Can you imagine Bogues trying to dunk?
Your brand is copying the tallest player on the court. Here’s why that loses.
Yea, you're not a unicorn tech giant yet, and that shouldn't discourage you from creating an awesome brand.
I watched Space Jam with my daughter, and the guy I couldn’t stop thinking about afterward wasn’t Michael Jordan.
It was Muggsy Bogues.
If you haven’t seen it in a while: a gang of tiny aliens steals the talent of five NBA players so they can turn into giants to defeat the Looney Tunes in a game of basketball (it's a cartoon, cut me some slack). Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, Larry Johnson, Shawn Bradley, and, standing in that lineup like somebody’s little brother waiting to get picked last, Muggsy Bogues.
He’s five foot three. The shortest player in NBA history. He played college ball at Wake Forest, Washington drafted him in 1987, and Charlotte took him in the expansion draft a year later. Then he spent years as the Hornets’ starting point guard in a league full of giants, and he averaged under eight points a game while doing it.
Read that last part again. Under eight points. His value was never scoring.
He didn’t try to out-jump anybody, because that was never his game.
He built his whole game around the body he actually had: a low center of gravity that made him a nightmare to stay in front of, a handle so tight and grounded he almost never gave the ball away, hands quick enough to pick your pocket before you realized you were being guarded, and a pass-first pace that made everyone around him better.
Can you imagine Bogues trying to dunk on 7ft tall Patrick Ewing?
He’d have had more success being a circus act. Instead he was a starter for years, because he played his size. (Even the one time he famously got the better of Ewing at the rim, he did it by stripping him on the way up. A block that was really more of a sneaky pickpocket.)
Bringing it back to design: Most brands are Bogues trying to post up Ewing.
They look at the tallest player in their category, the leader with the biggest budget and the loudest presence, and they copy the playbook move for move.
First it’s the voice. The founder is the most fun person on any call. They crack a joke before the agenda is even up and send voice memos with sound effects. Meanwhile the website reads like a compliance document: “Enterprise-grade. Mission-critical. Trusted by teams worldwide.” Those are somebody else’s words, borrowed because they wanted to look like the tallest person on the court.
Then it’s the look. The same dark gradient, the same glowing product shot, the same geometric sans, because it looked expensive on Stripe and it looked expensive on Linear. Copying Stripe, copying Linear, copying whoever raised the most money last quarter.
Then, and this is the one that actually costs you, it’s the person. The founder starts writing LinkedIn posts like press releases. They hire salespeople trained to sound like the incumbent’s salespeople. A prospect falls for the stiff, buttoned-up brand, gets on a call, and meets someone bubbly and warm who matches nothing they just read.
The customer feels it before they can pinpoint the obvious fact that you are trying to be someone you are not.
Here’s the crazy part: the tallest player’s playbook only works for the tallest player.
Ewing posts up because he’s Patrick Ewing. The category leader sounds corporate and stoic because that’s who they are, or because they got big enough that stoic is the only voice a giant company can agree on. When you copy that, you aren’t borrowing their strength. You’re playing their game, on their court, by their rules, against someone who will always be better at it than you.
And you’re benching the one thing they can’t copy back.
Professional and serious sound like the same thing. They aren’t.
Professional is a standard. Serious is a personality.
Professional means you show up, you ship, you answer the email, and the invoice is right. Serious is a tone of voice. You can be wildly professional and loud about it. Bogues was as professional as anyone in the league, and he played nothing like a center.
I know what you’re thinking: “Sure, but my buyers are enterprise. They expect serious.”
They expect competence. Serious is just the costume most companies wear to signal it, and your buyers have already seen that costume on every vendor in the category. The bubbly founder who’s genuinely excellent stands out in a lineup of identical suits. The stiff brand fronted by a secretly bubbly founder stands out too, just for the wrong reasons, usually about four minutes into the first call.
And it cuts both ways. If you’re the serious, no-BS, stoic type, don’t let some playful brand that went viral talk you into exclamation points and a meerkat mascot. That’s Ewing trying to run Bogues’s game, which looks just as ridiculous. Your dry, straight-to-the-point thing is different build. Play it.
It brings us back to the question I ask in every brand strategy workshop: how do you want your users to feel?
Then ask a second one. How do people feel after a call with you?
Your brand should match who you actually are. If you’re fun, bubbly, and energetic, your brand should be too. If you’re serious, no-BS, and stoic, so should your brand. Fake the opposite and you’re playing someone else’s game on their terms.
Figure out what your build is good at, and build the whole brand around it.
Play your size, you might just steal the ball out from the tallest player... even if you're 5ft 3in.
— Zach 🤘
PS. Look at your homepage, Do you see yourself in there?
