Liking What You Like: Ted Wright, Indies First, and Why People Buy Stuff
On Saturday, November 29th, A Cappella Books will be celebrating Indies First/ Small Business Saturday with some kickass authors, great local food trucks, awesome music, and that festive community spirit. Ted Wright is one of our featured authors--along with David Cross, Jessica Handler, Jennifer Hill Booker, and Ben Wakeman. Wright is the CEO of a marketing company and an author. Come meet him and celebrate with us on Indies First!
Pictured: Ted Wright in his work environment.
Ted Wright tells stories. In fact, that’s kind of his line of work—Wright is the founder and CEO of Fizz, a Word of Mouth Marketing company based out of Decatur, Georgia, where the name of the game is to help a company find “a story that is interesting, relevant and authentic. If a story is relevant, interesting, an authentic, it’ll get passed around.” Wright is also an 8th generation Atlantan, a practicing entrepreneur since the third grade (when he sold “Jolly Ranchers and Bubble Yum at Oak Grove Elementary”), and recently wrote a book on his much-coveted knowledge called Fizz: Harness The Power of Word of Mouth Marketing To Drive Brand Growth.
Wright is wonderful to talk to—the PR folks who run his website accurately call him “funny, engaging, and extremely unboring”—a fact that I can personally attest to as I met with Wright for a business lunch at Victory Sandwich Bar in Decatur. (He paid, the gentleman.) He looks you in the eye, tells his stories, and approaches you with such enthusiasm that it’s hard not to get swept up in what he’s saying. No wonder the guy’s the leading Word of Mouth Marketing speaker working today, or has business clients all across the globe. It, helps, too, that he knows his stuff. Wright was instrumental in re-vamping the Pabst Blue Ribbon brand, and if you’re a young, totally cool hipster like me, this fact makes you give the dude major props. I don’t even know why—or if—I like PBR, just that I started drinking it because all the cool kids drank it. I guess I have Ted to thank for that.
The story of Wright and Fizz and how he got to be where he is today is analogous to the stories we hear about people like Steve Jobs, aka slackers-turned-innovators. Though Wright, unlike Jobs, managed to graduate—after all, he’s an alumnus of the marketing and consulting firm Booz Allen & Hamilton and holds an MBA with honors from The University of Chicago—he says that he was a “crappy employee.” He liked to pioneer things, that “creating something that was valuable and sustainable” appealed to him much more than, say, doing what he was told. In short, he wanted to lead, not follow. Here’s the way Wright puts it in his mission statement: “Having a killer team, living on the cutting edge, being rebellious, being right—these are the things that bring me joy. Thus Fizz was created and has grown along the path it has taken.”
And what a path it is. Wright is now cited as the best Word of Mouth Marketing speaker working today and has won numerous public speaking awards for his talks. Along with PBR, he’s revamped Chocolate Milk, Bissell, Intuit, AT&T, and Intel, and more. The everyday layman might not know him by name (yet), but they definitely know the brands he works with. Seems like Wright’s strategy—helping companies find their story and then letting the public run with it—works. And he’s not hoarding his ideas, either. In his new book, Fizz, Wright shares all that he’s learned in his field. He seems to enjoy the sharing process, saying that he liked being forced to “put [him]self in the shoes of a start-up owner or a global CEO with a product line that needed help.” He’s not worried about his own book putting himself out of work. He’s just excited about more people knowing what Word of Mouth Marketing can do.
Pictured: Ted's book. CATCHY COLOR AND TITLE
That’s the key thing about Ted—he’s a person who does things because he genuinely likes doing them. And that is what he looks for in his clients and the brands he’s pushing. He knows people gravitate toward stuff that other people actually like, not stuff that's been pushed down our throats through relentless advertising. Or, in his own words, “We wanted to be involved with anything that people were doing because they liked doing it.”
Pictured: Wright, with ice water (?!)
Wright likes A Cappella Books for the same reason he likes anything—because we also do this because we like doing it. A Cappella is unique in that it started as an antiquarian bookstore, and while over the years it has shifted focus and accrued more popular titles, our staff and owner Frank Reiss take extra care to ensure that everything that ends up on the shelves reflects the philosophy of A Cappella Books and its longtime customers. Namely: good books. Music books. Weird books. Books you can’t find elsewhere. And books that reflect the staff. Wright flatteringly said that anyone who knows books will end up at A Cappella and realize they’re home—that in a place like ours, you can tell the people in charge really care. And that, Wright says, is what really makes a place stick around.
We’re so happy to have Wright here for Indies First. He’s an entrepreneur, a communicator, and is fiercely dedicated to the Atlanta community, especially to the people who are doing stuff they like just ‘cuz. Wright’s fun facts about himself on his website are that he likes good bourbon and driving fast cars (“though never at the same time”), but I’d prefer to leave you with this less cool but very cute image: Wright’s VERY FIRST MEMORY of reading was as a little kid with the book The Battle of Britain, for 30 minutes a week, in the DeKalb County’s SQUIRT program, which stood for “Super Quiet Uninterrupted Reading Time.”
Welcome, Ted! We’re so pleased to have you here at A Cappella Books!
