How successful was Colonel Harland Sanders at creating a brand? According to a survey conducted just four years before he died in 1980, the Kentucky Fried Chicken founder was listed as the second most recognizable celebrity in the world.<\/p>\n
So how did he get there? A middle school dropout, Sanders cleaned ash pans on the North Alabama Railroad and couldn’t make a steady career out of law, insurance, or politics. He was hardly a spring chicken at 62\u2014the traditional retirement age of his era\u2014when the first Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise opened. He was also broke. Soon, he would be worth tens of millions of dollars.<\/p>\n
I picked up Josh Ozersky\u2019s Colonel Sanders and the American Dream<\/em> in the hope of understanding how Sanders managed to captivate the public imagination in a time before internet and social media, and to see if his successes could be instructive. As it turns out, they are\u2014particularly when it comes to creating a successful brand.<\/p>\n The first attribute of the Sanders mystique was his status as “The Colonel.” Leveraging an honorary title bestowed upon him by the governor of Kentucky in 1936, Sanders built an empire that eventually reached 118 countries across five continents. At first, Sanders donned a black suit and hat. Eventually, as Ozersky explains, he decided on a white suit with a double-breasted jacket and a bolo string tie. Sanders even grew a goatee, which was naturally black before he dyed it white, completing a welcoming and eccentric image that brought his meaningless title alive. As his fame grew, Sanders would take bit parts in B-movies and show up on game shows and variety programs in his Colonel uniform.<\/p>\n Now, that’s not to suggest that anyone wishing to create a brand needs to create a bizarre alter ego and inhabit it. But as Colonel Sanders’ stardom shows, garnering attention and cultivating familiarity are crucial steps to establish any brand. And, in order to do that, believing in your brand is wholly a requirement. “It was the thing that had made him what he was,” Ozersky writes. “The superhuman grandiosity that had led him to start walking around in a white suit and string tie and calling himself ‘Colonel Sanders.'”<\/p>\n The second component of the Sanders mystique was his relentlessness. Back when Sanders owned a gas station in Kentucky, he fielded enough requests from customers asking about nearby places to eat that he started to cook and sell steaks, country ham, biscuits, and, yes, fried chicken, for travelers passing through. When The Colonel eventually grew confident that he had a marketable product to sell in his fried chicken, he resolved to drive around the country with a pressure cooker and the ingredients for his special recipe in order to cook chicken for prospective franchisees. “On some nights,” Ozersky writes, “he slept in the back seat of his Cadillac, shaving and combing his hair in the morning in a service station.” Being distinctive and assiduous were the spices in The Colonel’s secret formula. But having a quality product that he believed in got the Colonel to the other side of the road.<\/p>\n In fact, Sanders was so obsessed with success that he ultimately found himself incapable of letting go once he sold the company and he was relegated to the role of spokesman. In his late years, he wound up critiquing the company and getting himself into legal trouble. “It was impossible for him to relinquish his ownership of the product that defined him,” Ozersky concludes. “What was he if not the Colonel?”<\/p>\n Photo Credit: Steve Baker\/flickr<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How successful was Colonel Harland Sanders at creating a brand? According to a survey conducted just four years before he died in 1980, the Kentucky Fried Chicken founder was listed as the second most recognizable celebrity in the world. So how did he get there? A middle school dropout, Sanders cleaned ash pans on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1396,"featured_media":12462,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43902],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-professional-development"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n