Personal Branding Blog – Dan Schawbel

Today, I spoke with Tom Asacker, who is a well-known branding expert, author and speaker. We talked about how conversations have changed over the past few years, how to break through marketing clutter, and some future predictions. As more and more companies are built and destroyed in the next year, marketing and branding still remain an important topic. Now is your chance to be seen, while everyone divests in their marketing budgets.

Tom, how have conversations, branding and marketing changed in the past few years?

That’s a big question, Dan. It would take us a few years to fully examine it, especially when you take the past few months of economic meltdown, and its effect on brands, into consideration. But let’s look at it this way: Branding is accomplished through value-added innovation and marketing that appeals to ones audience. Fundamental outcomes of “branding” are, obviously, behavior, but also conversations; the ones within an organization, between the brand and its audience, amongst audience members, and, most importantly, the ones people have with themselves.

Those conversations used to be controlled and manipulated by the organizations behind the brands; like the Wizard of Oz creating drama with his audience by hiding behind the curtain and manipulating levers. But Toto, Internet-enabled technologies and platforms, has yanked the curtain wide open. The Great and Powerful Oz has been revealed as nothing more (or less) than men and women, like the rest of us. The question now becomes, Can these people help us with our journeys through their creative endeavors, their work? Do they have the wisdom, vision, and courage to inspire, guide and empower us?

You believe (as well as Godin and others) that people have stopped listening to spam and clutter. What do they listen to now and how do we market around it?

Remember, spam is in the eye (or ear) of the beholder, and we’ve always had clutter. So people are really no different today then they’ve always been, in that they selectively choose what to listen to, watch, and read based upon what they desire; what interests them and what they find value in. Today’s marketing challenge is that there are a lot more interesting things for them to choose from.

And Dan? You can not market around this fact. Rather, you must accept it and be driven to continuously reinvent your brand, differentiate and provide superior value for your particular audience. You have to approach it head on, with boldness and daring.

How does this “change in branding” impact the workforce and how they can succeed at work?

I have no idea. Seriously, the workplace is its own ecosystem, where people can succeed in the short term whether customers value their organization and brands or not. Detroit’s big three are on the verge of bankruptcy, yet their CEOs took home tens of millions of dollars last year. Absurd, but a fact of business life.

“That being said, if you work for an enlightened leader, one who places the interests and concerns of his people and customers above his own, then demonstrate how you can help add value and improve people’s lives. Because if you are not adding value in your work, you’re simply consuming resources and taking up space.”

What are 3 strategies that brands can use now to break through the clutter and get their messages across?

• First, be different in way that asserts your purpose as a business, and that purpose should be about them and not about you and making money. This will gain the attention of your highly skeptical and cynical audience.
• Next, be desirable in way that appeals to their interests. Most organizations have no idea what their customers are feeling and, thus, what they presently desire in the marketplace.
• Third, be real. Give people an experience with your brand that reinforces the value that they’ve intuited from their associations with your brand. Don’t try to communicate believability; demonstrate it.
• And finally, show your audience that you are interested in them by continuing to be interesting. Remember, brand is a verb not a noun.

What do you predict for the future of branding? What trends should we watch out for?

Just like Mr. T predicted in Rocky III, I predict pain! Many organizations, and independent professionals, will collapse during the imminent protracted economic downturn, either because they don’t understand how to build a desirable and profitable entity (a.k.a brand) or because the leaders simply do not want to make the tough decisions and do the hard work necessary to create one. See my 9 predictions for 2009!

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Tom Asacker, was referred to as a marketing guru in Tom Peters’ renowned book, Re-imagine!. More often described as a catalyst and non-conformist and acclaimed for his no-nonsense style, Tom Asacker is the author of A Little Less Conversation and A Clear Eye for Branding, groundbreaking books that redefine business for the new, customer-controlled economy. Tom’s first book, Sandbox Wisdom, a heartwarming story about a CEO’s search for meaning and success in the world of business and work, was a business bestseller in the U.S., and was published in South Korea, India and Estonia to rave reviews.