Mark Twain’s
10-Sentence Course on Branding
and Marketing
Tom Bentley
In this article you’ll see how Twain...
• Recognized the power of celebrity and personality in
establishing and spreading a brand
• Saw early what his audience wanted, and kept giving
them more, in endless variation
• Continued to refine and extend his brand over his
lifetime
Quick, what white-suited, stogie-smoking, joke-telling
wise guy delayed the publication of his autobiography
for 100 years? And how could that bio, produced by a
university press at 700+ pages—with more than 200 of
them devoted to scholarly footnotes—how could such a
moldy thing possibly be a best-seller?
Easy, because the writer made it richly public that the
autobiographical materials were too hot to be published
in his lifetime.
That, my friends, is marketing.
And the writer, over the long course of his career, became
by virtue of rendered personality and poised presentation,
the most recognized man in the world.
That, my friends, is branding.
No need to stop to see whether you can come up with the
answer, because it’s too obvious: Samuel Clemens created
the cherished celebrity known as Mark Twain as surely and
craftily as he created Huck Finn. The man had “platform”
a century before the concept had circulation.
How did Twain get his cred? By skillfully employing the
marketing and branding techniques of his time—and
making up a few of his own. (Oh, being his country’s
greatest writer probably did him more than a lick of good,
too.)
“In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French;
I never did succeed in making those idiots understand
their language.” Read that, and you know that Twain knew
his way around a good line. If I dragged a net through
all 700+ pages of my copy of Twain’s autobiography, I
could probably find 700 zingers that capture Twain’s
understanding of his own brand and his marketing.