The Power of Unpopular A Guide to Building Your Brand for the Audience Who Will Love You (and why no one else matters)

Introduction: Lessons Learned from a Lippy Lady on an Airplane

Chapter 1: Leaving the Playground – Rethinking Unpopular

Unpopular doesn't mean unsuccessful – it's time to rethink being unpopular. When you can identify the audience you don't want to serve, the one you DO serve becomes your first priority. It's time to ditch the playground rules, tune out the noise and tune in to a business model primed for longevity and profitability.

Chapter 2: Let's Talk About Why You Hate Me – Identifying Your Target Audience

The coolest thing happens when you stop focusing all of your brand-building energy on the people who are never going to like you – you actually find the ones who will. We’ll discuss how to deal with your due diligence, tools for talking to your audience, and building an avatar for your ideal demographic.

Chapter 3: Hideously Beautiful

What's lovely to one person will certainly be hideous to another – unpopular is the intersection of the two (and the ideal balance). On defining your responsibilities when building your brand and the bullshit that is entreprenership (and in a good way). We’ll also introduce the five characteristics of any unpopular brand poised for success: Personality, Approachability, Sharabilty, Scalability, and Profitability.

Chapter 4: Personality – Pick One

While having a viable business concept is job #1, personality is always and without fail job #2. The truth about why people do business with brands, what you stand to gain from taking a stand, and the one lesson you need to learn before any other: you’re going to piss some people off.

Chapter 5: Approachability – Putting Out the Welcome Mat

Unpopular brands offer their target audience a soft place to land, no matter what they're selling (and we're all selling something). But how do you create one and keep the people you need most from hitting rock bottom while you're busy building a business? The importance of conversation, audience acknowledgement, and why all unpopular brands have a high level of customer input.

Chapter 6: Sharability – We Want (and Need) YOU!

Now that your target audience can relate to you because of the personality and approachable culture you've embraced, it's time to focus on building a community – because communities share. It's the one thing that brands that try to be popular will never have that unpopular brands will! An exploration into why and how people share and how you can tap into your audience to help them become the most powerful marketing tool you have in your arsenal.

Chapter 7: Scalability – News Flash: You Can't Do Everything

Growth – for some businesses, it’s the Final Frontier. If you're going to go to the effort to build a brand, you need to build one that can endure the demands of growth. It's time to navigate the Growth Chasm that can swallow you whole and how you can, from day one, set out to build a brand that survives and thrives through growth stages.

Chapter 8: Profitability – The Money's Gotta Come From Somewhere

When you started a business, you never intended to get up every morning and go to work for free. How to keep your company pointed towards generating revenue and finding a balance between the always-on world of owning a business and the life it allows you to enjoy. Discussions on finances, pricing, the less-talked about emotional profitability, and a special look at the startup community and how its outlook on profitability differs from other businesses.

Chapter 9: Finally - They Hate Me!

If you thought that the bad reviews, negative blog comments, poor ratings and foul feedback would never come just because you built your brand the right way, you're wrong. But this is the day you've been waiting for! Learn how to manage negative feedback and more importantly, leverage complaints and feedback into tools to help you build better brands.

Chapter 10: The Backyard Economy

There's a responsibility that comes with building an unpopular brand, one that as entrepreneurs we're better poised to assume than anyone else. How to think about our brands in light of our local economies and how to build backyards that we, as brands, can monitor, nurture, and cultivate for the betterment of every community to which we belong.

Chapter 11: Shutting Up

Appendix: Shit You Should Read, Who Wrote It and Why