Two weeks ago I joined 25,000 other coconut bra-wearing Parrotheads to spend a hot summer night with Jimmy Buffett.  There are many things the Buffett brand does well, and one of them struck me during the encore as well all sang “Southern Cross” in perfect drunken harmony: Jimmy Buffett is a master at recognizing songs that he should have written.

He didn’t write “Southern Cross”.  It is a Crosby, Stills, and Nash classic. But it sounds exactly like a song that Jimmy Buffett should sing.

He didn’t create “Brown Eyed Girl“. Give credit to Van Morrison for that gem. But it sounds precisely like a Buffett song.

He didn’t dream up ”Uncle John’s Band“. The Grateful Dead gets props in that case. But once again, it sounds like something Buffett should have written.

He didn’t come up with “Weather With You“. That’s a Crowded House piece, but it sounds so perfectly Buffett that he made it his own.

While most businesses focus on coming up with the next big thing, plenty of smart brands have made their mark by perfecting products created by others.

Apple didn’t invent the mp3 player. Diamond Multimedia, Compaq, and Creative were among the numerous companies that brought it to market first. But all of them faded in October of 2001 when Apple revealed the iPod. Apple brilliantly perfected the technology of others and  eventually became the far-and-away leader in the product category.

Blackberry revolutionized mobile email, but they didn’t invent it. The first device appeared in 1992 when IBM created Simon, a mobile phone with email access. Blackberry came along four year later with two-way pagers and didn’t release a mobile phone with email access until 2002, a decade after Simon arrived.

Bud Light is the top selling beer in America, but Budweiser didn’t invent light beer. Meister Brau of Chicago did that, releasing the first light beer in 1967.  Bud Light debuted in 1982, fifteen years after the first light beer came along.

Sometimes great brands are the innovators.

More often, great brands are the ones that perfect products and learn from the mistakes of the innovators.

Sure, it takes brains to create.

It also takes brains to recognize opportunity, peer into the future, harness potential, and successfully (and legally!) make a song your own.

If you enjoy what you’ve read, please consider ordering a copy of Brand Like a Rock Star now with just a few clicks.  It is full of insights into how to build a stronger and richer brand through the lessons of rock ‘n’ roll. If you’d like to preview chapter one for free, you can grab a pdf file here. I would love to hear your thoughts on it. You can email me anytime: steve (at) brandlikearockstar.com.

In the days pre-iPhone and pre-Android, it was cool to have a Blackberry.

Now, all that has changed.

I had a great back-and-forth with Dean Heuman on Twitter (@dheuman). Dean is a marketing and communications pro with www.focuscom.ca and he is a die-hard Blackberry fan. But even Dean admits that “even if Blackberry comes out with something awesome, they are tainted with being uncool. It seems once you are tainted, you can’t be cool again.”

Can cool be recaptured?

There are some examples that suggest it is possible.

Only a decade ago, Old Spice was a washed-up brand that only your Dad would wear. Today it is the top selling men’s bath brand.

For a long time Johnny Cash was uncool, even in country music. He very quickly recovered that cool, and died a rock ‘n roll and country music icon.

Nintendo definitely looked pretty uncool compared to Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s Playstation. And then they created the Wii and changed all that instantly.

The Lacoste crocodile is suddenly cool to wear again, despite being a powerful symbol of 80s preppiness.

What can Blackberry take away from the lessons learned by these comeback brands?

1. Find new friends. Johnny Cash found uber-hip producer Rick Rubin. Old Spice found creative energy in Wieden+Kennedy and spokesperson Isaiah Mustafa. When you associate with cool, you too can become cool.

2. Take serious risks. Nintendo went after an entirely new audience for video games with Wii. Johnny Cash recorded sparse acoustic versions of alternative rock songs. If you want to move the needle, you need to do remarkable things that are inherently risky.

3. Touch pop culture. Isaiah Mustafa, as the Old Spice guy, has become a pop culture celebrity. The Wii became a pop culture phenomenon. When the world is talking about you, good things usually happen. Unless you’re BP, Anthony Weiner, or Tiger Woods.

4. Be patient. Lacoste waited nearly 20 years through the age of grunge, until the prep look came back in style. Johnny Cash waded through two decades of musical fads before his raw sound found an audience again.

5. Create scarcity. A shortage of something creates value. The lack of available Wii consoles when they were first released created a massive push for them. The death of Johnny Cash, at the peak of his comeback, left us wanting more of the Man in Black. Demand + Scarcity = Value.

I don’t know for sure if any – or all – of those lessons will apply to the fortunes of Blackberry, but I hope the brand recovers and emerges strong. It is good for competition and for the people of Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, whose economic base has grown along with Blackberry’s parent company Research in Motion.

There is an entire chapter in the book Brand Like a Rock Star that examines how brands can recover their “cool”. You can pre-order the book right now.

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I heard the song “Chinese Democracy” by Guns N’ Roses on the radio yesterday for the first time in a while.

Hearing this song again a few months after its radio and chart life-cycle ended put it in a fresh perspective, and it sounded pretty damn good. In fact, overall reviews for the “Chinese Democracy” album were relatively solid. Entertainment Weekly gave it a B- rating, and Rolling Stone gave it 4 stars out of 5. Those who took the time to get to know “Chinese Democracy” seemed to enjoy it.

So why is “Chinese Democracy” destined to be remembered as a failure?

Because it didn’t live up to the hype. Realistically, it never had a chance.

It simply couldn’t have been good enough to live up to the advance billing of being the most expensive recording project ever. It could never live up to the expectations of fans who waited 18 years between new original G N’ R material (their last new original album was the “Use Your Illusion” double album in 1991). Over the course of those 18 years there were many leaks, sneak previews, and boastful comments. The album was called “f*cking epic” and “mind blowing” by Skid Row singer Sebastian Bach.

Beyond the hype, the album was victim of a band that has become faceless. The image most fans have of Guns N’ Roses is the late 1980′s band that sang “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and “November Rain”. But the Guns N’ Roses of today is essentially Axl Rose and a revolving cast of musicians. They may be extremely talented, but it doesn’t really matter. If it isn’t Axl Rose and guitarist Slash, then it isn’t really Guns N’ Roses… at least as far as most fans would likely consider.

Most smart marketers could have predicted the fate of “Chinese Democracy” without ever hearing a note of music.

“Under promise and over deliver”.

Sounds simple enough. You want to entice people and tease them with your soon-to-be-released product. But you don’t want to hype the product to the point where the eventual release is a let down.

The Star Wars movies had the same problem. Two decades of waiting and endless advance hype made it almost impossible to truely appreciate the movies in their own right.

The Blackberry Storm… another product hyped to the point where it was destined to meet with lukewarm reviews. Some claim the Apple iPhone was also overhyped, but sales figures and the level of cultural acceptance would suggest that the iPhone did live up to the advance billing.

The Segway? It was supposed to change the way cities were built and the way human beings interact. Instead it gave Paul Blart, mall cop, something to ride.

Windows Vista? It didn’t change computing like Microsoft promised it would.

And while I don’t have a ShamWow yet, I’m pretty sure it would have a rough time living up to the high expectations that pervasive infomercial has helped generate!

The lesson is simple.

There is a fine line between hyping your product, and hyping your product to the point of dooming it. The right amount of hype helps make for a successful product. Too much hype, and you are destined to let your customers down.

There are other reasons “Chinese Democracy” didn’t sell that well… it was released in a down economy, it wasn’t well promoted by Axl Rose or Universal Music, and it was sold exclusively through Best Buy retailers. But those issues pale in comparison with the real reason for failure: it was impossible to satisfy the expectations of fans who waited almost 20 years for an album that cost $13 million to make. It was game over, before it even began.

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Blackberry, the geek, and U2, the girl, are going steady. Apple, the cool jock, is now single.

Despite once flogging Apple products, U2 recently announced that Blackberry is the sponsor of their upcoming summer tour. This is the band that endorsed the iPod and even had a version of it created in their honor. Bono called the iPod “the most beautiful object art in music culture since the electric guitar”. He espoused about how Apple embodied the band’s creative spirit, and most of us bought that story. Although it smelled of a sell-out, the pieces of the story fit together. We could picture Bono and Edge laying down some tracks on the road, backstage, and editing them together on a Macbook.

But a Blackberry? The Blackberry is everything corporate. It isn’t a sexy iPhone. It plays music, but that isn’t why you use it. It takes pictures and it gets on the internet, but that’s not the primary function. The Blackberry is a fantastically reliable and easy to use e-mail and phone device.

Why marry a creative, outspoken, socially conscious band with a staid product like the Blackberry?

Because Blackberry is desperate to prove it is as cool as Apple and their iPhone. And U2 needs to underwrite an expensive concert tour during an economic recession.

This is a sell out. It makes very little sense for either party. Certainly U2 doesn’t want the corporate buttoned-down image that the Blackberry lends it. And Blackberry doesn’t do itself any favors by comparing itself to Apple. Even the most casual Blackberry user knows that their Blackberry isn’t as cool as an iPhone. Blackberry fans use the product because of its functionality, not because it is sexy. They love it for what it is, and for what it isn’t.

Don’t bet on this relationship lasting past prom.

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