Battle of the Brands

David D'Alessandro, CEO and president of John Hancock Financial Services Inc., isn't afraid to name names. Boston Brahmins cringe at his loud mouth and loud ties. And he doesn't care much about toeing lines, gaining backroom consensus, or acting like CEOs of most major public companies, who shy from making a stink about anything. After all, making a stink is bad news for any public company, let alone a life-insurance company. It's bad for the brand, right?

Right, says D'Alessandro. Unless you're making a stink because something really does smell out there. Then you do what's right, not what's subtle. And if you do what's right, your brand -- which is all about trust and integrity anyhow -- will come out smelling like a rose.

That's what happened in 1998 when D'Alessandro, who had made Hancock one of the primary sponsors of the Olympics, publicly took the International Olympic Committee to task for their slow-footed response to bribery scandals. After threatening to withdraw his sponsorship -- estimated at between $40 million and $50 million for four years -- if changes weren't made, D'Alessandro was attacked personally and professionally. But he stuck to his guns and made the IOC implement an ethics clause (now called the Hancock Clause), which allows any sponsor to pull out of the games if a committee-related scandal erupts.

"Our motives were very simple: Don't splash mud on our brand," he says. Today, John Hancock is still a sponsor of the Olympics, and its own brand is one of the most respected in the country.

D'Alessandro, one of the only public-relations executives ever to make it to the corner office of a major public company, thinks that a company's brand is its single most valuable product -- something that few, if any, executives realize. In his new book, Brand Warfare: 10 Rules for Building the Killer Brand (McGraw-Hill, 2001), D'Alessandro shares his very public experience with the Olympics and other entertaining, brutally honest brand success stories. The book is plainspoken, opinionated, often hilarious, and smart. It's got a fair bit of piss and vinegar, as well as boundless common sense. So, unsurprisingly, does the author, who, at age 50, became the youngest CEO in John Hancock's history last June.

Although D'Alessandro is a trained "spinmeister," what comes out of his mouth can be surprisingly raw. Just listen to him talk about the life-insurance business, something that those in the industry usually mention only in hushed tones. Brand is critical in this business, he says, because life insurance is a commodity product and because it's about death, a topic no one really wants to discuss.

"Life insurance is a wonderful business if you know what you're doing," D'Alessandro says, betraying a trace of an upstate New York accent. "Why? People, on average, die right on time. They pay you money because they're afraid that they might die earlier. It makes the people here insane when I say that this is the bookmaking and loan-sharking business. And we're the house. We know the odds. So we win every time."

Hancock's ads, which have won numerous awards, are not about gambling, however. They're about the one critical emotion for anyone in the death business: empathy. The company has run memorable black and white ads commemorating a baby's birth and a college graduation -- events that celebrate the passing of time. More recently, the company has drawn attention with a notorious spot in which two women go to the airport to adopt an Asian baby -- which has been interpreted by some as a subtle endorsement of lesbian families. Whatever characters are displayed, the message, says D'Alessandro, is always the same: We care.

The branding extends to the ads' placement -- at wholesome events, such as the Olympics and Major League Baseball games, but never at NASCAR races. "We're a life insurance company," D'Alessandro writes in the book. "We don't particularly want to attach our brand to a violent death on the racetrack."

Here are four of D'Alessandro's most important rules for building a killer brand.

Never forget that you are your brand.

D'Alessandro first experienced the power of the brand as a child in Utica, New York, when he helped protect the family delicatessen's reputation with a rather unusual skill: licking meat. When he was six, his family discovered that he had inherited his grandmother's ability to determine if meat was going bad by licking it. "My tongue tingled," he says. So, much to the chagrin of the owners, his dad would bring him and his tingling tongue to the slaughterhouse when it was time to buy meat. "The owners hated me. They didn't want to give bad meat to a supermarket because they were afraid that they'd lose those huge orders. But they didn't care about us," he says.

Once he'd given the goods the thumbs-up, his dad would stamp the D'Alessandro name onto the flank to make sure that the meat David had approved was what the delicatessen actually got -- and that the meat sold under the D'Alessandro name was of good quality. The lesson: Keep brand front and center in all decisions, and know that it is the boss's responsibility -- and everyone else's too -- to protect it. You only have one name.