last ten years.

To date, over 250 million copies of the Harry Potter novels have been sold worldwide. This places the Harry Potter story third on the all-time best-sellers list, right behind The Bible (2.5 billion copies sold) and The Thoughts of Chairman Mao (800 million sold). The Potter books are available in more than 60 different languages. With the live-action movies, DVDs, and merchandising added in, the Potter brand is worth an estimated $4 billion in total. Not too bad for author J.K. Rowlings, who prior to the success of Potter, was a single parent living on state benefits in an unheated Edinburgh apartment.

In a recent article titled, “Harry Potter – Brand Wizard,” Stephen Brown, marketing professor of the University of Ulster, writes that the “Potter effect" goes far beyond the numbers. The entire children’s book sector has been invigorated, applications to boarding schools are way up, owls are becoming popular household pets, and locations used in the films are drawing record numbers of tourists from every generation.

So how did Harry Potter successfully transcend the boundaries of both culture and age?

What lessons can we learn from the world-famous “wiz-nerd”?

1) Story-telling is a powerful way to deliver a message.

In all cultures and for all ages, story-telling has been, and always will be, a powerful means of conveying a message. Even a marketing message. And the greater our attention to detail, the more likely we are to make a memorable impression. So don’t just tell prospects what you’re capable of. Give them a true to life account of what you’ve done for someone just like them. And make it rich with market-relevant details. They’ll not only stick around to hear the end of the story. They’ll actually remember it.

2) Mystery draws us in even further.

Harry Potter’s got the “secret sauce,” the “Intel inside.” He’s got that unexplainable point of difference we all crave - just because we don’t have it. That’s the magic of Harry Potter and that’s exactly how we should manage our brands: giving our audience just enough to want more.

3) Fun is a most welcome diversion.

Since the first Harry Potter book was published in 1998, our society has faced its share of adversity: from the horrors of war to the extremes of weather. Which is all the more reason to find a way to “say it with a smile,” to give our customers a reason to laugh as well as to buy. And as marketers, we’ll all have a little bit more fun in the process. After all, even Harry doesn’t take himself all that seriously.

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