CEO of Earth: A Ground-Breaking Guide to Building the Ultimate Brand

By Simon Hammond

How, given the chance, would you market planet Earth as the ultimate tourist destination?

Fysh Reynolds, 25-year-old MBA grad and internet superstar, must answer this question when his part-time job playing Ronald McDonald at kids' birthday parties thrusts him into an unexpected position of power.

When aliens land on Earth, they mistake the golden arches to be our most prolific centre of authority and assume Fysh — dressed as Ronald — to be leader of the free world. The aliens' mission: to establish Earth as a premium travel destination for intergalactic tourists.

Fysh, a gen Y marketing prodigy, is charged with creating the most powerful brand in the universe: Brand Earth. This fun, quirky and irreverent business fable unravels the mystery of why some brands have the power to inspire deep and primal emotions in consumers that make products legendary and their developers filthy rich. CEO of Earth is a blueprint for marketers who want to engage the philosophies that have propelled the world's most celebrated brands to greatness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Jan 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9781742469195

Book preview

Chapter 1

CARPE DIEM

Fysh Reynolds, the unlikely hero of our story, woke up one Saturday morning with a hangover, $246 in the bank and a part-time job entertaining kids at McDonald’s. Unbeknown to him, 15 hours later he would be going to bed as the Chief Executive Officer of the biggest business imaginable: Earth!

It all began on a typical Saturday morning in Australia’s second-largest city, the cosmopolitan cafe capital, Melbourne. Our 24-year-old hero had awoken slightly muddled from too many boutique beers at the previous night’s post-work-week drinks.

This in itself was nothing unusual and, from his vague recollection, nothing untoward had happened that night. As always, it was just a couple of quiet ones with his friends, accompanied by their respective run-downs of the week at the coalface.

As he lay in bed postponing the inevitable departure from his cosy nest, Fysh reflected groggily on the night before, and on his circle of friends in general. An unusually talented and inspired bunch, most of them had graduated from university and headed straight into highly paid jobs in the private sector, despite their youth and inexperience. They were part of a generation that had been bred to believe that the world was its oyster, but last night’s drinks had been a testament to how the rest of society was yet to cotton on to how lucky it was to have such bright young things driving the future of business.

For Fysh, a three-year marketing degree had led to an MBA, which he had just finished at the top of the class — a clear, but, to him, unsurprising demonstration of just how switched on to the world of business he was. Indeed, reflecting on his innate talents — Fysh knew he could market anything — got him through those moments when he remembered that, unlike his friends, he was yet to start raking in the big bucks and had in fact spent more time spouting Kotlerisms in lectures and writing his blog than actually milking anyone’s hierarchy of needs.

But Fysh’s gen Y citizenship was more powerful than the reality of his less-than-impressive professional life, and not having held down a ‘real’ job didn’t prevent him from sharing his generation’s scorn towards their slow-on-the-uptake gen X and baby boomer supervisors and managers, and their outdated approaches to all things consumer — particularly product marketing.

As Fysh stepped over the snoring body of his friend Owen, who was asleep on Fysh’s bedroom floor, he was torn between attempting to concoct a creative new hangover cure (possibly involving raw eggs and the half-eaten plate of nachos that remained in a hideous heap by his bed) and writing down in his blog the brilliant alcohol-induced insights he’d had the night before. He decided on a messy combination of both.

Fysh’s blog was his raison d’être. It was called BrandME and had received international acclaim when it had been voted ‘best new blog’ in the Weblog Awards that year. The mass appeal of the blog lay in its unique insight into a generation that had come to see individuals become living ‘brands’ in their own right. Fysh’s revolutionary belief that brands were the secret to creating personal reputation and success had given him a rare ability to analyse the brands that shaped his generation, and ensured that he joined the ranks of the elite internet pin-up heroes.

The blog was widely considered to signal a change in understanding of the role of brands in the modern age, and had usurped both The Coolhunter and The Consumerist in popularity. In addition to the popularity of his blog, Fysh gathered massive numbers to his Facebook page, had more people following him on Twitter than Ashton Kutcher and had even been listed in Fortune magazine as one of three bloggers ‘that businesspeople should take a good look at’.

Wiping his nacho-encrusted hands on his pyjama pants, Fysh flicked proudly through the scrapbook of accolades his blog had received: articles singing its praises had been published in Time magazine, The Economist, The New York Times and several other reputable publications. He had been offered book deals by two different publishers and had appeared on several current affairs shows as the voice of the next generation.

‘God, I’m good’, he said out loud as he took a swig of flat Coca-Cola.

His self-adulation was interrupted by the impact of a flying shoe to the back of his head; it seemed Owen had woken up, and wasn’t in the mood for Fysh’s intellectual masturbation. ‘Stop getting intimate with your scrapbook. It’s disgusting. I need a Bloody Mary, and you need to get to work.’

As Fysh pedalled down the main drag of St Kilda on his fixed-wheel bike with his iPod blaring, he contemplated a future where he maintained creative control of his own projects. Maybe he’d be a coolhunter; perhaps a branding revolutionary; most certainly a marketing genius.

And, he reflected as he racked his bike and barrelled through the big glass doors of his ‘office’, he also knew a lot about hard work.

Our hero had worked for the great golden arches, McDonald’s, since he was 15 years old. Adamant that he would not be spoilt, his parents had insisted that he learn the value of money. They’d sent him off to the fast-food giant’s greasy kitchen to work one summer holiday, and his fascination with the brand power of the business had kept him there for almost 10 years.

Fysh, perhaps prophetically, had always thought that McDonald’s would have an important role in his future. So he’d flipped patties and picked pickles off windows with the best of them over the years, eventually working his way up to what he regarded as this monolithic brand’s plum role — the personification of all the power of the McDonald’s brand.

After a nine-month break from dunking fries in his final year of high school an enterprising young Fysh, who’d grown tired of hair nets and spotty-faced crew members, had seen an upside where most people would have run for the hills. He’d returned to his local McDonald’s and pitched the manager on the idea of his assuming responsibility for its ‘front of house’ operation. It had been that afternoon, six years ago, that Fysh had first donned that big red wig and carefully applied greasepaint to his face in the patented pattern. And he’d been moonlighting as Ronald McDonald every weekend ever since.

Playing the part of Ronald McDonald was surprisingly lucrative, as Fysh was being paid under actors’ equity rather than child labour laws. And Fysh quietly enjoyed the mayhem of running kids’ birthday parties: sugar-stoned eight-year-olds charging up and down the slippery slide; manic parents trying to force cheeseburgers into the mouths of distracted, agitated children with ketchup-smeared faces; French fries, cheap and nasty presents and wrapping paper strewn as far as the eye could see; and the inevitable weekly challenge of limiting food fights to minor skirmishes. And then, the climax: Fysh would enter from a side door, ice-cream cake festooned with sparklers in one white-gloved hand, red-and-yellow balloons in the other, belting out ‘Happy Birthday’ in a helium-fuelled aria that no child, no matter how much Coke they’d consumed, could ignore.

In the change room, Fysh winced as he pulled the tightfitting bouffant red wig down over his expensive haircut and decided that maybe he had overdone it slightly last night. Looking in the mirror and pulling a couple of the registered trademark Ronald faces, Fysh reflected that one of the bigger perks of the job was that it was relatively easy to ‘perform’ with all degrees of hangover and sleep deprivation. He certainly knew what the power of three large post mixes and two Big Macs could do for restarting his system before it was show time.

And today was no exception. By 11.30 am, Fysh was mentally kowtowing to the world’s most popular soft drink and the fast-food chain’s greasiest fare, while all around him chaos ruled supreme. Little Johnny had just pulled little Mary’s hair; the quiet kid who had been gradually eating himself into oblivion finally let go with a projectile vomit; Harry, the birthday boy, was having his third tantrum about not getting the first hat, the biggest sundae or the best seat; and his parents were trying hard not to blame each other for this debacle, while serving McCafé lattes to other parents, who were too scared to leave their precious ones in the hands of the hungover young upstart in the red wig and yellow overalls. (Well, they did have a point.)

As far as Fysh could tell, it was business as usual. Little did he know that an event was about to unfold that would change his life — and, without overstating it, the course of human history — forever.

Having lost the collective attention of his young, hyperactive wards minutes previously, Fysh had just put a wrap on a Pussycat Dolls medley on his McDonald’s red-and-yellow plastic kazoo when he spotted three costumed freaks shuffling through the glass doors and straight towards the flagging party.

The intruders looked like characters from Star Wars. Wookiee types, to be precise: big cuddly looking longhaired creatures, albeit without any sign of the large gun and ammo belts Chewbacca might have had. They were every bit as tall as Han Solo’s legendary partner, and Fysh momentarily reflected that it must have been hard for Harry’s parents to find a troupe of such strapping young men to dress in such a way, particularly as these actors clearly took themselves way too seriously. Talk about not reading your audience, Fysh thought to himself.

With all the squealing self-absorption of an only child of well-to-do parents, Harry the birthday boy leapt up from the ground and launched himself at the legs of the tall, furry creatures. To him, the cavalry had arrived, his parents obviously having organised additional performers to entertain him and his friends on his special day — which was a welcome relief to Harry after being subjected to endless lame gags and half-hearted tricks courtesy of an under-the-weather Ronald McDonald.

Normally Fysh would have bristled at being usurped by crude hacks in costumes bearing none of the pizazz of the tried-and-tested Ronald McDonald get-up, but today he felt only relief. If the Joneses had decided to cut his grass with some outside troupe of performance artists, fine: he was over it. It was definitely time to help himself to the bottomless coffee, pull up a plastic bench and read his horoscope and last night’s football review.

But it soon became apparent that the creatures weren’t here to juggle or do acrobatics for anyone, let alone Harry, who had been shrugged off and cast aside with a flick of one of the Wookiees’ hairy legs. Without even a hint of vaudeville, the shaggy giants marched straight up to Fysh and asked if he was in charge.

Being the enterprising young soul he was, Fysh puffed up and glibly answered ‘yes’, presuming they were about to ask for his input on some highly creative Wookiee act, or at least ask him for a run-down of the restaurant’s public liability coverage. But before he could elaborate, the biggest of the three creatures reached over and placed a hairy finger on the inside of Fysh’s wrist and — zap! — he was out cold.

The birthday boy’s family was soon berating the store manager about their less-than-satisfactory party experience. They were particularly outraged in light of having paid extra for Ronald McDonald to entertain their little angel, only for Ronald to have his unsavoury, dishevelled friends crash the party, pass him something suspect, then disappear. The clown had gone all strange, stiff as a board, and simply walked out on them.

It was bedlam. The manager didn’t know whether to run after her Ronald, serve the ice-cream cake that was fast becoming liquid or stop the French fry fight that had erupted from one end of the restaurant to the other. She had no idea that, in a matter of hours, none of this would matter and that Fysh, whom she’d always thought of as an annoying know-it-all, would be instrumental in the greatest feat of branding genius ever embarked upon.

Suffice to say,