What Vanilla Ice can teach us about branding

At my church growing up in Plano, Texas, there was this guy named Tommy Quon. He was a short guy with some serious swagger, a nice car, and a wife who looked like a model. Urban legends swirled around him among my group of church friends. There were rumors that he was Vanilla Ice’s manager. There were whispers that he had a fleet of luxury cars and spent time on the set of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze.

The year was 1991.

In hindsight, this all seems like the work of pre-Internet imaginative pre-teenagers. Yet, the urban legends about the guy eventually were proven true. Someone, perhaps even Vanilla Ice himself, perhaps a high school prankster, had signed the church's guest book with an illustrative signature and the name - Robert Van Winkle, aka Vanilla Ice. We would pore over the signature as though Jesus of Nazareth had traveled across time to visit our humble church. It was a BIG DEAL.

Robert Van Winkle was born in Dallas, Texas and spent time in Florida as a kid. He moved back to Texas around the age of sixteen and dropped out of school. He was an excellent break dancer and motorcyclist. He also loved to rap.

At age nineteen, Van Winkle performed at a club called City Lights in South Dallas and was granted a sort of residency due to his immense talent as an MC. He began to nail his performances, and, he opened up for bands like Public Enemy and NWA. in the late ‘80s. He was living a new variant of the American Dream.

Vanilla Ice was born.

One night, about a year into his gig at City Lights, he was stabbed five times outside of the club.

It was in the hospital after this stabbing that the owner of City Lights, Tommy Quon, signed Vanilla Ice to a record deal. Quon used his earnings from the club to finance Vanilla Ice’s early career and album. It took them two years to record Ice’s first studio album, To the Extreme.

Most radio stations passed on playing the album’s first single, but a B-side titled “Ice Ice Baby” caught the ear of a DJ in Atlanta, Georgia. It became a staple on Atlanta radio. Even in 1991, Atlanta had the ability to make or break a young rapper. Quon spent $8,000 to quickly create the now iconic video for “Ice Ice Baby” in response to that success. You may remember the video—with the stupid baggy pants and the ‘80s Dallas skyline in the background. And that haircut.

To the Extreme was Vanilla Ice’s first studio album and became the fastest selling hip-hop album of all time with 11 million copies sold, going on to sell 15 million copies globally.

In many ways, the wall that Run DMC and Aerosmith took down in their classic video for “Walk This Way” did not come down until Van Winkle dropped “Ice Ice Baby” on suburbia. Hip-hop was fast tracked to dominate the musical landscape for decades. It broke through in a way that had yet to happen, like a missile festooned with neon fins and ostentatious graffiti.

Timing. Perspective. Preparation.

Back to Tommy Quon. He was not a musician, but he was an excellent businessman. He knew how to brand, and his timing was impeccable. In Vanilla Ice, he saw the future, and like any entrepreneur, he used his platform to take a measured risk. He started with a studio recording, and when customer feedback was good, he moved on to a music video. Classic escalation of concept.

There is one key reason why it all worked. Vanilla Ice was a greatly consistent, near-caricature (in hindsight) brand. Plus, he solved a problem.

The problem? The suburbs needed a bridge to rap and urban culture. NWA, Ice-T, and lots of other rappers of this particular vintage were historical and great but ultimately too intimidating and polarizing for suburban America to get behind, especially for the time.

My parents were not going to listen to “F*ck the Police,” but they would listen to “Ice Ice Baby.” Sure, kids (like me) - we would grab NWA and Ice-T tapes at the mall and hide them from their parents, but parents were dismissive and protective. I still remember my mother finding an NWA tape and telling me that she wanted to “beat it with a hammer” on account of its near prodigal levels of profanity. No such emotions emerged with Vanilla Ice. With the “Under Pressure” Queen/Bowie riff and the harmless baggy pants, Vanilla Ice was rap at its most accessible. My mom would bump it in our Chrysler Town & Country on the way to soccer practice.

It was like a cartoon advertisement for rap, but just catchy enough to set the world on fire. Even though the second verse of “Ice Ice Baby” describes a drive-by shooting, the world accepted the track as vanilla enough for the mainstream.

Vanilla Ice was rap culture’s fait accompli. After “Ice Ice Baby” stormed the US, everything changed. In school, teachers encouraged rapping as a form of presentation. During NBA games, rap beats were played. On TV, in increasingly uncomfortable formats, people would rap things. I lived through many of these painful cultural moments personally. It was an awkward time for the game.

Rap became legitimate and safe.

“Rolling in my 5.0 with my drop top down so my hair can blow.” Vanilla Ice was no Rakim, but he tore down the wall. He shattered rap’s ceiling. His music was not great, but his timing was.

Brand + timing + problem solved = greatness. If you want to get rich, then align those three things and move forward like a Mongol horde charging under a black banner.

“Ice Ice Baby” also adheres to the most important rule of branding—repetition.

He says “ice” at least thirty-five times on the track.

The most important things for brand is consistency, repetition, and authenticity. Unfortunately, Vanilla Ice had some issues with authenticity.

As a white guy practicing in a predominantly not-white game, he already had an authenticity target on his back, with such a profitable act of appropriation. The late ‘80s and early ‘90s were a time of frequent poseur accusations, and Vanilla Ice checked those boxes, especially when contrasted against fellow “Brothers in Ice,” Ice Cube and Ice-T. As a suburban kid, I remember loving Ice Cube of N.W.A., but being legitimately terrified to cross paths with him. He seemed so hard. I had no such feelings about Vanilla Ice.

Vanilla Ice summed it up perfectly in 1990:

“It’s not about skin color,” he insists. “Rap is from the streets and I’m from the streets. That’s why a lot of people accept me.”

It was about the streets. He was right, sort of.

He published a biographical account about his “background” coming up in the streets, of which parts were falsified. Of course, getting stabbed numerous times seems like a fair qualification for one’s connection to the street to me, but it didn’t matter. He lied in a book about himself—that was the story. It destroyed his brand, and really his career as a musician. He was twenty-two.

If your brand lies, then kiss it goodbye.

If your brand is inconsistent, then you do not have a brand.

If you do not have a brand, then you will never create long term value. Sure, you may get a shot at dating Madonna (above) and appear in a movies with the ninja turtles, but you will cap your value in a major way.

Regardless, Ice Ice Baby is a great lesson in branding and hip hop.

On an interesting note, “Ice Ice Baby” caught the ear of infamous music executive Suge Knight. Knight, as we know now, is a gangster of a hip-hop icon, and a cautionary tale about the dark side intimidation that takes place behind the stage.

Suge effectively intimidated Vanilla Ice into licensing the publishing rights for “Ice Ice Baby” to his record label. Allegedly, Suge held Ice from his feet off the fifteenth-floor balcony of the Bel Age Hotel until he relinquished the rights to the track. Fast and loose, street rules. The rap game.

Suge used the royalties earned from “Ice Ice Baby” to allegedly start (!!!) Death Row Records. That anecdote, along with its place as a MAJOR crossover hit and the first number one hip-hop single, probably makes “Ice Ice Baby” one of the most historically significant hip-hop tracks of all time, though it does not get that credit.

A brand attracts.

The Nuts and Bolts of Branding

Branding is a very basic and yet complicated art and science. At its core, it is the essence of your business. When people think of your company, it is your brand that they feel. Every interaction, every word, every image, collectively forms a brand.

Everywhere your brand interacts with a customer needs to have a common thread and theme.

Logo and Name 

This is number one. Naming your business is a moment that reflects what you believe it means to the world. Choose a name that fits the character and what you want people to remember. With Menguin, I wanted to have a brand that took a moment to "get" and involved a quiet introspective moment of delight, when you made the connection on its meaning.

Combine your name with a logo to use as a visual shorthand. Someday, people may know your brand so well that they recognize it from logo alone. That is the goal. Create a primary version of your word-mark and logo and then use it everywhere. Do not create many variants as it will erode consistency.

Vanilla Ice had a perfect name. It both made an emerging genre more vanilla, and it summed up who he was perfectly—a white rapper.

Font

Choose your family of fonts and stick to it. Make sure every single thing that is ever typed uses those fonts. From email to website to print ads, the fonts need to be consistent. People trust consistent. The mind notices little inconsistencies in brand like an errant font and interprets these inconsistencies as dissonance. Create rules for headings, subheadings, and body text first. Move on from there as necessary. This is an easy best practice. Try to pick fonts that are not too clever or creative, as they will lack a utilitarian function and be difficult to use across functions.

Personifying the Brand

I have been blessed to work alongside some of the greatest people in the world at Menguin and Generation Tux. One of my mentors is a guy named Neil. Neil is a branding expert and academic who taught at Cambridge, University of North Carolina, and currently teaches at Indiana University. He is one of my luckier breaks as far as collaborators are concerned, and much of my obsession with brand stems from Neil.

One of my favorite exercises that I inherited from Neil is the brand personification exercise. Effectively, you create a fictional individual and create attributes for that individual as though he or she is your brand. If your brand is a person, what is their job? What kind of car do they drive? What do their friends say about them? What are their hobbies? What type of music do they listen to? Are they married? Are they straight? Where are they from?

It can go on forever. The purpose of this exercise is to create an individual that everyone at the company can relate to and understand. From there, everything your brand does must be consistent with how that individual would behave.

For Vanilla Ice, you could say, would Vanilla Ice drive of slant nose 911? Yes. Would Vanilla Ice date Madonna? Yes. Would Vanilla Ice make a movie about motorcycles? Of course. Would Vanilla Ice lie about where he is from....No.

As it is difficult to make decisions of consistency with an ephemeral brand, this exercise creates a polymorph version of your brand that is a human. Say his name is Steve. Say a new intern creates a social media post that sounds wrong. You get to say, “Steve would never say this; he doesn't talk in contractions and hates the mountains” or something like that.

By personifying the brand, you make it more real and consistent. But above all else, you get to sound like a crazy person.

Voice

Voice is everywhere. Every word on your website, or in texts, or in emails, or on the phone, is a manifestation of your brand’s voice. There are two components to this, thematically: how your brand “talks” and the consistency within that vernacular.  

To illustrate, let’s revisit personifying the brand. You have this humanized version of your brand, and now must define how that person would talk. This gives a foundation. Would this person say the things that you are saying in emails and on the website? If not, then is there a good reason for that? It should certainly be a great topic of debate.

Make sure that you are constantly auditing what is written and what is said to create a consistent voice experience. Work closely with a copywriter or work as the copywriter to make sure the early vernacular and rules are standardized and documented. 

One other thing to note: always be open to making adjustments early on to better accommodate your customers. When we first started Menguin, we had this pithy, extremely bro-ish approach. We consistently received feedback from one of our most important customer groups—brides—that we seemed risky for their wedding due to this nonsensical style of voice. We adjusted to be more approachable and safe.

Once you feel comfortable with the printed word, move on to the spoken word.

Influencing how employees speak to customers is a challenging but rewarding experience. Thanks to phone, chat, and texting technology (Check out Voxie), it is easy to see the transcripts of nearly every conversation that takes place between a brand and its customers. It is important to coach your team to interact in a way that is consistent with the voice of your brand. From the first to last words uttered on a call, it is all part of your brand. Coach your team to be on brand.

Every single brand in the world struggles with voice consistency. Make it an ongoing conversation and be mindful of it. Vanilla Ice had two years to hone his message on an album that mostly hits the mark and remains consistent - it was outside of the studio where he strayed from his brand message.

Imagery

Take a look at the ads for any major brand. Look at their website. Most have a consistent look to every image they capture.

The way to create this effect is to stick with a specific palette or use of color while also understanding the brand’s aspirational composition. As much as it pains me to admit this, I do my best branding consistency work in Pinterest. It is very easy to collect images that “feel” like your brand on a Pinboard. After a while, trim it down to the most essential and effective images and voila—you have a brand framework before you even had to take a picture or hire a designer.

Below is one for Menguin. Keep in mind that I FOUND these images on Pinterest.

First, understand what kind of look you are going for with the brand. Second, plan shoots and create images that capture that look. This will be challenging no doubt, but if you organize your thoughts via a Pinterest Pinboard, then you can hand it off to a photographer or other creative person, and they will get what you are aiming to create. It is very challenging to describe this type of thing with words alone. It is a visual exercise.  

If you get stuck, here’s a helpful method to focus your Pinboard creation into something you will be able to creatively wrangle, like pretend you have to design a house using furniture that looks like your brand, or imagine you are dressing your personified brand in clothing, etc.

With brand development, I always hit Pinterest first. It is a rich medium to quickly license content for the sake of brainstorming.

Vanilla Ice's cover album from To the Extreme really hits the zeitgeist of the mall rapper RAD era early 90's in about 5 ways. Parker Lewis silk shirt? Check. Baggy Pants? Check. Hair rising into a coiffed growth like on some rare bird of paradise in the furthest reaches of the West Papuan rainforest? Check. Undercut lines shaved into the hair? The album artist made sure to include a side profile detail shot at bottom left...Check. Is the term Extreme used? YES, of course.

A Brand Bible

Build a brand bible that outlines your font choices, images, brand philosophies, personification, and examples of this in action across website, print, email, and anywhere else a customer interacts with your brand.

This will serve as the formal rule book for your brand to ensure consistency across all mediums. When you hire a new employee or agency, you hand over the brand book and say, “This is who we are, don't f*ck it up." This helped us so much at Menguin and provided a necessary bridge to culture.

THE TAKEAWAY

The key to branding is to create an authentic voice and brand image and then remain true to it no matter what. Vanilla Ice created a brand identity yet failed to create any sort of long-term authenticity. His cruise was a straight shot up and a straight shot down. The more brand trust you create through repetition and consistency, the more residual value you create for your company. If you compromise what you have built through violations of consistency or authenticity, then kiss it all goodbye. Brand is simply repetition of a few elements and knowing who you are.