The Same Laws Apply For Personal Brands as Any Brand

January 1, 2009 at 11:00 pm | In Book Reviews, Interview, People, Personal Branding, eBrand, marketing | 5 Comments

Today, I spoke with John Gerzema, who is the Chief Insights Officer for Young & Rubicam Group and an author.  We discuss the three main challenges marketers face in today’s marketplace, what the brand bubble is and how to measure it, as well as his five-stage model for brand creativity and change.  John, then gives us his perspective on personal branding.

What challenges do marketers have these days? How are they different than years ago?

Marketing is facing a convergence of forces:

  • First the Fragmentation of everything — of channels, choice, modes and mediums means it’s no longer possible to build a brand on the back of mass media, the way we did in previous decades.
  • Second, because of Social media (collaboration, communication and sharing… social networks, applications and consumer generated media), consumers rely on each other more than brands.
  • And Personalization (products, experiences, mass customization and micro-addressability) means there are no USP’s anymore. A brand has a myriad of potential appeals to be personally relevant.

All of these new phenomena accelerate the decay in brand equity. Consumers are quicker to punish uninteresting brands. Marketing must adapt because brands have nowhere to hide.

What is the Y&R’s Brand Asset Valuator (BAV) and what key research have you found on brands?

BrandAsset Valuator is the world’s largest continuously updated study of brands. We’ve invested over $ 115 million dollars and each year we interview over 500,000 consumers in 44 countries. We’ve tracked consumer perceptions of over 40,000 brands since1993. In fact, we’ve opened up the database for anyone to research hundreds of brands in our study.

What is the brand bubble and why do you think it will burst soon? What can we do today to prepare for it?

“We believe another crisis is brewing on Wall Street: The financial markets think brands are worth more than the consumers who buy them.”

Main Street offers a different view of brands than Wall Street: While brand value increased 80% in three decades, brand awareness declined 20% — brand quality eroded by 24% — trust in brands declined by a staggering 50%. And 85% of brands were either stagnant or declining in brand differentiation.

The first thing we must acknowledge: This is not a brand problem; it’s a business problem.  When consumers fall out of love with brands, shareholder value is at risk. CEO’s are leveraging their brands to make promises of future earnings to shareholders. Today, brands are 30% of the market cap of S&P 500, or almost $ 4 trillion dollars. The 250 most valuable brands are worth $ 2.197 trillion dollars, which exceeds the GDP of France. Even the world’s top 10 most valuable brands are larger than the market capitalization of 70% of U.S. public companies. So we’re advising clients to completely re-think marketing from a cost of doing business, to a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.

The 21st century CEO must be the ‘Brand Manager in Chief’. The best CEO’s think like CMO’s. And the best CMO’s must think like CEO’s. Together, they must bring marketing to the forefront of business strategy in order to access and integrate other functions of the business.

“Marketing isn’t a department, but a way of thinking across the company. Marketing is now everyone’s concern and a business imperative, as important as any strategic function in the enterprise.”

What is your five-stage model for brand creativity and change?

In the book we walk the reader through a five-stage model to drive the brand through their organization and to collaborate from the standpoint of what the consumer wants and what the brand needs. This process involves the entire enterprise recognizing that the brand imperatives are one and the same as the organizational imperatives. Every department and division, including outside vendors, suppliers, partners – everyone in the brand’s value chain – plays a role in fueling the energy of the brand, by contributing creativity and ideas that lead the brand forward. The company has to become what we call an Energy-driven Enterprise, and this especially means that the entire company has to become marketing-led, not just a company with a marketing department.

Most importantly, in developing the process to ignite energy into their brands, we identified what we call the Five Laws of Energy. These five laws now govern the new ConsumerLand, where consumers have new demands and unparalleled power. These five laws help enterprises re-examine how they approach and implement their creativity, their messaging, their flexibility and ability to evolve their brand, their approach to marketing, and their use of strategies and tactics.

Do you have any tips for people wanting to create personal brands? You can use some of the research you’ve already discovered to answer this question.

The same laws apply for personal brands as any brand — Have a unique point of difference (your differentiation) and continuously innovate around it (energy).  Today’s social media and fragmentation described above offer any individual extraordinary opportunity to brand themselves and gain a following quickly. The key as with any brand is to also have integrity and ‘walk your talk’. So the brand promise —the person’s content, delivery and dialogue are all critical factors to providing a brand experience that consumers believe is unique and enduring.

——-
John Gerzema is Chief Insights Officer for Young & Rubicam Group. He is the author of The Brand Bubble.  One of the early founders of account planning in American advertising, John has guided brand strategies to global business and creative acclaim. Previously, John ran Fallon’s international network and founded offices in Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Sao Paulo. He holds a master’s degree in integrated marketing from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and a B.S. in marketing from The Ohio State University.

Lessons on Personal Brand Building From Donald Trump and P Diddy

December 31, 2008 at 10:14 pm | In Book Reviews, Interview, People, Personal Branding, entrepreneurship | 1 Comment

Today, I spoke with John Eckberg, who has spoken with many successful entrepreneurs and celebrities, wrapping up his interviews in a book and sharing a few today for this blog. The two we will discuss are Donald Trump and P Diddy, who, in my opinion, truly represent the epitome of personal branding.   Donald Trump understood early in his career that personal branding would give him an edge, while P Diddy figured out that being around people who were smarter than him would help accelerate his business success.

What can Donald Trump teach us about building a powerful brand (personal/product/corporate)?

Donald Trump is one of the few Americans who has turned his success in the fairly stodgy field of real estate in world-renown brand and persona in the milieu of entertainment, retailing and recreation. And while I am no Trump-a-phile, that is, I have not studied his books nor have I pored over the minutia of his career, I do know this much about him: the guy returns phone calls. Maybe it’s because I work at a newspaper and hold a megaphone that reaches hundreds of thousands of people (though I suspect he’d return phone calls to folks who run newsletters) but this mogul is somebody who tends to his telephone messages.

Why is that important in building brand and what does that teach us about creating a brand? Trump (who, by the way, is Mr. Trump to me since he never played centerfield or was a jockey, according to that Ring Lardner newspaperman’s rule of who gets called by their first name in any conversation) understood early on in his career that people with personal brands have an edge when it comes to negotiations, co-ventures, real estate deals and just about everything else in our society. He must have learned this from his father, a man who cut mega-deals with other real estate moguls in the rarified and cut-throat world of Manhattan real estate.

Trump knows that when somebody with a brand walks into a room or picks up the phone, they carry with them subtle but strong personal packaging.

“Trump has embraced the element of human nature, the tendency to elevate others, into a clear advantage.”

He is never off stage, never out of the limelight, either, and knows that subordinates, peers and colleagues are always watching. In fact, they never stop watching.

And here’s something else. We usually think that somebody with baggage means that they have a hurdle to overcome. But that is not the case when you think of a brand as baggage. In that case baggage has a positive impact on a person’s patina – or brand.  Trump has Gucci baggage.

The first and only time I met Donald Trump face-to-face (although we have spoken several times since then) was in the early 1990s at a Super Bowl when the Bengals narrowly lost to the San Francisco 49ers. My job was to chase quotes from locals from the Cincinnati area, who were at the game, and after one interview, I looked to my left and there was Trump. His hair, I might add, was magnificent. As I slid over to chat with him, there on the 10 yard line (what’s he doing on the 10-yard line, I thought but didn’t ask) my heart was in my throat. I mean, this guy is Donald Trump. But within moments the nervousness went away and my natural interview assurance kicked in. Part of it, I realized later, was the Trump charm. This guy puts other people at ease. That’s the part of the Trump brand that does not resonate in Macy’s commercials for his suits, in his show The Apprentice nor in the magazine covers. He has a calm confidence, yes, but it’s also a confidence that is infectious. He makes others feel at ease.

How does he achieve this? Eye-to-eye and a benign and wry smile work wonders. Practice yours in a mirror. It’s the first step toward a personal brand. Exude confidence and that will instill the same in others. That may not make you a billionaire but it is, assuredly, the first step down that path and may be the most important quality you can develop as you move through your job, career and life. The ability to put others at ease will bring you much in return.

What can P Diddy teach us about constructing an empire from the start to the finish?

“Surround yourself with smart people, listen and weigh what they have to say and then take a risk.”

During my interview with Mr. Combs, I wanted to establish early on that I knew a little about his core competency, which at the time was not Making a Band or discovering singers or writing songs, although he was plenty good enough at all that. I was a business reporter who covered what was then Federated Departments Stores (now Macy’s), and what I needed to know was simply this: how much were the annual sales of Sean Jean apparel. So I threw out a number, something I had independently generated – $450 million annually. It was dead on, he confirmed.

And that meant, roughly, that this entertainment icon was netting probably $90 million annually (give or take 300 percent) from the notion that a generation of Americans wanted to dress like Diddy – have style like Diddy. I pushed it one step further and found out something that I still carry with me today.  Smart people keep lots of other smart people around at all times. I jokingly suggested to him that he didn’t need to give me any “points” for an idea I had, that he should brand a car, that is, create a co-venture with a major auto manufacturer and come out with a Sean Jean SUV. “We’re in negotiations with…..” Diddy calmly replied as he noted that his next step in life was to continue to build the empire.

One question I did not ask was this: why does a guy who has $450 million in annual sales from just one initiative – hundreds of millions more likely come in from his branded TV entertainment efforts – why would that guy, who has no formal theatrical training, risk the wrath of the most vicious scribes on the globe and walk out onto a Broadway stage to offer his portrayal of Raisin in the Sun. I mean, he’s already wealthy beyond imagination. Why take a chance on becoming a laughing stock of the Great White Way. I didn’t ask the question and now regret it but I’m pretty sure we all know the answer. Great things stem from great risk. Personalities who do not seek risk are not likely to build much of a brand and certainly will not build an empire. Mr. Combs was a risk-taker but one who was accustomed to success. Nothing will ever change about that, either. With great risk comes great success. But first you have to embrace risk.

——–
John Eckberg is the author of The Success Effect: Uncommon Conversations with America’s Business Trailblazers.  He is a career journalist with 25 years of experience in the challenging field of daily newspaper reporting. A graduate of Ohio University, he has been a business columnist and business reporter at The Cincinnati Enquirer for more than a decade, where he has covered numerous beats including federal courts, investigative reporter, feature writing, neighborhood columns and urban development. Widely published, his work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, USA Today and many other American print and Web publications. He is the co-author of Road Dog, a true-crime thriller about serial killer Glen Rogers of Hamilton, Ohio.

Innovation Requires Personal Brands That Are Rebels

December 31, 2008 at 12:14 am | In Book Reviews, Interview, People, Personal Branding | 2 Comments

Today, I spoke with Hayagreeva Rao, who is a professor at Stanford Business School and author. He talks about what a “market rebel” is, why they are important, some examples of rebels, the benefits and how personal branding relates. Hayagreeva makes a great case why you should become a market rebel to stand out amongst your peers and start innovating to change the world. Although, market rebels aren’t readily visible, they are able to innovate within company’s or as entrepreneurs. Innovation causes change and change is needed for progress!

What are market rebels? Why are they important?

“Market rebels are activists who challenge the status quo and defy conventional wisdom.”

The Compact Oxford English Dictionary defines a rebel as one who resists “authority, control or convention”. Market rebels are important because they spearhead collective action that takes the form of social movements. In turn, these social movements can either advance a radical innovation or block it. In either case, market rebels construct ‘hot causes’ to harness the attention of distracted audiences and rely on ‘cool’ techniques to mobilize collective action.

For example, the market rebels at the vanguard of the personal computing movement had a ‘hot cause’ – centralized computer and a computer that could only be touched by a priestly class, and a ‘cool’ technique of mobilization – ‘homebrewing’ clubs where people could assemble their own machine and personalize computing and gain autonomy.

They played a crucial role in in spawning new firms that led to the birth of the personal computer industry. Similarly, deaf rights activists challenged producers of cochlear ear implants and thwarted the spread of the technology. Their ‘hot cause’ was the loss of sign language and the demise of a deaf culture, and their cool techniques of mobilization included public marches and destruction of cochlear ear implants, and even litigation.

What are the benefits of market rebels?

Market rebels promote collective goods and play decisive role when normal market incentives do not work. For example, in the early automobile industry, the car was not culturally accepted and was seen as a devilish monstrosity. Advertising by car producers was widely distrusted. In these circumstances, auto enthusiasts banded together into automobile clubs, and lobbied state governments for speed limits and licensing and prevented a maze of local regulations.

They organized reliability races which paved the way for producers to win them and establish reputations. They also lobbied for good roads. All of this made mass production by Henry Ford possible. Market rebels played similar roles in the birth of the microbrewing industry, and the growth of new styles such as nouvelle cuisine. In all of these cases, they advanced radical innovations. But market rebels also play an important role in blocking thwarting radical innovations. For instance, they championed the cause of small stores and sought to stem the advance of chain stores and they organized an anti-biotechnology movement which prevented German pharmaceutical firms from commercializing bio-technology.

Can you name a few market rebels who have helped build our culture/businesses?

In contemporary times, a wide range of market rebels have played important roles in the evolution of industries. The important thing to keep in mind is that they are individuals who submerge their identity in a common cause and so rarely stand out in the public eye. Instead, it is the organizations they build and the collective action they spark that leaves a lasting imprint.

The free software movement, where “free” means “free” as in “free speech” and not “free beer”, played an important role in the spread of Linux – Linus Torvalds comes to mind. In microbrewing, Charles Papazian laid the foundations of the homebrewing movement, and entrepreneurs such as Fritz Maytag played were influential in the growth of small producers who made beer using authentic ingredients and artisanal techniques. On the other side, investor rights activists such as Evelyn Davis and the Gilbert Brothers and Nell Minnow were at the vanguard of the investor rights movement which improved corporate disclosure and monitoring of executive compensation.

What would the world look like without these market rebels?

We would not have the Automobile Association of America – it was started by auto enthusiasts who formed auto clubs all over the country. There would ne no brewpubs or microbrews in grocery store aisles. Organic food would not have taken root in American culture. All of these are cases, where market rebels were the harbingers of social movements that led to radical innovation. But for market rebels, we would have more Walmarts and Big Box stores all over the country. But for the environmental movement there would be no hybrid cars and consumer interest in the electric car.

If you brand yourself as a market rebel, how will it help your career?

Being a market rebel gives you a distinctive identity and visibility as an outsider. But they come at a price – you are more likely to be in small organizations rather than large bureaucracy and not have large financial resources. Which is why rebels exploit ‘hot causes’ and rely on ‘cool mobilization’ techniques to inspire action. In this sense, it is your cause and techniques that brand you.

——–
Hayagreeva Rao is the author of Market Rebels: How Activists Make or Break Radical Innovations. He is the Atholl McBean Professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resources at Stanford Business School. He has published widely in the fields of management and sociology and studies the social and cultural causes of organizational change. His research has been published in journals such as the Administrative Science Quarterly, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science and Strategic Management Journal. He has been a Member of the Organizational Innovation and Change Panel of the National Science Foundation. He is a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science and of the Sociological Research Association. He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Management.

How to Get Into the College of Your Dreams and Hack it

December 26, 2008 at 7:08 pm | In Book Reviews, Interview, People, Personal Branding, Success Strategies, gen-y | 6 Comments
Tags:

Today, I spoke with Cal Newport, who has already written two books for college students, and has a great blog on how to hack college.  Cal has a lot of knowledge when it comes to how to succeed at college, make the most out of your time in college and how you brand yourself as the top college graduate to get into grad school.  His advice is very interesting, especially his points about not majoring in business and how to differentiate yourself without having two majors.  He even helps us dissects the college admissions process, so high schoolers know what it takes to get into the top schools. This interview is a must-read for any ambitious college student!

What does it take to be a standout student?

At the college-level, this usually means two things:

  • First, being a star within your major. You want professors in your department to write recommendation letters that begin: “this is one of the top students…”
  • Second, being involved in one really interesting, impressive endeavor. For example, organizing a conference, starting a new publication, launching a business, conducting undergraduate research. This combination is the most rewarded by the post-graduation market.

Here are two things that do not make you a standout: taking an incredibly difficult course load or joining a huge number of clubs. The former makes it hard for you to excel within a single major (which requires that you can spend a lot of time on a small number of courses) and the latter makes it unlikely that you’ll do something truly original and interesting.

Many students think the key to success is being able to say: “I have three majors and am the president of 19 clubs.” This bores people. What really shines is being able to say: “I kick ass in Astronomy and wrote a computer program to help analyze radio telescope data.” Here’s the cool part: the latter path is actually really fun. The former path leads to burnouts.

What is the difference from the college application process of 5-10 years ago and today?  What does it take to get into college?  Ivy league college?

The college application process has undergone major shifts. There was a time when being class president and scoring really high SAT scores meant you could go to an Ivy League school, and everyone else went to their local state school.  As things got more competitive, we entered the age of the “well-rounded” student; elite colleges started looking for students that showed real aptitude in multiple different areas.

More recently, this has given away to a star system: the elite college seek out the rare superstar student who blows away his or her peers in terms of raw intelligence and accomplishment.  The most widely used strategy for winning the modern admission game is to do more hard things than everyone else applying for the same spot. This leads to students with what one high schooler I know calls “super resumes” — 15 clubs, 5 mission trips, 3 sports, 19 A.P. courses, etc.

I call this the schedule-packing strategy. My problem with this approach is that it doesn’t work very well. Sure, if you can do more hard things than everyone else applying to Harvard, you can get in. But most likely, there will be someone who did just a little bit more than you and all of your effort will be wasted. To make matters worse, this effort is very painful. In short: schedule packing is really hard.

The alternative approach is to become what I call on my blog a Zen Valedictorian. These are students who eschew over packed extracurricular schedules, and, instead, stumble into areas that really fascinate them and end taking the pursuit somewhere really unexpected and cool. If you can couple this with the grades and SAT scores that match your dream school’s expectations, then you have a good shot of getting in. It’s also much less painful.

For example, I met a student who got a full-ride scholarship to UVA because she spent her summers engrossed in horseshoe crab research. She did, basically, nothing else in terms of extracurricular, but she had these professors writing recommendation letters that were like:”she is this fantastic researcher with a big career ahead of her.” Her life was very relaxed (the research was 30 – 40 hours a week only during the summer), but to the admissions officers she looked much more impressive than the student who was up until 2 am every night during the school year trying to keep up with a crazy course load and too many activities.

What are your top 3 college hacks to succeeding more by doing less?

  • Study during the day, during short bursts (around 1 hour), in isolated locations. Do not study in long, uninterrupted blocks at night after dinner. Because your intensity of focus is so much higher during the day, you will accomplish the same amount of work in much less hours.
  • Never perform rote review (silently reading your notes and reviewing your assignments). Instead, create quizzes such that the answers to the questions cover the concepts you need to know for the test. Study by answering the questions, outloud, as if lecturing an imaginary audience. Then check if you hit all the main points in your answer. This quiz-and-recall approach will cement concepts stronger and faster than silent review.
  • Do less. Have one major. You think you need a double major, but you don’t. Keep your courseload reasonable. Keep your extracurricular commitment low. Spend more time with friends, or reading, or just exploring things that are interesting. This will prevent burnout.  You’ll also *do* much better in your classes — because you have more than enough time to handle the work — and in your small number of pursuits.

What would you recommend to a college student in order for them to get the job they want when they graduate?

Follow my advice about becoming a standout: be a star in your department and do something really interesting. Don’t worry about matching your major to the job you want, if it’s not a technical field (think: engineering or programming), your major doesn’t matter much.

If you have your heart set on a specific field, make your one cool thing you do during college match that field. For example, if you want to be a journalist, you should probably make your cool endeavor center on writing. Though, for the most part, it’s hard to predict what you’ll be doing right out of college, so, in general, being a standout will keep options open.

“Don’t, however, major in business. People are bored by this. If you really want a high-powered job in finance or consulting, major in math. This impresses these same people.”

Is straight A’s enough to get into graduate school anymore?

Grad schools care about only two things: your grades in the relevant courses and your research experience. That’s it. It’s not like college. The admissions committee doesn’t want a well-rounded class. They don’t care that you volunteered for Habitat for Humanity. They want students who can hit the ground running doing top-notch research.  If you want to go to graduate school, put most of your time into your major courses and getting involved with research.

——–
Cal Newport graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 2004, and is currently a Computer Science Ph.D. candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of How to Become a Straight-A Student (Broadway Books, 2006) and How to Win at College (Broadway Books, 2005). Newport has appeared as a student success expert on ABC, NBC, and CBS and on over 50 radio networks, including ABC Radio, USA Radio, and XM Satellite Radio. In addition, his award-winning blog, Study Hacks, is one of the Internet’s largest student advice sites, with over 4000 RSS subscribers and 30,000 – 50,000 unique monthly visitors.

Next Page »

Blog at WordPress.com. | Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds.