Art of Branding

As we all know, brands try to harness what’s different and special about a brand in a short tagline or slogan. Famous taglines can even become part of our national identity like Nike’s “Just Do It” or Avis’s “We Try Harder” or Apple’s “Think Different.”

The ad tagline is a catchy representation of the brand’s USP (Unique Selling Proposition) also known as the brand’s Big Idea. The Big Idea is a proposition so compelling that it draws people to your brand.

From a branding perspective, a USP can be very powerful. Look what the concept of “safety” and the slogan “For Life” did for Volvo. Interestingly, when they developed the car’s USP around safety, the team working on the branding for Volvo was also exploring other ideas such as a heritage strategy based on being made in Sweden. Who knows what would have happened if they took that route?

From a personal branding perspective, it’s important to know and communicate what’s different and special about you, too, in a Big Idea, so that you can be a brand apart in the business marketplace. For example, one colleague who is a market researcher specializing in the women’s market calls herself “The Oprah of Madison Avenue.” Another client calls himself “The Empowering Leader” to emphasize his leadership style that gets results with his team.

Here are five tips to keep in mind as you isolate your Big Idea or USP:

1. Be authentic: You brand positioning must come out of a key strength you have that sets you apart from others.

2. Make it short: Use a phrase, not a sentence

3. Be big enough to last: You don’t want to box yourself into a USP that won’t help you advance in your career.

4. Convey a positive emotion: Focus on the positive result or benefit you provide.

5. Strike a chord: Your USP should be relevant and be appealing to your target audience (colleagues, bosses, clients, customers).

My mother always said, “Beauty is only skin deep” and “Don’t judge a book by its cover” when I would fret over my looks.

Yet, the reality is, we judge people by the way they look every day.

When the hearings for Elena Kagan’s nomination start on Monday, June 28th, I doubt whether her looks will come up in the questioning, but her looks already have been commented upon in the media. (See Deborah L Rohode’s article on Kagan and her looks in The Daily Beast.)

As Rhode points out, “Looks are one of the last frontiers of acceptable bigotry.”
And looks are definitely an area where” the diversion of attention from achievment to appearance is more common.”

Yet, I can’t buy into Rhode’s thesis in the artifice and her new book, The Beauty bias, that we need to eliminate the beauty bias. She advises: “We have always known that it hurts to be beautiful, and that it hurts even more not to be beautiful. But few of us realize how much. Although our prejudice runs deep, we can do more to reduce its most unjust and unnecessary forms.

Impossible, I say. That’s like trying to change human nature.

While a mother loves all of her children, studies show the more attractive ones are favored. And study after study points out that we are all susceptible to the “beauty premium” and that looks have a halo effect. We think more attractive people are smarter, more productive, even kinder than unattractive people.

That’s why we have to acknowledge that the beauty premium exists, and package ourselves to advantage. Oprah has a weight issue like many of us but still packages herself attractively. And octogenarian Betty White is red hot on TV right now showing that you don’t have to be young either to be attractive.

We all can package ourselves to advantage. And it sure beats trying to change human nature.

Just when I was going to brand the 2011 election cycle as the year of the female candidate, I’m reduced to writing about hair.

Dee Dee Myers famously said about her experience as White House Press Secretary for President Clinton that “people don’t hear a word you say until they decide whether they like your hair or not”

Of course, Dee Dee was talking about a lady’s hair. (For a man’s hair style to register on the radar screen it has to be really out there like Donald Trump’s hair.)

Which brings to mind Carly Fiorina’s offhand comment about Barbara Boxer’s hair yesterday caught on an open mike. Carly is the Republican candidate for the US Senate and Boxer is the Democratic incumbent in California and both are revved up for battle in the general election.

My fear? That the great wins women have made in the primaries are already becoming a cat fight.

Asked about the incident by Greta Van Susteren, Fiorina said, “I was quoting a friend of mine. My goodness, my hair’s been talked about by a million people, you know? It sort of goes with the territory.” Fiorina then brought up her battle with cancer, adding, “Especially when you don’t have any. As you remember, I started out with none.”

Of course, Fiorina’s comments in a larger context aren’t a big deal. We all make gaffes particularly when we think we’re just talking to a trusted aide and don’t realize the mike is on. And Fiorina did brand herself as strong and courageous in my book when she began her campaign with absolutely no hair after battling cander.

But in another, more damaging way for women, her words reinforce popular stereotypes about women, namely that we’re catty and tear each other down behind the scenes.

In a hyper-competitive job market, employers are having trouble finding potential employees among a sea of qualified candidates. You can convince them that you’re ideal by developing and communicating a compelling and unique personal brand.

By Catherine Kaputa on Tue, April 13, 2010

CIO Magazine— Zeroing in on your unique personal brand and communicating it consistently and effectively in your job search is a surefire strategy for attracting employers’ attention and landing a new job. Here are four personal branding tactics that will make you irresistible to hiring managers.

1. Brand yourself in a sentence.
Effective brands are defined succinctly and competitively in a single sentence. The sentence should declare what’s different about you and why it matters. It should be short enough to write on the back of a business card and definitive enough to describe the brand’s purpose. For example, Google (GOOG) defines its brand this way: “Google organizes the world’s information and makes it universally accessible and useful.”
When you are composing your brand sentence, think of how you can label or position yourself differently. For example, rather than calling myself a career coach like others do, I call myself a “personal brand strategist” and go on to say, “I use the principles and strategies from the commercial world of brands for the most important brand—Brand You.”
Similar to this Article
• Personal Branding: 8 Tips That Will Help You Stand Out
• Personal Branding: IT Professionals’ Four Pain Points
• Developing a Personal Brand for Your Job Search
• 6 Personal Branding Mistakes That Can Threaten Your Job Search
For an IT professional I worked with, we devised this brand sentence: John Doe: A technology solutions pioneer developing new revenue streams through technology in the converging worlds of Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

2. Get feedback on your 60-second elevator speech.
Brands hire experts to create their ads, then test them to get feedback.
There’s an easy way for you to get feedback: Just grab a video camera and record yourself giving your elevator speech or your answer to the most popular interview question, Tell me about yourself. Then sit down and evaluate your performance. The only way to get good is to practice, make a video and rate your performance.
Your personal commercial should elaborate on your brand sentence in an interesting way. Take another page from the branding playbook and include a memorable phrase that embodies your brand purpose, like an ad slogan does for a brand. Try an analogy: Put two different ideas together to express who you are, such as “I’m a cross between X and Y” or “I’m like A meets B. Tazo Tea, for example, defined itself as “Marco Polo meets Merlin.” I sometimes say, “I’m a cross between a P&G brand manager and a career coach.”
Even though you’ve practiced and videotaped your delivery, your elevator pitch shouldn’t seem wooden and rehearsed. The key is to practice, but to avoid memorization so you don’t sound like you’re scripted.

3. Create branded marketing materials that break through the clutter.
Every brand has marketing materials: advertising, a website, brochures, business cards and other collateral that are all designed with a distinctive look and feel and a message focused on the brand vision—the best brand story possible.
You should do the same. Your marketing materials are your business card, cover letter, email address, voicemail message and resume. Later you can expand your brand’s marketing materials to include online social networking profiles, a website and a blog. It’s easy to do them for free or economically though a service such as VistaPrint. But don_t use their free business cards with their logo on the back (that will brand you as cheap!) or use a template design. You are a brand, after all.

Make sure that all your marketing materials have a similar look (they should use the same fonts and colors, for example) and tell your best brand story.
You can take another page from the branding playbook and get “celebrity” endorsements in your marketing materials. Of course, we’re not talking about actual celebrities, but getting a quote from a former boss or client about a project where you played a major role. Put together a Resume Addendum that lists key projects in a case study-Challenge-Solution-Results-format. Then put the quote from your boss or client at the top of each case study. You can also use your endorsement quotes in your cover letter, website and your LinkedIn profile.
Similar to this Article
• Personal Branding: 8 Tips That Will Help You Stand Out
• Personal Branding: IT Professionals’ Four Pain Points
• Developing a Personal Brand for Your Job Search
• 6 Personal Branding Mistakes That Can Threaten Your Job Search

4. Develop an e-mail “Stalking” campaign.
CNBC “Street Signs” Anchor Erin Burnett got her start on television after writing what she called a “stalker letter” to anchor Willow Bay. Of course, Burnett wasn’t literally stalking Bay, but a clever email and letter campaign to companies and hiring managers can brand you as someone with initiative and get you noticed.
Many of my clients have used this technique successfully in today’s tough job market. Here’s an email sent a client, a young technologist in transition, sent that got him a series of interviews and eventually a job offer:

Subject line: Looking for ways to keep costs down for your clients?

Body of email: I’m a technologist who recently supplemented my technology training at ABC University’s program in xxx. I’m a go-getter who can deliver projects and services at a lower rate for your clients, a key concern during these economic times.
In today’s environment, I think it’s important to segment tasks that require someone to do a process or a project versus those that require someone with extensive experience to exercise judgment. Today’s clients are looking for ways to decrease costs and I can help provide different ways to bill the client at a more cost-effective rate.
I would love to get on your calendar for a phone or in person meeting to discuss how I can add value to your company. I have attached my background and look forward to speaking with you.

When you get into the branding mindset, you’ll want to reassess your personal brand regularly just like any brand manager would do—not just when you’re in transition. After all, Brand You is a journey that will last your whole lifetime.
Catherine Kaputa is a personal brand strategist and president of SelfBrand. She is the author of the book You Are a BRAND! How Smart People Brand Themselves for Business Success, which won the Ben Franklin award for Best Career Book 2007. She also wrote The Female Brand, Using the Female Mindset to Succeed in Business (May, 2009).

Brands think in terms of defining their brand succinctly and competitively in a brand sentence. The sentence should put a stake in the ground and declare what’s different about you and why it matters. It should be short enough to write on the back of a business card, and definitive enough to define the brand’s purpose.

For example, Google defines its brand this way: “Google organizes the world’s information and makes it universally accessible and useful.”

When you are composing your brand sentence, think of how you can label or position yourself differently. For example, rather than calling myself an career coach like others do, I call myself a “personal brand strategist’ and go on to say, “I use the principles and strategies from the commercial world of brands for the most important brand – Brand You.”

I have a passion to improve the personal branding awareness of men and women. So it’s been a humbling experience sometimes to observe how I come across on camera. As a speaker and workshop leader, I am in front of the video camera more and more these days. And as an author, I’ve been interviewed for my point of view on various personal branding topics. Seeing the person who is me on camera after an event can be a humbling experience. Ouch! Is that person actually me? All your flaws are magnified (every “umm” and “you know,” every brushing back of your hair.)

Here is some wisdom from a friend, Carol Ross, from her blog, A Bigger Voice, on how to become better in front of the camera:

To become more natural, tape yourself often

Aim for authentic

It’s not about you, it’s about the message.

Here’s a link to Carol’s entire post on her explorations with her flip camera.

Catherine Kaputa

SelfBrand (www.selfbrand.com)

Twitter@CatherineKaputa

LinkedIn

Savvy brand managers spend a lot of time delineating differences: different product benefits, different look, different message, and different target audience. What they are creating is a distinct brand strategy explaining what their brand has to offer that competing brands don’t. And the payback can be enormous.

Look at high profile entrepreneurs who hit the big time like Donald Trump or Martha Stewart. They built a compelling brand idea or USP (unique selling proposition) for themselves and their business idea every step of the way.

No matter what you do, you should do the same.

Branding is about finding your big idea – your unique selling proposition – that something special that sets you and your business apart from others and helps you to be more successful.

In my book, You Are a Brand!, winner of the Ben Franklin Award for Best Career Book 2007,  I outline the strategies and actions that people in all types of careers can do  to propel business success and build a personal and business brand identity.

Let’s look at one of them, Alexandra, an executive coach who had been in business for more than ten years. Alexandra had a marketing brochure and fancy logo but no different idea. After I read her brochure, all I could remember as a takeaway message was “executive coach who works with all kinds of people and all kinds of problems.”

A lot of business people make this mistake. They want to cast a wide net so they won’t miss any business. However, the opposite usually occurs. They don’t get much business because people don’t have anything to sink their teeth into. Alexandra offered no reason for someone to choose her and gave no sense of the kind of clients she was best suited to help.

We got our brand insight when I asked Alexandra, “What kind of client are you really good with?”

“Believe it or not,” Alexandra told me, “I like working with really difficult people – managers with poor people skills, the kind that are featured in books like How to Work for a Jerk.”

Eureka! We had our different brand promise.

With her focus on difficult managers and the people who work for them, Alexandra had a point of difference and a USP on which to build her self brand and company brand. She had a public relations platform for pitching reporters doing stories on how to cope with an abusive boss or a difficult client.

Alexandra’s different brand strategy also became a way of being memorable and staying at the top of everyone’s mind. And as we know, out of mind is out of business if you are an entrepreneur.

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Catherine Kaputa is a brand strategist, speaker and the founder of SelfBrand LLC (www.selfbrand.com)  , a NYC-based personal branding firm. Her newest book is The Female Brand: Using the Female Mindset to Succeed in Business (Davies-Black, 2009, www.femalebrand.com). Her previous book, You Are a Brand! How Smart People Brand Themselves for Business Success, won the Ben Franklin award for Best Career Book, 2007

As a woman, I hate to see women in high-profile jobs flame out because I fear it reflects badly on women in big roles. That’s why I went, “Ouch” when Janet Napolitano said, “The system worked,” after a terrorist attempt on Christmas day. And why I’ve been fascinated by Desiree Rogers quick rise on the national scene, and just as quick demise.

The NYTimes ran an interesting story on March 12, 2010 on the series of events leading to her downfall.
In the whole story, I think there are important branding lessons for us all:

• Don’t upstage the boss
Did Desiree forget that Michelle Obama was First Lady?

• Don’t make the story about you
A cardinal rule about personal branding, is not to make the story about you, make the story about the project, the challenge, the mission, the team. Look at the Academy Awards. The smart Hollywood celebs wisely don’t make their success about themselves. When you are the feature of glossy spreads in designer clothes – the story is about you and not the larger purpose.

• If you work in a shark tank, beware of sharks
Washington DC is known as a town for its subplots and rivalries where the long knives come it, it is surprising that Desiree set herself up for a downfall by avidly seeking a high-profile role as social secretary, a role traditionally known for discretion and behind-the-scenes planning. Better to have moved more slowly in building up her brand.

• Don’t be tone deaf to the larger marketplace
Whatever made Desiree think that she could wear a $3495 dress and $100,000 diamond earings in a shoot for a glossy magazine in the midst of a recession? Or sit in the front row next to Anna Wintour during Fashion weak with the unemployment rate over 10%. There’s a reason that Wall Street bosses have mothballed the corporate jets temporarily and are flying commercial. It makes for very bad press.

• Make sure you have supporters
We all need the support of our own “board of directors.” People who can advise us and support us when the going gets rough. As an associate of Rogers put it in the NYT, “She didn’t get any help from Gibbs, no help from Axelrod, no help from Valerie Jarrett. Nobody came to her defense.”

Let me hear your thoughts.

CIO Magazine, By Meridith Levinson
IT pros sense that personal branding can advance their careers, but they sometimes have trouble putting it into practice.
I’m always amazed at the amount of traffic personal branding stories generate for CIO.com. My last story on the topic, 6 Personal Branding Mistakes that Can Threaten Your Job Search, turned nearly 16,000 page views in its first week.
The numbers tell me that CIO.com readers are hungry for information on this subject. To understand why, I spoke to two personal branding strategists who have experience working with IT professionals. They explained why personal branding is such a hot topic right now as well as IT professionals’ most common hang-ups around the practice.
Randi Bussin, a certified career coach and Reach personal branding strategist, attributes IT professionals’ interest in personal branding to the competition in today’s job market. They realize that landing a new job requires a lot more effort than searching the web and sending out resumes, she says of her clients in IT._At the same time, she adds, they’re seeing and hearing a lot about the role personal branding can play in their job searches, but they don’t know how to put the principles of personal branding into practice for themselves.
“People are realizing you have to do this,” says Bussin. “It’s a non-negotiable. If you can’t say what makes you unique from everyone else applying for the same job, you’re going to have a hard time rising above the noise.”
Personal branding is equally important to IT professionals who want to increase their job security, if not advance their careers with their current employers, notes personal branding strategist Catherine Kaputa, who is also a speaker and the author of You Are a Brand!

“In the business world, soft power trumps hard power,” she says. “The farther up you go in a company, the more important these soft power skills are.”
These soft power skills, which include leadership ability, communication skills, presentation skills, and relationship-building skills—combine to create an individual’s personal brand.
Despite the advantages personal branding confers to IT professionals, the practice can be painful for them. Here are four common pain points IT professionals experience around personal branding:

1. Some don’t want personal branding to matter in their career advancement.

“A lot of information technology people are struck by the fact that the school rules no longer apply in the business world,” says Kaputa. In school, she says, the student grind pays off: Their intelligence and hard work leads to good grades and academic recognition. But in the business world, she adds, intellect and hard work aren’t always enough to yield a promotion or job offer, and this bothers some IT professionals. Candidates often need to showcase exceptional soft skills and have good reputations as well.
2. They don’t like the idea that their appearance matters.

Like it or not, your personal brand is inextricably bound up with your appearance—the way you dress, whether or not you wear glasses, your grooming. “There’s a lot of evidence that packaging plays a strong role in how people view you,” says Kaputa. If you want to be a VP, you need to dress the part, she says, adding, “You can’t be wearing gym clothes.”
3. It’s hard for them to see the big picture.

Bussin says IT professionals have trouble identifying what’s unique about them—the lynchpin of their personal brands. They tend to be, by nature, so focused on details that seeing the forest through the trees is hard for them, she adds. Another challenge: Figuring out how to talk about the projects they’ve worked on as success stories.
4. They don’t like to promote themselves.

Self-promotion comes naturally to few people, yet it’s a key component of personal branding. To make it easier for IT professionals, they should think of self-promotion not as inauthentic boasting or beating their chests, but as a way of communicating the skills and expertise that they take such great pride in and that could help others.
Are you interested in personal branding? What aspects of personal branding are hard for you?

Link to California Women’s Conference where this articles appears:

By Catherine Kaputa

Searching for a job in a bad economy is not high on anyone’s to-do list. To be successful, you need to use special tactics and strategies – you need to brand yourself. Branding is all about standing out and getting traction in a competitive environment.

Here are 5 ways to market Brand You for a successful job hunt:

1.    Target your customers
Adopt the marketing mindset by determining who your “customers” are. They might be hiring managers, influential people in your network, senior executives at your old company, etc. Then, rather than focusing on your needs (finding a job pronto), ask yourself these three questions:

• What are your customers looking for?
• What reaction do you want to get from them?
• How can you get that reaction?

Then work backwards:

• What is the best way to appeal to them?
• What accomplishments and experiences should you emphasize?
• What should you de-emphasize or eliminate?
• What specific actions can you take to get the reaction you want?

2.    Position your brand differently
When it comes to creating your brand, find the best positioning for yourself – something that you can stand for that is different, relevant and adds value. You want to solve a pain point in the marketplace. Remember, in terms of branding, the most important aspect is how you influence others’ perceptions. Position yourself and your attributes so that they sing for a specific job. Think of your resume as an “ad” for Brand You. Tell a compelling, relevant story with the resume, beginning with the profile at the top of the page. Everything should work together to position you and tell a cohesive brand story for you and the job you are exploring.

3.    Have a compelling “elevator speech”
The elevator speech is a must that many people overlook. Hence, when they are in the job interview or at a networking event, they stumble through explaining who they are and why that is important. The elevator speech is short. (That’s why it’s called an “elevator speech.”) It should be your sixty-second personal commercial. It’s your personal introduction that is colloquial, conversational and memorable. That’s why you’ll want to use a sound bite or analogy or anecdote to set yourself apart. In essence, an elevator speech should convey the key highlights of what you have done and how you did it. It should also imply that there’s more you can do, specifically for that customer.

4.    Be consistent at every touch point
Brands try to take advantage of every touch point so that everything works together when a customer comes into contact with the brand – the product itself, the advertising, the PR, the in-store experience – the total customer experience with the brand. Likewise, you should make sure your brand conveys a consistent image and message at every touch point:  your appearance, your resume, your phone messages, your emails, your follow-up letters, your business card. (If you’re unemployed, make sure you create a personal business card. Nix to writing your contact information on a scrap of paper or your old business card.)

5.    Seek “celebrity” endorsements
You may not know any real celebrities (I don’t either), but you no doubt know another type of “celebrity,” such as the CEO, President or SVP of a company where you worked, or a senior executive who could vouch for you. Ask them to provide a short sentence or two about your ability and character and use it as a third-party endorsement. You can use the quote in an addendum to your resume or in cover letters. You can also invite these “celebrities” to recommend you on LinkedIn. (You may want to make it easy by offering to draft the short testimonial so they can do the final editing.)

In following these 5 steps, you have the chance to weather the economic storm and come out of it with the job of your dreams.

Catherine Kaputa is a nationally known speaker, author, and self-branding guru. Her new book, The Female Brand, Using the Female Mindset to Succeed in Business came out in July. Her previous book, U R a Brand: How Smart People Brand Themselves for Business Success, was winner of the Ben Franklin Award for Best Career Book of 2007 and a bronze IPPY award. (The book is being reissued in paperback as You Are a Brand.) Kaputa is founder ofSelfBrand LLC, a NYC-based personal branding company.

More from Catherine Kaputa visit www.selfbrand.com