Art of Branding

Tough times are bad, but the flip side is creative destruction. New things appear out of the old.

As much as we may hate it, difficulty forces you to be innovative, more focused and smarter, and that’s good.

That’s why, during this current tough time, make sure your brand is positioned right for today and tomorrow.

Some people have to find new opportunities for themselves, or if you’re an entrepreneur, you have to do things in a more economical way, not same old, because business just don’t come in over the transom like before, you have to earn it of course.

In a tough economy, your brand must be different and it must be relevant.

Look at my case.

My focus before 2009 was primarily on individual coaching of entrepreneurs and executives.

One friend even said, with so many people out of work, this would be the best of times for you because so many people will be needing your coaching services.

In fact, it was the opposite. It was the worst of times. With the recession and job layoffs, people either didn’t have the money or were afraid to invest in personal coaching. And I initially saw a drop-off in business.

What I did was expand my brand footprint and change my business focus almost completely to corporate speaking and workshops. I limited my individual coaching to entrepreneurs and senior executives who were interested in either doing an intensive 2-month coaching program, The SelfBrand Strategy and Mini-Marketing Plan, or SelfBrand Speech-Writing, both areas where I could make a strong contribution to their brand.

I focused my marketing efforts on corporations, particularly the human resources area, for my talks and workshops, You Are a Brand! (based on the ideas in my first book that came out in paperback edition in 2009 )and The Female Brand (my new book on female leadership came out last summer).

In marketing yourself in a touch economy, you need to fill a gap – have the right solution for the right price and be different so that you stand out from the competition. That way you’ll be a brand for all seasons.

CIO.com
In 2009, personal branding became the buzzword of choice for job seekers and career coaches alike, and for good reason. When done right, personal branding–the act of identifying and communicating your unique value to people who can help advance your career–promised to be the job seeker’s silver bullet, his surefire way to stand out in a crowded job market.

The social media and social networking technologies that took 2009 by storm sure made personal branding easy. Too easy, perhaps, since many job seekers made careless mistakes in their haste to brand their way to a new job.

Personal branding experts say some of these mistakes can undermine professionals’ job searches and career management plans. For example, too much self-promotion can alienate the audience you’re trying to reach, says Catherine Kaputa, an advertising executive turned personal branding strategist.

[ Personal Branding Really Is the Key to Finding a New Job ]
Kaputa and two other prominent personal branding strategists list the six most common and most damaging personal branding mistakes people make, so that as you recharge your job search for the new year, you can ensure your personal branding efforts put your best face forward.

1. Putting the cart before the horse. The biggest and most common mistake people make is using the tools for personal branding, such as blogs, LinkedIn and Twitter, without first taking the time to define a strong, authentic brand for themselves.

“One of the most prevalent myths about personal branding is that it has to do with just creating a lot of visibility,” says personal branding strategist and Career Distinctionco-author Kirsten Dixson.

Consequently, people lay “a lot of digital footprints,” she says, before considering who they are, what they want to become known for long-term, and how they can differentiate themselves from people with similar goals and backgrounds.
Kaputa advises clients to think strategically when they’re defining their personal brand. She recommends they go through many of the same exercises marketers use when releasing a new product. These include such tactics as: SWOT analyses, setting goals for themselves, considering the visual and verbal identity for their personal brand, and establishing a marketing plan for themselves.

Dixson says honing in on your personal brand is hard and takes time, but it’s worth the effort as it guides all of your future personal branding efforts. What’s more, many of the other personal branding mistakes people make stem from not having a clearly articulated brand. Therefore, taking the time to define your brand sets you up for success and function as a preventative measure.

2. Having an unfocused brand. Many job seekers purport to practice personal branding. But instead of identifying and demonstrating their unique value through their communications, they continue to brand themselves as, say, an IT project management expert and a business process improvement expert and a virtualization expert.

“People have ’slash’ identities, and it’s a problem,” says Kaputa, author of You Are a Brand! “In the world of branding, being a generalist, jack-of-all-trades gets you nowhere.”

3. Adopting a copycat or generic brand. The purpose of personal branding–and, indeed, any kind of branding–is differentiation. Savvy job seekers work to brand themselves in order to distinguish themselves from other job seekers with similar backgrounds and skill sets. So don’t fall into the trap of branding yourself a “results-driven manager” or “turnaround CIO,” says Kaputa. You’ll just look like everyone else who’s describing themselves the same way.

“You want to own an idea,” she says. “You want to stand for something that’s a strength and a competitive advantage.”

4. Behaving inconsistently. When you commit to personal branding, you commit to having one identity, one voice that’s consistent across all media, all channels (e.g. phone, voice mail, e-mail, instant messaging), and between the physical and online worlds.

If you represent yourself as a paragon of professionalism on your LinkedIn profile, says Dixon, but you leave mean-spirited comments on blogs or your e-mails come off as less than professional, your target audience will question your authenticity.

5. Not committing to social media and social networking. Blogs and social networking sites are effective vehicles for personal branding, but only if you use them regularly. Otherwise, you look lame and uncommitted.

“If you establish a Twitter profile but you never tweet, it’s going to hurt you more than help you,” says Dan Schawbel, personal branding expert and author of Me 2.0.

Similarly, Schawbel adds, if you have a LinkedIn profile, make sure it’s 100 percent complete. And if you’re taking the time to write a blog, you must also take the extra time to promote it so that people can find it in a sea of more than 133 million blogs.

“You have to be as committed to your social media profile as you are to your husband or wife,” says Schawbel. And he means genuinely committed.

6. Over-promoting yourself. Some people go overboard with self-promotion when they embark on a personal branding campaign. Too much self-promotion can do more harm than good. That’s why Kaputa advises clients to think about the frequency of their self-promotion efforts.

Too much self-promotion can manifest itself in the way people represent themselves on the comment section of blogs, adds Schawbel. Most people leave their name, URL and their comment, as is customary. But some people who are trying too hard to brand themselves also leave their title, the name of their company and their personal branding statement, he says.
“They look bad because they’re over-promoting themselves,” says Schawbel. “What matters is writing a great comment that inspires or states an opinion on the post. When you do, people will click on your URL. It’s about the soft sell.”

Follow Meridith Levinson on Twitter at @meridith.

Janet Napolitano, our head of Homeland Security, had a solid reputation as a female leader, even spoken of as a Democratic presidential candidate in the future.

That is until she uttered the words, “the system worked” in reacting the attempted Christmas day terrorist attack on Flight 253.

Though a little late in coming, President Obama demonstrated his leadership chops by saying with a tip of the hat to Harry Truman, “the buck stops here” and there was “a systemic failure.”

From a branding perspective, when a tragedy strikes a brand, a company or a country, as a leader you have to take responsibility and you have to present a plan to turn things around. And, most importantly, you have to utter words that convince people that you are up to the job.

People don’t want to hear that “the system worked” even if it did. Because if the system worked we need a new system that can be more effective in catching terrorists. What did work was the brave people on Flight 253 who took charge to thwart the world-be terrorist.

Napolitano further hurt our credibility as our leader of Homeland Security after President’s address yesterday. When asked what surprised her in her role as director of Homeland Security, Napolitano replied that she was most surprised “by the determination of Al-Queda.”

Are you surprised their determination? After 9/11, after the CIA massacre at Khost, after…?

The morale of this study is the importance of political savvy in personal branding. When you’re a leader, you have to realize that everything you say and do will be watched, especially when there’s a big mess-up. Your words can brand you as a leader or not up to the job.

Author: By Roger Dobson

Researchers investigating whether there is a beauty premium to be had in the workplace have found that those they deemed the most attractive make 12 per cent more money than those regarded as less goodlooking. Average Joes and Joans have little to smile about either, with the moderately attractive taking home seven per cent less in earnings than the prettiest people.
The main reason for the apparent victory of the lookers is that they are seen as more helpful and co-operative.
In the study, reported in the Journal of Economic Psychology, University of California researchers studied three groups of subjects according to general perceptions of physical attractiveness. Their behaviour was observed and their different incomes taken into consideration.
“Attractive people make more money than middle attractive people, who in turn make more money than unattractive people,” declared the researchers.
The scientists said their work was applicable across different societies and work settings.
The researchers concluded that attractive people make more money because they found it easier to generate co-operation among their co-workers. The team ruled out another possibility ? that the more successful were just more selfish.
In fact, they found that that attractive people are, on average, less selfish than moderately attractive people. The team said one theory why people are more co-operative with attractive people is that they believe them to be more helpful.
They say attractive people are consistently judged and treated more positively, and the results show that 39 per cent of attractive men and women were judged to be helpful, compared to 16 per cent of middle attractive people, and only six per cent of unattractive people.
The researchers said: “Beautiful people tend to be in more successful teams because other team members are more co-operative in the presence of beautiful people.”
The good news for those like Ugly Betty (played by America Ferrera, below) is that when the beautiful people are not pulling their weight, their good looks count against them. In those situations, the unattractive invariably come out as the winners.
Work strategist Catherine Kaputa has already suggested that looks have a bearing on an individual’s career. “It is pretty disconcerting to find out that the workplace is a beauty contest,” said Kaputa, author of U R a Brand.
“Good looks have what social scientists call the halo effect. Because someone is attractive, we assign many other positive attributes to him or her that have nothing to do with looks.”
Help, I look like a workplace failure.
Work guru Catherine Kaputa has formulated a five-point plan for salvaging your looks and achieving success:

1 Package yourself: clothes will not help you perform but will help how your performance is perceived
2 Emphasise features: be confident about your looks and build a strong image
3 Have a trademark: think Bono’s shades or Sir Robin Day’s bow ties. Stand out from the crowd
4 Focus on “soft power”: use your values, style and point of view to attract others to you. Stand tall, and never slouch
5 Hone your speech: the ability to sell yourself and your ideas is critical

CATHERINE KAPUTA ON REBRANDING YOURSELF   January 3, 2010

For many years a corporate advertising fly-flier on Madison Avenue, Kaputa has repositioned herself as “a cross between a brand manager and an executive coach”, writing about and teaching “personal branding”.

“It’s about looking at yourself as a brand in a commercial market place, packaging yourself with a visual and verbal identity distinct from others,” and developing a game plan for Brand You,” she enthuses. Her ideas have found favour in a particularly tough job market. “There are more and more people unemployed, worrying about becoming unemployed, feeling under-employed, or wishing to become entrepreneurs, and my strategies and techniques give them identity, visibility and edge. This isn’t just self-promotion, but about your CV telling your brand story and seeing your self-brand as a strategic and creative commercial project. This is particularly important for home-workers. When you’re working remotely, as more and more are, it’s essential to maximise Brand You.”

Kaputa writes, lectures, heads workshops and does individual coaching. She particularly focuses on women. “Some women say, ‘Why talk about such things in the business arena? There shouldn’t be any difference.’ I’m talking about the reality of the workplace, where male hubris has often won out over female humility when it comes to promotion. Whether to women’s groups in Fortune 500 companies or to my female readers, I emphasise the strengths women have in relationship building and communication, and how they can use those assets to help build their personal brands in the job market.” Kaputa will be bringing herself, her self-brand and her self-branding messages to the UK later this year. JH

ADVICE Come up with a unique signature phrase that you can use in every conversation. Think of Sir Alan Sugar and the success of “You’re Fired!”, which symbolises him being a tough business leader. Although you may not want to be known for saying that right now.

IN A NUTSHELL Learn to brand yourself

before others brand you in a way that you don’t like.

The Female Brand is published in the UK this summer. Kaputa blogs at www.selfbrand.com and tweets at twitter.com/catherinekaputa