The woman who infamously wrote I Will Always Love You and Jolene in one night, two of the most recognizable ballads in the American songbook, used 2020 to show she’s just getting warmed up. She started the year breaking the Top 10 Billboard Hot Dance tracks, finished it by revealing she’d contributed $1 million dollars to the program that gave us the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine. Oh yeah, and in between, she won her 9th Grammy and saved a 9-year-old girl while crossing the street. If you missed her this year, perhaps your kids didn’t, as Dolly spent her evenings online, reading children’s books to kids scared about the isolation of sheltering in place.
All in a year’s work for America’s patron saint.
For fifty years, we’ve been enamored by her persona and her self-proclaimed “assets”, but only in recent years has the broader public come to see the incredible talent and business acumen behind the brand. Dolly confesses that she created her “bimbo” persona because it gave people what they wanted while liberating her to give them what they needed: levity, inspiration, and a dose of Smokey Mountain truthtelling. Dolly turned herself into a brand that was close enough to the truth so that when the time came, the whole truth could come through. For those who’ve watched her career carefully as I have, it’s been coming through all along.
“I just wanted to do really good work, and I wanted to make a really big difference in the world.” – Dolly Parton, 1977
Playing The Long Game
A deep dive into Dolly’s storied history will tell you that she had a plan from the start. Sometimes her plan meant taking a back seat so bigger egos could shine. Sometimes it meant stretching herself to give her music a fresh platform to shine. (You’ve seen 9 to 5¸ right?) Whatever her methods (and they were always secondary) Dolly has something to teach C-suites and brand leaders about building a brand that stands the test of time. Sometimes you take the short-term losses to build toward the long-term wins.
Sometimes you lay quiet until you have something to say.
Dolly has ridden the wave of American love and indifference as every brand must by simply knowing that there was more of the story to tell. And by ensuring that her deepest values were always driving the bus. In a world where brands are flashes in the pan and then gone – where rebrands are callous attempts at click-bait and marketing is an algorithm-chasing pimp looking for his next trick to turn, there are lessons to be learned here. And short-term thinking isn’t one of them.
Everything Is Autobiography
No, I don’t mean one more hero story about your company’s founder. What I mean is that until our public voice comes from a private life worth the inspiration, we’ll always be chasing clicks, fads, and aggrandizement. Dolly’s greatest moments in her career were fueled by deep connective tissue to her life story and her personal drive for a life of meaning. 9 to 5 itself, she has stated, was an anthem to women like her.
Tumble out of bed and I stumble to the kitchen,
Pour myself a cup of ambition,
And yawn and stretch and try to come to life.
To have an autobiography that carries a brand for 50 years takes work. To have the brand you sell, the company you lead, the product you endorse be weighty enough to reflect your deepest values requires a dose of courage that most in business wouldn’t dare. But they should.
Know More Than Just Your Game
“She may be the country music queen, but her comprehension of music is encyclopedic.” – Debbie Allen
The most powerful brands have a point-of-view. Not on why you should buy the product, but on how the world should be and what they’re doing about that. The only way to do that with guts and with integrity is to know more than just your thing. You’ve got to know the landscape around where you live, understand the implications beyond the next sale, be a student of the economic, emotional, and entrepreneurial world driving your clients and customers.
To be a brand that goes beyond this moment, a comprehensive view of the world is required. When that happens, you will make strategic bets where others wouldn’t. Invest where others turn a blind eye. Inspire where others live in fear.
For some Dolly’s gift to Covid-19 research feels like something out of place. But for those paying attention, it is the obvious result of her network of do-gooders, of geniuses in their own space, of friends in strange places. All of them connect to her out of an awareness and an understanding of the world she is trying to be a co-creator of. And by the most important metrics, her encyclopedic creativity and connectivity are achieving results.
My guess is the Harvard Business Review on the strategy and tactics of Ms. Parton is not coming any time soon, to their folly. But to your benefit. The brands that understand what makes something both incredibly current and timeless, both frivolous and deep, both inspired and mundane will make the world. And they will do it the Dolly Way.