Debbie Millman

Ben (of Ben & Jerry’s) was in the room. He needed a logo.

Debbie Millman just started her agency. She was competing against the best ad agencies in New York City.

She lost. So she moved on to Burger King.

“Why do you think you lost?”

“We didn’t have insurance,” Debbie said. “We didn’t have the big, global brand experience to show them.”

“I’ll never forget this,” she said. “When we got to Burger King headquarters, we got into a fairly small elevator with the Senior Vice President of Market Research. The door closes. He looks at us and says, ‘Don’t get your hopes up.'”

This is important. Because Debbie Millman never describes herself as an entrepreneur.

But she’s the perfect example.

Entrepreneurship is about putting your all into something, getting rejected and going back into the next room.  

Data is taking over. Data is replacing thinking and driving the direction of the future. Data sells confidence. And that’s what the brands wanted.

Burger King tried changing their logo 7 times in the decade leading up to Debbie’s success.

So she did focus groups. And studied eye-tracking on the original logo. “We wanted to know what people thought,” she said. “We wanted to get a sense of why this was so beloved?”

“People do not read first. First and foremost, they see color. Then they see numbers, then shape, and then, if you still have their attention and they understand what you put in front of them, then they will read.”

A logo is a message. Even if you don’t read it. You can recognize logos visually without reading. Our brains know.

Then we choose who we belong to. And that’s our tribe.

Debbie was changing the face of an iconic brand. And change causes fear, which strikes up all the stress hormones in our body.

“In order for us to create an identity that was evolving from the original, we had to keep some of those iconic elements.”

You’re original. As a baby, you were a blank canvas. No logo. No brand. No name. And no identity.

Then you went to school and made friends and things happened to you. Someone asked me, “who will you always be? Who’s James? When you’re 4, 14, 24, 34, 44, 84, what parts of you will always be there?”

That’s what Debbie had to figure out with her brands. She did it with Tropicana, Star Wars, and eventually, she won Ben & Jerry’s over too.

But after all of this data, all of this color, all of this branding, at the heart of it is the essence of who you are. What is the logo of your heart.

Debbie figured out hers. And created her life around it. Figuring out who we are is the key to having an impact all over the world.

That’s what Debbie taught me on this podcast. That’s what I try every day to create in my own life.