Art of Branding

It’s not an oxymoron; you can be happy and successful and a woman.

Marcus Buckingham, author of First, Break All the Rules, has just completed a research study that he titled, “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness.” The distressing finding: over the last 40 years, “women’s happiness has trended downward as compared to men’s despite the gradual increases in power and prosperity.”

Yet there are women who seem to have it all, to be happy and successful. Here are some of the tips from Buckingham’s research and the research that I did for my book, The Female Brand:

Focus on moments not goals

Rather than one, three or five year career plans, successful women snatch and focus on successful moments what Buckingham calls “strong moments” These are positive moments that make you feel good. And the moments can cover a myriad of business and personal moments: closing a big sale with a highly desirable prospect, writing a perfectly worded email or memo, mentoring a junior employee who reminds you of yourself just out of college, or helping your son or daughter prepare for a tough exam. Bring these moments up in your mind as a regular part of your mental preparation at work.

Accept who you are

One interviewer even revealed, “It’s hard to admit, but I don’t like playing with my kids. My daughter would come up to me and say ‘Mom, you play the mommy, and I’ll play the baby’ and I would think ‘Not again. I am the mommy, you are the baby.’ The moments I love with my kids are when I’m teaching them something, helping them learn, but I’m bored silly by playing another game of dress up. I got my life back on track only when I rejected the idea of being the ‘perfect’ mother, and accepted the reality of which moments energized me and which didn’t.”

Accepting who you are will empower you since you will put your energy toward your passions not trying to be whom you think others expect.

Strive for imbalance.

We’ve heard so much about balance, but the women in the Buckingham research and my own don’t talk much about balance. One women even told me, “I’ve been completely unbalanced my whole career.” Most successful women realize that balance is impossible to achieve, and we have to be unbalanced in the way that suits our needs and interests.  As some women pointed out, even if they could achieve it, balance might not be fulfilling. “When you are balanced, you are holding your breath. Balance is the wrong life goal.”

Let me hear your thoughts on melding happiness and business success.

It pays to pitch studies show. This is true whether you’re pitching yourself for a promotion, negotiating a higher salary for a new job or you are pitching your ideas and recommendations in a meeting.

Pitching is something more men than women seem to have a knack for. Many women don’t like to pitch themselves studies show. They wait to be asked.

In researching my new book, The Female Brand, I heard some incredible reasons for the fear of pitching, including, “If I ask I might make someone else feel bad.” A more typical female response was, “If I work hard enough, I’ll be noticed and rewarded.” After all, that’s what mom told me, too.

Of course, hard work is often rewarded. But nothing beats hard work along with a good pitch!

That’s why you need to dispense with the formality of waiting to be tapped, take the initiative and pitch yourself. To do that well, you need to learn the art of the pitch. Here are some tips to get you started:

• Have a clear-cut message. Have a concise message of what you want to say and how you are going to say it. Don’t talk too much and overwhelm the listener.

• Be authentic. If you don’t have a go-for-dominance-make-a-killing style, don’t pitch that way. Do it in a way that’s natural for you. Find the words and pitch style that you feel comfortable with.

• Don’t take it personally. Not every pitch will be successful. You don’t want to get emotional during a pitch since it will undercut your effectiveness and perceived professionalism. Even if you don’t agree with the decision, act like a pro and thank the person for hearing you out.

• Be empathetic. . Build emotional connections by relating the human side of issues. Respond to what the other person is saying. Look for non-verbal clues that will give you ideas on what to emphasize, and what parts of your pitch aren’t working so you can move on.

• Don’t give up too soon.  If you are initially turned down, keep the conversation going by finding out why. Often exploring objections and finding out why and what the objections are will lead to other options. Remember that when the other side talks more, more options come your way.

• Practice leads to success. The more you do it, the easier pitching gets. The first time I pitched myself for increased responsibility early in my career, I tossed and turned the night before. But I did it and succeeded. You’ll win some, and you’ll lose some, but you need to get started now so you can get your mistakes out of the way.

Let me know your thoughts on how to pitch yourself successfully on the job.

In our careers, we are groomed to think in terms of incremental or bold moves up. But lateral moves can be even more important.

Recently, I was speaking to a senior executive at a major global company – we’ll call her Kirsten. She told me this story. “I had a very good situation at my company early in my career. I was happy, liked the work and liked the people in my department. Then, one day after I had worked there five years, my boss said to me, ‘Kirsten, you’re talented and hard-working, but if you want to go anywhere in this company, you need to know something outside of this department. You need to know how the larger corporation works. You need to know people in other businesses and what they do. You need broader experience.’”

Kirsten was smart and ambitious, but, at first, she didn’t like her boss’s advice. She was content. She hadn’t thought of moving precisely because she was doing well and liked the people she worked with.

From a branding perspective, when you are doing well but aren’t growing anymore is precisely the time to think of expanding your brand footprint. It’s the time when brands thinking in terms of expanding into new markets, adding more bells and whistles or building new alliances. And people should too. Learning new things and gaining new experience though a lateral move will help keep your brand relevant and vital.

Even though she didn’t want to make a change, Kirsten discussed possible lateral moves with her boss and interviewed for one. At first, it wasn’t easy. The new department and area of responsibility was completely outside of her comfort zone. She described early meetings where her new colleagues used lots of jargon she didn’t understand. Kirsten had a plan. She carefully took notes, then went back to her new team, and asked them to help her decode what was said and what she needed to do. Kirsten went on to make a series of lateral moves and well as moves up. She’s even set up a system in her division to actively promote and encourage lateral moves for employees. Today, she’s a C-level executive at her company.

Is it time for extreme job hunting? See this Wall Street Journal article that outlines some of the latest tactics.

We all know it’s a killer job market, but marching around with a sandwich board in downtown Manhattan’s financial center is not the way to go if you are an unemployed Wall Street investment banker.  Here’s what an executive recruiter, Tom Blanco, had to say about it.

“It is important to remember that while you while there are many different ways to draw attention to yourself as a candidate, not all attention is good attention. This is particularly true in the corporate world. I was NEVER paid a fee of $10,000, $20,000 or $30,000 by a client for a finding candidate that was even REMOTELY freaky. NEVER.

There are some exceptions for very creative fields.

For everyone else, know that top candidates do not attempt to distinguish themselves from the pack by wearing a hat out of a Dr. Seuss book or playing guitar in their underpants in Times Square. They stand out because they have excellent credentials, strong industry skills, great presentations, excellent communication skills, great attitudes, glowing references and they are well prepared.”

“Brand experience” is an important concept in branding and something I talk about in my books because it can be a very powerful personal branding tool.

Brand experience is all the points of contact you have with a brand – all the visual, verbal and experiential encounters. For example, you can experience a brand in a store, on the web, in commercials on TV or radio, in movies, at events, on the phone or in other ways. In the new field of “experience design,” marketers try to design the total brand experience so that the ideas, emotions and memories from these encounters create the desired brand image and message. That way, everything reinforces each other.

Most important, marketers try to create a different brand experience from competitors so it’s a strategic tool. Compare the experience of being in an Apple store with Computer World. Or shopping at Nordstrom versus The Gap. Or having a coffee at Starbucks compared to Dunkin’Donuts. Each brand is building a brand image and experience that is distinctive, that reflects the brand image and its value proposition – its Big Idea – in a subtle or not so subtle way.

It pays for people to think in terms of brand experience, too, if you want to maximize Brand You. You create a brand experience every day by the way you interact with people, the impression you create when you lead a meeting or the way you participate in someone else’s meeting. What does the way you dress or decorate your office say about Brand You? What is the message conveyed about the way you answer the phone and talk to clients and colleagues? What about the meeting notes you send out, the way you answer email messages, the kind of voicemail messages you leave? In short, you create a brand experience at every touch point in your career life. And everything communicates brand messages.

Think of all the touch points with colleagues, with employees, with more senior people, with clients, with industry contacts. Ask yourself (and answer!) this question: How can I enhance the brand experience people have with me at work?

For example, if you are trying to build a connection with someone new, do you walk him or her to the door after a visit in your office, or do you let that person wander back alone? Or do you delegate it to your assistant? One senior executive I admired made it her trademark to always personally come out to the lobby to bring clients or visitors back to her office. It was so unusual at her level that we all remarked about it.

It’s very important to ask yourself one more question: Are you consistent in the brand experience you convey, or do you convey different impressions depending on whom you are with.

Let me hear your thoughts on ways to create a successful and personal brand experience in your career life.