Doesn't the better performing, more loved brand sell more? Agassi vs. Sampras

“I never wanted to be the great guy or the colorful guy or the interesting guy. I wanted to be the guy who won titles.” (Pete Sampras)

25 years ago, the big tennis rivalry was between Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi. But in the win/loss column, it wasn’t even close. Sampras won 14 Grand Slam titles to Agassi's 8 and beat him 4 of the 5 times they played in a final. Yet Sampras' endorsement income peaked at $8 million. Agassi earned $28 million the same year. (Forbes July 5, 2004.) Their autobiographies offer some clues to explain the discrepancy:

A wide shot of a tennis court with a small image of Sampras says this is more about the game than the player; an impression reinforced by the subtitle: “A champion’s mind.” (Not any particular champion.) Indeed, he begins by acknowledging that you might wonder why he’d written a book at all: “After all, I was the guy who let his racket do the talking.” His story is a straight line, characterized by consistency, likeability and superior performance.

The cover of Agassi’s book is a dramatic close-up: vulnerable, authentic, open. Then you turn to the first page: “I open my eyes and don’t know where I am or who I am. Not all that unusual—I’ve spent half my life not knowing. Still, this feels different. This confusion is more frightening. More total.”  This story promises drama, incongruity, bad feelings and bad behavior: a very crooked line, but with an arc towards redemption.

Agassi’s book has 20,463 ratings on Amazon. Sampras: 551.
Agassi is #9,238 on Amazon’s Best Seller list. Sampras: #183,646.
Why? Because Agassi is more interesting:

"You can make the argument Sampras is the greatest tennis player of all time…But then you would have to find someone interested enough to debate the point…If charisma-free Sampras made one mistake in his career, it was that, growing up in the era of Connors and McEnroe, he actually believed it when everyone said fans preferred polite athletes who didn't thumb their noses, and other body parts, at authority. Andre Agassi, who wanted to be Connors, could have told him the truth." (https://lnkd.in/evyBud2C)

But doesn't the better performing, more loved brand sell more? These beliefs misunderstand how brand marketing creates value. They assume people make decisions based on product quality or brand likability. In reality, the brand more worth thinking about often sells more in the end. At heart, brand marketing is ‘interestingness management’: creating a recognizable yet dynamic pattern full of ideas and actions that generate and maintain brand interest across time.

Of course, if your product is the Sampras of its category, able to dominate through product superiority alone, congratulations. But must it be a choice? Sampras paid a lot in lost endorsement money to be boring. Would he have been less good had he been more interesting? It seems more likely that he would have become a superstar in addition to being a champion.

There's something about Sampras, but nobody cares. ESPN.com