You’re standing in front of a project offer, ready to jump in, you’re pyched but then you ask yourself, do I believe this thing will succeed? Hmmm…
Your answer must be an unequivocal “yes”, because if you don’t believe in it, how can you believe in the work you do for this company? Many people even when saying “no” take that work on, and ultimately, this leads to generic output, which ultimately leads to a boring career doing work that has no emotional value.
For your work to be authentic and meaningful (great) you must be a believer.
Find companies and products you believe in, and offer your help, you’ll be amazed at how much value you can bring to a mission you’re embedded in personally.
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.
I’ve been noticing a trend in a lot of publications and blogs that I used to enjoy reading. When they’re starting to run out of ideas, they get confrontational, with their articles and posts becoming more like rants about things that frustrate them. The unfortunate reality is, as in life, no one is going to hear your criticism if it’s in the form of an attack, it’s human nature to deflect information when it’s presented this way. It needs to be in the form of a conversation.
Conversations have two sides, with both willing to hear each other. Otherwise it’s an attack, which is all to easy from behind a keyboard.
Let’s challenge ourselves to have more conversations, and listen to the other side with an open mind. I’m constantly surprised by how my mistaken perspective led me to believe something that turned out not to be true, but by being open when you’re wrong it’s easier to admit it.
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 recently backed out of a project because I started to see analysis paralysis setting in, and this was at the planning stage! Very smart people with a lot of experience in the corporate world, good at navigating politics, good public speakers, but these skills don’t translate to the startup bootstrappers mentality. The goals were unattainable, the team too big, lack of laser focus and discipline, the kitchen sink mentality. All this project needed was a few people and some simple goals followed by some heads down hard work and a slightly scary soft launch to test consumer response.
Many people, myself included, self-loathingly praise themselves for perfectionism. But really it’s a procrastination tool of the highest level–An excuse to never get anything done, because it’s never, ever, quite good enough. If only I had realized this ten years ago! This is definitely a symptom of corporate management, where incremental safe steps are made in an environment where experimentation is translated into “risk of public failure and embarrassment”. The reality is you must risk failure at some point to get something done fast enough for it to move forward at a speed that you can afford. The faster you get it done, the less financial risk and the more opportunity you have to test in a live environment.
I think the concept of “Good to Great” is a little flawed. Not in the process but the outcome. Here’s the reality: The person who gets to market with their new brand/service/product is generally at a huge advantage. She’s got the turf on her side, and over time as everyone is catching up to her she’s also suddenly got the advantage of experience as well. While the other 5 people who had the same idea are “perfecting” their offering, the person who got it to “good” launched, built a community, developed a following, and got stuff done.
Plan it out, be sure the idea is sound, do your research and then get it done. Maybe skip the venture funding you think you need and self fund. Get it to market and get people using it, then test and improve as you go. I guarantee you can perfect it later, but be sure perfecting it now isn’t preventing you from even getting it done at all.