Okay, Kids, Here’s the Blueprint for Selling Cookies, Sex and Sweat
I’m not sure how the conversation would have gone if David Liederman, Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Richard Simmons had met for coffee.
I do know that if they had simply exchanged stories, it would have been a master class in how the last couple of decades have become the age of branding.
All three, who died within eight days of each other, exemplified the value of creating and marketing a product tied to themselves. That’s not a new concept. After Thomas Edison developed electric lighting and phonograph record technology, he started a power company and a record label. But the advent of television in the 1950s, then the Internet and social media in more recent times, has given personal branding a rocket-powered engine.
Those skilled in the art of branding could now take established products, things that had been around for years, and make them feel fresh and new simply because of who was now promoting them.
Liederman, who died July 4 of a heart attack at the age of 75, sold chocolate chip cookies.
Chocolate chip cookies had been a staple of the American guilty pleasure diet for more than four decades when Liederman launched David’s Cookies in 1979. Essentially he upped the cookie game by adding more butter and using high-end Belgian chocolate “chunks” instead of traditional chips, making the cookie chewier and richer. Okay, and more expensive.
While they didn’t address America’s weight situation, they were delicious. They also earned Liederman a lot of money, which enabled him to sell the brand in 1996 and pursue his real dream of becoming a full-service world-class restaurant chef, not just a guy who made cookies. He did okay in that pursuit, though not as well as he did with butter and chocolate chunks.
Dr. Westheimer, who was universally known as Dr. Ruth and died Friday at the age of 96, sold the idea that we should talk about sex, because it’s natural and pleasurable.
While that doesn’t sound like a radical premise, hundreds of millions of people gasp at the very notion of discussing sex at all. Some regard it as personal and private. Others regard it as shameful and sinful outside the strict parameters of marital procreation.
Dr. Ruth, while not advocating universal promiscuity, argued that because sex is one of the built-in functions of the human body, we should deal with it as openly as we deal with other functions.
Toward that end, she wrote 45 books, hosted multiple television shows and achieved near omnipresence as a media celebrity instantly known by her first name alone. She circumvented the “awkward subject” problem by the simple trick of being a smiling, upbeat 4-foot-7 Jewish woman with a thick German accent whose parents died in the Holocaust. She never played those cards explicitly, because she didn’t have to. Who could tell Dr. Ruth “You can’t say that” and not sound like a 17th century scold?
Simmons, who died Saturday at the age of 76, sold the idea that losing weight doesn’t have to be a chore.
Not hard to catch fish with that bait.
Simmons was not the first person to say you can lose weight by burning off more calories than you consume. He also wasn’t the only person to offer a program for doing so, following in the footsteps of folks like Charles Atlas and Jack LaLanne and facing contemporary competition from the likes of Jane Fonda, whose workout tapes sold about 17 million copies.
Simmons separated himself from the crowded fitness field by becoming the self-described class clown.
He wore non-traditional workout clothes, like candy-striped shorts and studded tops. He became a master talker, a fave of talk hosts like David Letterman and Howard Stern, and he knew their game. When Stern suggested Simmons had both masculine and feminine elements, Simmons immediately declared a feud, vowing never to guest with Stern again. Until he did.
He was flamboyant enough to become a widespread punchline, which helped his most famous workout tape series, Sweating With the Oldies, sell more than 20 million copies.
Like Liederman, but for different reasons, Simmons eventually found branding had a burdensome side. Even after he stepped back from active promotion, he remained a saleable gossip column subject, and he found some items offensive enough to file lawsuits.
In the final analysis, David Liederman wanted something different. Dr. Ruth got exactly what she wanted. Richard Simmons got what the Bob Dylan / Johnny Cash song “Wanted Man” capsulized as “a lot more than I needed of some things that turned out bad.”
It’s all instructive because, as we barrel forward in the age of influencers, branding will become more alluring, more intense and sometimes more harrowing.
So it would have been interesting to hear what these three would have had to say about it — if only because it’s also worth remembering that for every three brands that make it, maybe three hundred thousand never get past family and friends.
