World Wrestling Entertainment’s (WWE) Vince and Linda McMahon are both masters at challenging and shattering conventional wisdom. They prove that anyone can build a Cult Brand. Neither Vince nor Linda McMahon grew up with a silver spoon in their mouths. In fact, Vince McMahon started out his career selling Encyclopedia Britannica door-to-door before eventually joining his father’s small wrestling company in 1971.
Building a national brand meant that they had to be willing to break the unwritten rule that the twenty or so regional promoters who controlled U.S. wrestling wouldn’t compete with each other. They began by taking what little profits they had and paying local TV stations to regularly broadcast tapes of their company’s wrestling matches. The McMahons figured that wrestling fans nationwide who watched on television would eventually find themselves craving an exciting live WWE match in their own towns, instead of the tame offerings of the local promoter. They were right. WWE’s risky TV broadcast strategy ended up working incredibly well.
It was 1982 when they first decided to really roll the dice in the wrestling world. The two convinced Vince’s father and partners to sell them the family wrestling business. They agreed to make four quarterly payments of roughly $250,000 each. If Vince and Linda missed a payment, they would lose everything, and the business would revert back to the partners of Vince’s father.
Four years after the McMahons started their videotape blitzkrieg, only a handful of regional wrestling operators remained in business, and these survivors were running scared. WWE’s promotions had not only won it thousands of new fans, but it also helped make the McMahons appear much larger and more powerful than they really were. Their risk taking redefined professional wrestling.
Today, WWE is the only international brand of any consequence in professional wrestling. Taking huge risks and always keeping the fans alive allowed Vince and Lind McMahon to build from scratch an entertainment empire that generates over $400 million in sales annually.
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