I was sitting in the Chicago o’hare airport on a very delayed flight, finding myself watching the TV, something I never do. I was watching nightline and they were interviewing a design firm and they were having them redesign the American shopping cart in 72 hours. I was very impressed with the process that was taken to get the results that were found and implemented. The design firm was IDEO. When I got home I called them to try and schedule a meeting just to meet some people there. At this point I was just a soap company with two employees with annual sales of just about 150k.

A few months later I got a call back. I happened to be in SF visiting my girlfriend at the time and I went down there and got a tour and told the business development person, Dan Bomze the story of Pangea, he quickly went and got a writer and a designer and a few more people, I told the story to them as well. A few weeks later I got an email from Dan expressing IDEO’s interest in branding Pangea. After a few rounds of negotiations we struck a deal. Coming to the plate with many concepts and ideas myself, they partnered me with two designers a writer and a materials expert, together the Pangea Organics brand was found. Earlier that year I was sitting in Joshua Tree National Park for my annual visionary meeting with myself when I decided to introduce the concept of plantable packaging to the world. It took two years but finally we found success.

Read On

“Good products and services are like brushing your teeth. You’re expected to do it every day. You don’t get extra credit.” — paraphrasing Geoffrey Moore

We don’t talk about companies that we like. We don’t talk about companies that deliver quality service, day in and day out, for a reasonable price. We expect that. You’ve never called a friend and said “Did you know that Ritz hotels are really nice?” You need to give people a reason to talk about you. Word of mouth starts with the topic of conversation. (It doesn’t start with a MySpace page or a viral video). Bland companies never give us a reason to talk, so we don’t talk about them.

There are seven emotions that cause someone to make a recommendation:

Read On

SMITH, the online magazine I started in January 2006, is powered by stories, so I’ll start with one here. One of our most successful ideas has been the six-word memoir project. The concept is simple: Tell us your life story in six words. However, it can be challenging to distill a life with such brevity. When we launched six-word memoirs, we published some examples on the site. I quickly wrote one for myself: “Big hair, big heart, big hurry.”

The hair is genetic (and often unruly), but the other four words accurately describe my personality, a worldview and way of being that burns itself into SMITH Magazine. I can even distill my personality further, all the way down to one word: infectious. I bring a passion to SMITH’s mission—our belief that everyone has a story and everyone should have a place to tell it—that is unwavering and infectious. I spread my love of what I do fast and furiously. I don’t know how to do it any other way. SMITH and so many other media outlets are fighting to capture the attention of an audience with many choices and much to do. When I infuse this audience with the infectious spirit that lifts me up and fuels SMITH Magazine, I know I have won over new readers—new “SMITHS” so to speak.

Read On

Last mother’s day, we screwed up. Big time.

We had these brand new customizable photo bags we were gonna put up for sale. They looked beautiful, and you could upload any photo to have it baked into the fabric with heat. High quality finish, for $100+. It was perfect for moms, so we scrambled to get it up fast so our customers could order them for Mother’s day delivery (the bags take a couple weeks to create.)

We stayed up all night, but we got it done. And aside from a few early glitches, it worked! The orders came in, and people started writing in to tell us how excited they were to be getting a custom bag. It went on like this for a couple weeks before we found out. Almost a third of our orders had never gone into manufacturing. A technical glitch had prevented us from seeing them, and with a week left until M-Day, it was impossible to get to deliver on our customers’ promises. We were about to have a bunch of very angry customers (and moms!) on our hands. I didn’t know what to do.

Read On

At DRY, our brand positioning and personality are everything — our personality is our brand and our brand is our offering. As such we talk A LOT about what we are and what we want to be. . . and, equally importantly, what we don’t want to be. We give our brand and our individual products personality profiles, and ask the questions: “If DRY was a person, who would we be?”, “What would we do?”, “What would motivate us?” We look at historical figures, celebrities and people on the street — “Is he DRY?” “What flavor is she?” And we talk about the personalities of other brand— “How are we different?”

So, what is the DRY personality? We’ve worked hard to create a brand that we believe meets the needs of today’s consumer, and as such, our brand personality is a direct reflection of our target’s desires for simplicity, individuality and versatility. The traits we associate with the DRY brand are: smart, sophisticated, simple, modern, unique, innovative and engaging. What DRY is not are: serious, elitist, playful, irreverent, folksy, aloof or average.

Read On

1. Why was personality the theme that you chose to build your hotel brand around?

Because hospitality is mainly about one very important ingredient…Personality! When we originally started this hotel company, it was called Hotel Group of America. As the company grew and we continued to open more hotels, so many of our guests would comment on how much personality each property had. So, we took this feedback from our guests, and renamed the company Personality Hotels. And that’s very true - each of the properties definitely has its own unique style and personality so there’s always a perfect fit for each of our guests’ individual needs. I can’t meet all of my guests, but I do feel that I get to know a little bit about them just by the hotel where they choose to stay.

2. How did the idea to use the Personality Profile comment cards come around?

Six years ago I was brainstorming what kind of comment card would inspire my guests to fill out and give me their honest feedback. My older daughter, who was 10 years old at the time said “Make it like a paper doll that guests can fill in and make sure to give it a heart & mouth so it comes alive!” Don’t you just love kids and their honesty? and has it increased the number of comments you get overall? I can barely keep up with the number of cards that we receive from our guests! I especially love they ones that are decorated and become original pieces of Personality art. The cards really allow people to express their artistic side and have fun. Do people take theirs with them? No, they love turning them over to us. I post the most original ones in the corporate office to remind my staff why we’re in this profession. I also post them on PersonalityHotels.com for all the world to enjoy.

Read On

Over the past 8 years, Zappos.com has grown very quickly. In 1999, the year the company was founded, we had almost no sales. Since then, our historical gross merchandise sales numbers have been:

2000: $ 1.6 million
2001: $ 8.6 million
2002: $ 32 million
2003: $ 70 million
2004: $184 million
2005: $370 million
2006: $597 million
2007: $840 million
2008: $1 billion (projected)

We’ve been asked by a lot of people how we’ve grown so quickly, and the answer is actually really simple. Our top priorities are company culture and customer service, which has resulted in repeat customers and word of mouth being the #1 driver of our growth. We believe that one of the most important ways for us to deliver “above and beyond” customer service is by letting the personality of our call center reps shine through. This means that, unlike most call centers, we don’t have scripts and we don’t measure call times. Each of our reps are are encouraged to let their individual personalities shine when talking with our customers, because we don’t want to come across as just another faceless company.

Read On

When we set out to build BzzAgent in late 2001, we wanted to build the first WOM brand. Not the first brand built by WOM, as that’s happened hundreds of times, but the first brand that stood for WOM. So, we created a cute name, a memorable bee logo and came up with snappy copy about hives and honeycombs.

The Bee Logo, the cornerstone of our brand, was developed to near perfection in under an hour, but we spent days refining it. He looked terribly upset. We messed with his forward-arching eyebrows, but every variation made it look like our bee was high on ecstasy, so the glowering low eyebrow look stuck.Whenever anyone told us the bee looked irritated, we responded by saying, “he’s not angry, he’s just determined.” Our brand was memorable, sure; but without even realizing it, the germ of our personality had begun.
Read On

More than six months ago as I was in the midst of writing Personality Not Included I thought about all the great stories I was hearing from people and how interesting it would be to hear them all in their own words - as opposed to just shared in my voice as many of them are in the book. As I interviewed more and more people for the book, the idea for this site emerged. The Personality Project is a group blog which will feature contributed blog posts from authors, founders, bloggers, artists, and many others all about the topic of personality in business and why it matters. In some cases, you will read stories that the contributors have never shared anywhere else. In others, you will get a deeper look at what has made a particular brand or organization successful today. Ultimately, The Personality Project will share these voices over the next year - two per week every Tuesday and Thursday. So subscribe to the RSS feed or by email, or just bookmark the site to return to. I guarantee you will learn a lot along the way.

Here is a list of the first ten contributors:

1. Rohit Bhargava (the post you’re reading!)
2. Dave Balter (CEO/Founder of BzzAgent)
3. Tony Hseing (CEO/Founder of Zappos.com)
4. Yvonne Lembi-Detert (CEO/Founder of Personality Hotels)
5. Premal Shah (President of Kiva.org)
6. Sharelle Klauss (CEO & Founder, DRY Soda)
7. Amit Gupta (Founder of PhotoJojo)
8. Larry Smith (Editor & Founder, SMITH Magazine)
9. John Bell (Head of Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence)
10. Andy Sernovitz (Author, Co-Founder of WOMMA)

These will be published over the next few weeks, and I will also be sharing the next 10 contributors signed onto the project on the first of every month (so the next ten will be announced on May 1st) on the Personality Matters Blog (the official blog for the book). You can read a bit more about the team behind this effort on the About page, but we have already invited more than half of the contributors to the project and will be seeking out others over the coming months. If you know someone who you think could have a great point of view to share here, check out the Join the Project page for more details on how to nominate them. Personality is the difference between good brands and great ones … and this site will give you an inside look at the power of personality through the stories of some of the people who have managed to use it effectively already to build their brands.