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« Monday « April 27, 2009
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Personal Branding: It's a Myth
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The real-time Web is rife with personal branding gurus and talk of taking ownership of your personal brand. I think it's a crock of shii. People who talk about personal brands in all seriousness don't really understand what branding is. Instead of personal branding, you stand a better chance of success by just being yourself, warts and all.
Let's first define this nebulous term "branding." It's simple, actually. If you have a product or a service, branding is the process of accomplishing two basic and essential tasks: telling potential customers and patrons how you're different than your competition, and why you're better. That's it. It's really that simple...and that hard.
Now, let's take that definition and apply it to a singular entity - a person - and for laughs, let's call the process 'personal branding.' This one person is not in pursuit of a massively well-known and public position, like, say, President of the United States, competing against two or three other well-known people, but is instead looking for a more modest opportunity, like their next job, with more pay and bigger responsibilities.
Let's take Otis, my man, an experienced and competent marketing associate at an up-and-coming firm, in Any Town. If he were to truly brand himself, he first would have to position his skills, talents, and experience against all of the other marketing associates... in the world, because he's in competition with them all, if this personal branding hype is to be believed. How many competitors that matter are there? Let's say, for the sake of argument, given the fact that the world is flat now, and that the Internet shrinks time zones, and makes a candidate in London just as viable as one in Los Angeles, that there are 10,000 other equally qualified people whom Otis competes with, 2,000 (or 20%) of whom are also working on their own "personal branding" programs. Realistically, how is poor old Otis going to position himself against a market so large, and which really can't be defined in any objective way? How can one differentiate against 10,000? The truth is, most everyone will be pretty much the same, unless they're truly exceptional, and those folks attract opportunities rather than seek them.
Moreover, since Otis' task isn't just to position and differentiate himself from his competitors, he must also prove that he is better than all of his 10,000+ competitors. How does he do that? Just by saying he's better? Really? Well, isn't that what everyone says?
At any rate, he's not branding anything. Otis' competitive set is too large for him to break free, and he can't prove in any definitive way that he's better than ALL his competition by "branding" himself. What he's really doing in this branding process is trying to find a clever, buzzword-compliant way to get his resume to the top of the slush pile.
But let's not call that process "personal branding."
"Personal branding" is not only a myth, for a regular person, who is not famous, it's near impossible to demonstrate in almost any setting. Oprah can have a personal brand. You probably can't, not today, at least. But there is hope: one thing the Internet does provide is a global platform for anyone to showcase what they can do. In the "old days," they used to call this "doing the legwork" to find a better career opportunity. I wish we'd go back to calling it that, or something more similar and accurate. There are certainly more opportunties today to display one's talents, in efficiently public ways, but that's not personal branding. That's called polishing your resume.
If you're honest with what you 're doing you'll be more successful.
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« Friday « April 24, 2009
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Kung Fu Fighting
(blip.fm)
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One of my favorite all-time songs.
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« Thursday « April 16, 2009
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You got 3 minutes... to destroy your brand
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Image courtesy of Domino's IP Holder LLC
A brand is a promise. Since its founding in 1960, the essential tenet of Domino's Pizza's promise was that they could deliver you a pizza faster than any joint in town (I'll return to this notion of speed in just a moment). Their trademarked slogan is: "You got 30 minutes!" If your pizza didn't arrive at your door within thirty minutes of the time you placed your order, you got to eat pizza for free. Domino's is the self proclaimed world leader in pizza delivery - not pizza - pizza delivery.
This week, in the space of about 3 minutes - this is the notion of speed bit - a pair of renegade Domino's employees did more damage to the brand than possibly anything it has experienced in nearly 50 years of existence. What did they do? They videotaped themselves making sandwiches for speedy delivery while one of the employees marinated slices of cheese and meat with lovely gobs of snot from his nose and covered the food with farts, just to be safe. And to make matters worse, and ignite an online PR nightmare, they uploaded their video to YouTube. And that's when the fun really began. After seeing this video - which has since been pulled from YouTube - it would make any potential customer question whether or not they'd want to order food from this establishment ever again. But then, Domino's was about pizza delivery, not necessarily pizza. You can read more about the situation here, and here, and here.
The two employees have been fired, and now face felony charges; delivering food tainted with nasal mucous is a health offense: a terrible blow to a food company. The Domino's corporation has issued all sorts of apologies, including a video on YouTube, which you can view here.
The lesson for brands, in this new world of social media, is: your brand promise is only as good as your lowliest employee. So treat all of them with care, because they are your brand. This brand promise we talk about is filled with nothing but hot air if only the CEO and the marketing team spouts the taglines and discuss the attributes and associated essences. If your lowliest employee, sitting in the back room, barely scraping by on minimum wage, doesn't buy into what the brand is all about, then you have a potential time-bomb on your hands. And now, even that lowliest employee has the ability to show the world what you're really about with the flick of a cameraphone and the click of an 'upload video' link on the World Wide Web. Truly engaged employees would realize that at the core of Domino's brand promise, beyond the 30 minute guarantee, is this assumption that the food is fresh and healthful, not tainted with boogers and intestinal gas.
Branding begins within the company. It's critically important that the people in charge get this part right, that they believe it and sell it to the rank-and-file every day. Don't live the brand, make the brand live: put some energy and resources into building rock-solid internal cultures, and maybe, don't cut corners in hiring practices either. Continuously engaging employees with the brand, its meaning, its values, its goals, will empower the people who work for the company, yeah, I used the e-word, but if the employees truly understand and buy into what the brand is all about, it will help each one of them see how their efforts contribute to the brand's growth.
We like to say that receptionists, janitors, salespeople, delivery guys, and CEOs are all brand managers. Companies that don't give every employee a stake in being a contributor to and a guardian of the brand could end up with a big mess, like Domino's has on its hands, and sliced salami, right now. They certainly can recover from this, but unlike their slogan, this problem is going to take a lot longer than 30 minutes to fix. So for other companies, how about some preventative maintenance, like investing an internal brand engagement program that has teeth and staying power? The money and resources you spend on brand engagement today could save your reputation and hedge your market share tomorrow.
I think I'll skip the takeout food for now. Looks like a mac-and-cheese night at home.... nom, nom, nom!
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« Monday « April 13, 2009
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Big brands and social media: it's about self-interest
(Advertising Age)
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QOTD: "It's a sort of enlightened self-interest. It's not about philanthropy. It's a marketing program with social benefits."Who says ad men can't tell the truth? Innovate or die and sell, sell, sell!
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« Sunday « April 12, 2009
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Dear Twitter: failure is not an option (for branding)
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Well-known marketing and public relations pundit Steve Rubel thinks that Twitter is peaking, which means it's poised to begin an inevitable decline into irrelevance, if that slide hasn't already begun. The three reasons he cites are: 1) celebrities; 2) disorganization; and 3) superficiality. While he thinks that time will tell whether or not the Twitter team can work its way through this innovator's dilemma, I actually think Twitter has a more fundamental problem as a brand, one that may be harder to overcome than the technological challenges it faces.
I introduce you to the famous Twitter Fail Whale:
Image: screenshot of Twitter over-capacity failure
Now if you're running a startup like Twitter, you've got to love all of this attention, especially if you subscribe to the notion that any publicity is good publicity. Except when that publicity speaks to the brand's promise in an ineluctably negative way. You have a service that, while it appeals to millions of users, still has a long way to go before so-called mainstream people actually understand how it could be useful to them. You have a great, memorable name, in fact, Inc. Magazine, says Twitter is one of the ten greatest company names of all time.
And yet, your most memorable, and perhaps even most lovable symbol, the Fail Whale, is a totem of malfunction, a promise that your service breaks so often that it's been cast as a recurring character in your daily show. Technology early-adopters tend to be a bit more tolerant of a tool's failures, because often they're involved in the making and marketing of such tools and they understand how difficult it can be, but with Twitter poised for super-charged growth, a lot of the new, incoming users who will join are going to be less forgiving and less patient. And if they begin to encounter the Fail Whale as much as the early adopters have, they're going to associate breakdown with the Twitter brand experience. But I don't think these new users are going to make sculptures and cupcakes and YouTube videos. I think they'll just leave and never come back.
Rubel makes a good point that Twitter has some fundamental problems to fix, lest it lose its core audience, who've driven the company's innovation. But the Fail Whale is as much a technological challenge, as it is a branding challenge. The best thing Twitter can do is make the Fail Whale disappear. Twitter need to make the Fail Whale as invisible as that other whale that was feared but never seen: Twitter has to make their whale as mythical and rare as that other fictional white whale, Moby Dick.
Position the brand for success. Not for fail-whale-ure.
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« Saturday « April 11, 2009
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DiggBar is a Howl of Desperation
(Ted Dziuba blog)
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"Hence the introduction of this DiggBar business. When a link makes its way to the top of Digg, it gets republished quite a bit. Now that all these links will land a user at Digg.com, Digg that collects the unique users from this collateral linkage. And it's working, too. In a recent interview, VP John Quinn of Digg said that the DiggBar has given them a 20% boost in unique visitors. This move shows that not only is Digg willing to pull some sleazy shit to increase their unique visitors, but that they also need to pull this sleazy shit, because they need more unique visitors."I'm glad that someone in the technosphere, someone with a rep and a bit of street cred, came out and said the sleazy word. I think the DiggBar overlay, as currently implemented, is slick and really cheesy: sleesy. You have to give the site(s) you're referring to the credit. You're still going to get traffic, Digg, but do you have to suck the life, and search engine juice, out of the very Web sites you so depend on in order to even exist. OTOH, this is just emblematic of how distorted the Web has become due to influence of search engines, and these crowd-sourced news sites that get gamed constantly. We're now arriving at Hell, in that handbasket.
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