The Ad-Free Brand: Secrets to Building Successful Brands in a Digital World (Frank Feng's Library) by Chris Grams

Author:Chris Grams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Que Publishing
Published: 2012-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

How the Red Hat Brand Story Emerged

When I started at Red Hat in 1999, co-founder Bob Young was still with the company. Bob is a wonderful storyteller who loves to share anecdotes and metaphors to illustrate his points. So, within my first week at Red Hat, my head was filled with all the basic Bob Young stories about Red Hat.

He told one story to explain the value of open source, which we referred to as the “Hood Welded Shut” story. In it, he compared buying normal software to buying a car with the hood welded shut. If you wanted to get inside the software code and try to fix or improve it, you couldn’t. The underlying source code didn’t come with it—the hood was welded shut.

But by buying open source software, which came with the source code, you could get under the hood yourself to see what might be wrong or, if you didn’t have the skills or desire, pick anyone of your choosing to work on the code for you (not just the company that welded the hood shut in the first place).

People loved this story because it was at its heart a story about freedom from control, about having a choice. This resonated with anyone who has ever been forced to upgrade to a version of a software product they didn’t need, dealt with a bug that did not get fixed for years, or had been otherwise bullied or ignored by a software company.

Stories like this one were great illustrations of the raw materials of what would later become core traits of the Red Hat brand, concepts like freedom, choice, liberation, and value.

Over the years, Red Hat began to collect more and more legends that illustrated who we were and what made us different. Former chairman and CEO Matthew Szulik loved to tell the story of the day he hosted an important meeting with one of the biggest technology companies in the world, and the head of our support organization walked in to the meeting wearing a t-shirt that read, “I’d rather be masturbating.”

Matthew used this story as an illustration of the difference in culture between Red Hat and the other big technology companies of the day. But I also suspect Matthew liked that story partly because he was scarred by the experience, partly to show how far the company had come, and partly because it was a great (if demented) illustration of how much freedom people enjoyed at Red Hat.

In 2001, I was asked to be a part of a project to define the values of the company. At that time, Red Hat was still very small, probably about 500 employees. Our group decided to approach defining the values the open source way. Meaning, we opened the process to the entire company, allowing everyone to contribute ideas.

Interestingly enough, we found people continued to use many of the legends and stories we’d heard over the years (like those I illustrated) to explain why they thought certain concepts should be closely held as company values.

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