Jason S. Bradshaw: There's a secret Harley-Davidson discovered that turned near bankruptcy into brand worship. It wasn't their engines. It wasn't their logo. It was something much simpler. Something that every leader and business owner can do right now to make people fall in love with what they do.

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Jason S. Bradshaw: Today I'm sitting down with the man who helped make that happen.

Ken Schmidt, the voice behind one of the greatest brand turnarounds in history. And together we're going to uncover how noise not marketing creates domination.

So let's go for a ride. Welcome to the show, Ken.

Ken Schimdt: Thanks for having me, Jason. Great intro. I loved it.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Ah, thanks so much.

Now Ken, take us back to those really early days at Harley-Davidson. That was what was really happening behind the scenes when you joined, and how close were things to collapse.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, so what was that first moment that you realized that the company had to stop focusing on the product and start creating a sense of belonging?

And you would've thought giving all this incredible praise that everybody was gonna be charging into Harley dealerships to buy new bikes. And yeah, bunch of people did come in, especially people who'd been sitting on the fence and may be considering it.

So we took all of the money that had been earmarked for marketing which wasn't much 'cause the company was essentially broke. But, we stopped all marketing, all advertising, all promoting, all discounting, all dealer co-op stuff and invested that money in leasing two semi-truck that we could load with bikes and take out in the field - blue collar cities in America. Your Clevelands, your Detroits, auto industry type, and put the signs up. And anybody that wanted to take a bike for a ride could come and take one for a ride.

It's oh, sucks for them.

But when the person who's upset is telling you directly, it hits you right in the heart, right in the gut. Wow! These people are upset with us, and they wanna see us do better. They're upset with me. I don't like the way that makes me feel. We need to turn this around.

Things started to click and again, I'm sorry for such a long wandering answer here, but that was when the discussions of being more human as a business took hold. When customers were saying that they felt like they knew us or I talked to somebody at the factory. I know them. I know how hard their working now. The impact that has on the reputation of the business where most businesses are completely invisible to their customers. It gave them something to talk about. A reason to like us. To prefer us. To root for us, if you will. They come back and spend more time with us. So then we basically just said, all right, let's weaponize [00:08:00] this.

Jason S. Bradshaw: When you were sharing that insight with us, I was thinking how true it is that It it doesn't matter how great a product is on paper, it can be the best product in the world, but until someone gets a chance to experience it, they really don't understand it.

Ken Schimdt: The other thing is, and the big takeaway that we had from this is that if we asked people, anybody in the street, what's Harley-Davidson? What Harley-Davidson do? Then the answer was always the same. Three words. They make motorcycles.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, for those listening along to the show, watching the show at the moment, what you might not know about Ken Schmidt is not only has he been in the trenches and done the work, he's now helping organizations across the world transform the way they create or gain attention on their brand.

And I know Ken, during your talks that you mentioned that people aren't loyal to products, they're loyal to people. Why do so many brands still get this completely wrong? Regardless of the fact that there's experts like you that have done it and proved that it is really that human touch that makes a difference.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah but [00:12:00] nonetheless, Amazon still has a very strong focus on that customer experience. They might, in many categories be the cheapest in the category.

Ken Schimdt: But even if they're not that customer belief, that nobody in the retail world has done anything for me that I like or prefer. Has done anything to foster with me or have any real level of human engagement or the kind of experiences that I think are positive and worth re returning for so I'll just hit a few buttons and be done. And the box will show up life will go on.

Jason S. Bradshaw: And if you're not happy with that box, unlike the retail experience, five seconds later, you can have you return. No questions asked.

Ken Schimdt: Beautiful.

Ken Schimdt: I'm glad saying that Jason because so many times if I'm talking to business people and we will talk about an Amazon. It's easy for them. They've so much money to play with. I say, what do you mean it's easy for them? I said, no they decided to do this and they're doing it. And they're reaping the rewards from that, which is why they have all that money. They just threw it in the box and shipped it to you. You'd never go back or you'd hear bad things said about them. They said, this is what we're going to do. It is not to inject enthusiasm and some visible passion into what you're doing and legitimate empathy and care for the people that you're serving. That's not capital intensive. That creates capital.

Jason S. Bradshaw: And people forget that there were many years where Amazon, despite market pressures continued to make losses and not once shied away from what they decided on, which was getting it right for the customer.

Talking about getting the formula right, though there's a few brands in the world where customers are so fanatical, they go out and get tattoos. Harley-Davidson is absolutely one of those. How can businesses today build that kind of emotional connection with their customers where, maybe it's not a physical tattoo, it's the next best thing to it. What would be a business's first step to get on the journey of creating that level of emotional connection?

We were just talking about Amazon a minute ago. If you put the customer at the front of everything. And say, how would you like to feel in any type of buying environment or any even transactional. For once in your life, wouldn't it feel nice to have somebody show you a tremendous amount of respect or to light up when they see you? Or to hear in their voice a level of passion and enthusiasm and commitment that where you would sense... this isn't what I'm used to. This is " delightful."

Every business in the world says they do. But if we're gonna focus first on being a source of delight for you which requires maybe saying some things that you didn't expect to hear. So it's not that... can I help you approach the businesses? What are you doing this weekend, man? Tell me about that. And then as that person is answering that question, you light up like they're telling you the secret of the universe.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, absolutely. I also think that what Harley-Davidson managed to do, and in no small part 'cause of the work that you led was really amplify this sense of community. And the tattoo is obviously a very visible expression of... hey, I belong to this community.

Ken Schimdt: I remember Jason, and this happened more times than I could count. If I would be with a major investor from the financial community or someone from, a domestic car company, or a computer company, or a beverage company. And we'd be doing some cross pollinization looking back and forth and benchmarking against each other. I would bring them into one of our environments, a large motorcycle gathering. And people are always [00:19:00] curious because they felt like they were in the outside looking in, or that they wouldn't belong. And obviously don't ask me to speak for these people. Ask them a question yourself, and you're gonna be so surprised by the way that they answer you because nobody's gonna talk about the product. Nobody's gonna, oh, I really like this one because it weighs 800 pounds and it gets 61 pounds of torque at the rear wheel at 3,500 rpm. I mean, who remembers that crap? Nobody, but that's what people would think that, oh they're so drawn, and they're so drawn by the hardware, and they would hear people say that, especially when the demand for Harley's outweighed supply for about a 10 year period. They say what kind of bike do you have? I don't have one yet. What kind do you want to get? I don't care what kind I get with specific model. I just I have to get a Harley. I went in on this. I wanna be part of this. And I say, can you [00:20:00] imagine in any industry for any product or service being when people felt that drawn to something? And again, yes, the product was the catalyst, but it was the people and the energy and the community. They said, I can't get this anywhere else. I don't have a lot of friends or my social calendar's not full, but I can come and do things like this and be around like-minded people and have a lot of fun and brag to my friends, and then they're gonna wanna come.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, why wouldn't you indeed?

So Ken, you've said before that every business must answer three questions. What do people say about you? What do you want them to say and what are you doing to make them say it? Which of those three questions is the hardest for leaders to face, honestly. And why?

And say you have 500 employees, 5,000 employees, 50,000! 50,000 employees in your business would have 50,000 different ways of describing what you're about here. That's a problem. That's what we need to work on.

So therefore, what we need to focus on is do we want people to remember? Because that is the essence to me of what experience is. Experience is what we remember. And I remember you positively. They're awesome. I love these people. What a great business. What great people. They remember you negatively. They suck. And we've all said that about businesses in our lives. And then there's about the 80% of business interactions we've had that are in the middle of that spectrum, and that's all the times that we got what we wanted, heard what we expected to hear, heard what we've heard a million times before, got what we paid for and remembered [00:25:00] absolutely nothing about it.

I said, and that's your challenge, as leaders of this business. How are we going to be remembered? Let's focus on it being delightful. Putting that human face on the business so that they prefer us. Be a source of delight for people but also create a vernacular about who we are as a business that our competitors aren't using and claim that space before they do.

So we're gonna strike words like quality from our business descriptions and customer service. Those are the givens. We can get to that if people want to talk about it. But let's come up with something else to hang hats on. Maybe this is a conversation for our marketing people? And I'll say, are your marketing people responsible for the reputation of this business when you're up talking to investors?

They also believe that just being thought of highly for their product is enough until you explain to 'em that it's not.

and then you literally see the light bulbs going, yeah, you know what? He's right. Our stuff does look exactly like our competitive stuff, and we have said this exact thing for the last 50 years.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah. It's amazing how much we commoditize ourselves without, actually taking into account what we're doing and forgetting at the same time.

Ken, a as we draw to towards the last few questions of this episode of Chats with Jason, it would be remiss of me not to talk about the elephant in the room in a lot of boardrooms at the moment.

I don't want us to go down that rabbit hole but in a world where AI is going to be paying a part in businesses, perhaps more so than ever, how do we keep the human noise alive in brand storytelling?

Ken Schimdt: Oh that's such a great question and it's coming up all the time and what it's always interesting to me to hear the internal arguments and discussions about this at businesses where they're saying, people can tell that the stuff that we're doing, our social feeds, that's AI driven. Or we're concerned that they can see it and that they're thinking of it that way. And I always say you better find out, first of all if you're going to be doing this.

Yeah, it's going to do wonders for your internal processes and stuff that no customer in the world ever cares about. That customers having their five seconds with you, their 15 seconds with you because they stumbled upon your website, or they met you at a show, or they walked into your store, if AI is gonna be used as a tool, it has to have the same voice that your favorite, most prized, dearly beloved employee would have, speaking with a customer or a prospect. Because if that's not happening, you're still on the commodity track because all your competitors are doing this too. So, please don't, in the name of efficiency, believe that you can overstep humanity or that the AI, that the bot or the fake video or whatever can [00:29:00] capture that. It can to a degree, but boy, the parameters that you're feeding that , man, you have to be so careful because empathy and soul, we know when something is real and genuine. And I know that the lines are getting blurred, but it's like somebody telling you when you're explaining one of your problems... oh, yeah, that sucks, man. Oh, that guy's not even listening to me. I didn't, that sucks, man. No, but with, oh, what, how? Oh geez. I'm so sorry. How did that happen? Oh, okay. That's a human response. Something that's harder for AI to engender but again, when everybody's doing it and everybody will be doing it, it will become so vanilla, the businesses will lose their humanity.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, I think we're absolutely aligned there.

Ken, as we go to ask the last question to close out the show. You've lived by a powerful motto all your life. Never do what's expected. Make yourself as noticeably different as possible, and have a lot more fun than you're supposed to.

How can leaders today give themselves and their teams permission to live by that motto of yours?

The worst that can happen is we try something that doesn't work as well as we hope, but then we just resharpen our edges and do it again.

Jason S. Bradshaw: What a great way to end the show.

I'm Jason S. Bradshaw, and this has been another episode of Chats with Jason.

Hey, just quickly, I wanted to reach out and say thank you for taking the time to listen to this episode of Chats with Jason. I'd really appreciate a five star review on your favorite podcasting app, or if you're watching along on YouTube, give me a thumbs up and show that you like this video and be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss out on the awesome content and the great guests that we've got coming up for you.