There’s been a lot of talk lately about the important of ones personal brand. With a tight job market, it makes sense that people be able to understand where they fit and to work towards a unique differentiation strategy for themselves.
With this understanding I thought I’d take some of the strategic thinking typically reserved for businesses and map a quick process for people to use for their professional selves. I’ll keep this extremely simple since I’d like this to be something people can run with and not a long dragged out analysis/paralysis process. I’ve translated the following concepts from the business to the individual, and seeing it this way makes me see the process a little differently. It’s actually eerie how people-brands and business-brands can be so similar.
The 4 Human Experiences Your Brand Should Affect:
1. Perception: What do you want people to think of you? Be this person.
2. Reason: Are you who you say/act like? Authenticity is critical, look for your deeper truth, what’s beneath the surface you may be afraid to expose?
3. Emotion: Are you connecting with people on a deeper level? What do you believe deeply in that you can advocate/evangelize?
4. Resonance: Do you connect with people in a way that’s meaningful to them? Are you reading other’s needs or are you acting on your own?
The Building Blocks of Your Experience:
1. Where do you have the most credibility?
2. Where do you have the most experience?
3. What are you passionate about?
4. What causes are you aligned with personally?
5. How do you define success for yourself? Money, achievement, freedom?
6. What do you stand for?
7. Who are you competing with?
8. How are you different from them?
9. Who would you be excited to collaborate with?
10. Is there a social context to your desires?
11. Choosing only adjectives, how would you describe your best qualities?
I’m really just winging this but in looking back at this post this is some powerful stuff for any person to do for themselves. If you’re like me and you’ve had a difficulty in the past describing what you do to strangers, this would be a fantastic immersive process to take on, even if it were just for 30 minutes.
It’s critical for every business to spend some time between developing a business strategy and executing a marketing plan. Many people, myself included, call this “Brand Strategy”, but there’s other names for it. The important issue is to find out what makes you truly unique and irreplaceable to your customers, and the only way to really find this out is by having conversations and asking tough questions, both of yourself and your customers.
Here’s why it’s important to have a brand strategy before kicking off your marketing strategy:
1. Without a brand strategy you will have no aligned single “deeper truth” driving your marketing efforts beyond profitability or increasing shareholder value. This encourages short term thinking that diminishes the individuality of your business and makes you generic. The marketing strategy will be based more on the “now” and therefore the brand strategy should be rooted in the “always”.
2. You need a sounding board to validate constantly changing marketing efforts. When developing creative ideas and concepts, how do you validate these? By having a solid brand strategy you can weigh everything you do against that. Is this idea really us? See if it speaks to your brand. It will help you know whether your agency “gets you” and whether your sales teams are all saying the same thing. Put a stake in the ground and live by it.
2. Without a stake in the ground on your brand you are at constant risk of saying the wrong thing and therefore being the wrong thing to your customers, then you’ll need to triage, which is expensive. Do this enough no one will believe you. Choose your story and stick with it for the long run.
3. You need to find your “True North” for your business/brand. Once you understand how to articulate this, it will inspire fantastic creative execution, because everyone on your team will be working towards the same clear goal or destination. It will also make it easier and less costly to engage new team members/agencies, etc. By being able to articulate your unique value and position over and over, it becomes easier and easier to onboard team members and takes less time to get them onboard. Many companies stay with bad agencies simply because the time to onboard a new team is too costly and there never seems to be a good time for it.
What’s your true north?
I often send myself some notes through email to my phone to prepare for a first discussion with a client or potential client, and I thought I’d share this list I just sent myself today for a meeting. These are intended to give me a sense of both what makes any brand tick but also to what degree my client understands their own brand.
Please feel free to steal these and use for your own discussions. These are conversation starters so rephrase and reword these to fit your own discussion style.
Who are you? (Personality)
What do you do? (Cocktail conversation quicky)
What’s your vision? (define “wild” success)
What’s your mission? (how dare you getting to “wild success”)
What wave are you surfing? (social context?)
Who shares your brandscape? (competitive audit)
What makes you the “only”? (Positioning strategy?)
What should you subtract/Add? (Curate, curate)
Who loves you? (Tribe?)
Who’s your enemy? (Who is it fun to rally against?)
What do your customers call you? (In their words not yours)
How do you explain yourself? (What’s your value without “marketing speak” and acronyms)
How do you spread the word? (marketing strategy/execution?)
How do people engage with you? (integrated platform?)
What do/should they experience? (How do you want them to feel?)
How do you earn loyalty? (Building your tribe how?)
How do you extend success? (Where are you moving/how changing?)
How do you protect yourself? (Hoew do you defend your position? Innovate how?)
* Some of the wording here comes from Marty Neumeier’s outstanding books “Zag” and “The Brand Gap”. Get them read them.