Why brands looking to stand out should look to stand-ups

The authors met when they were both standup comedians, and they soon realised that they also had branding in common. After spending their adult lives achieving success in both, they have concluded that they are essentially the same thing. That is what this paper is about. Whether you are branding yourself as a stand-up or your self, product or service for business purposes, if you can communicate your unique capability and your passion to innovate around that capability, and if there is a demand in the marketplace for that capability (whether the market knows it yet or not), you have a formula for success. But if you cannot articulate and communicate it in a clear and confident voice that feels unique, authentic and desirable, then you cannot transcend the noise to even be considered by your buying audience. Stand-ups understand better than anyone else how to deliver a unique, differentiated message around their authentic passion and capabilities. It certainly applies to Jerry Seinfeld and Aziz Ansari, #7 and #49, respectively, on Rolling Stone Magazine’s Top 50 Stand-up Comedians of all Time (Love, M. (2017) ‘50 best stand-up comics of all time’.1 And it also applies to ‘Wow’ ideas with billion-dollar valuations and carefully calculated grabs of market share that facilitate incremental growth — like Dollar Shave Club and BioTrue Contact lens solution. All four are market leaders who broke out by adhering to an authentic and differentiated offering driven by passion and capability. This paper explores how.