The Business Growth Blog by Rob Cuesta

Do Your Targets Hear The Sizzle?

There's an old advertising adage that says "Sell the sizzle not the steak". In recent years, it's been distorted and misapplied by less scrupulous ad-men, to become "sell the sizzle, and forget the steak". marketers have taken products with little or no real value to the consumer and hyped them up just to increase the price. It's the basic premise behind the book "Never Mind the Sizzle...Where's the Sausage?" which I reviewed last year.

Of course, one of the common misconceptions people have about personal branding - and branding in general - is that it's ALL about the sizzle, so I thought this afternoon I'd look at the world of sizzle and steaks.

Always give 100%

It's happened to all of us: you wake up in the morning feeling tired or somehow below par. Maybe you couldn't get to sleep, maybe you were up late, maybe you're starting to go down with something. You go in to work and you think "I'm not feeling great; I'll put in 60% effort today, but it's OK, I'll make up for it tomorrow."

Turning your people into Brand Ambassadors can recession-proof your company

That's the message that Tessa Hood, a fellow personal branding expert, and I are promoting at a forthcoming seminar in London.

The name's Bond, James Bond...

I remember the first time I heard that line. I was four years old, sitting in a darkened cinema watching a rerun of Goldfinger (my parents were pretty liberal when it came to things like that, and we knew the manager of the cinema).

For two hours I sat, transfixed as 007 battled the bad guys, got the girl and saved the world. Without knowing it, though, it set the tone for many aspects of my life over the years since then.

Personal Branding and NLP

Inevitably, over the last few weeks I've been pondering on the links between Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Personal Branding. I've met people who believed the two were incompatible. If you think that NLP is about 'fixing' people then I suppose it would seem odd to compare it to Personal Branding, which is all about "authenticity" and "the real you".

If, on the other hand, you see NLP as a set of tools for developing greater understanding of yourself and of others, then it's application to Personal Branding becomes a lot more apparent.

You don't have to please all of the people all of the time...

There's a principle in pricing a product or service that if you're not turning off a third of your prospects by charging more than they want to pay, you're not charging enough. I happen to believe that the same principle applies right across the spectrum.

What would you do...

... if you only had 6 months left in your job? That is the question facing one of my clients right now. But as I was working with him the other day it struck me that it is something that everyone should be asking themselves, even if they've only just started a new job or business.

10 things you should do if you make a big mistake

We all make mistakes. On one occasion early in my online career I became an accidental spammer when someone offered me a marketing list of 10,000 names in a specific industry. In my enthusiasm at receiving such a windfall, and with a high profile joint venture to promote, I emailed all 10,000 contacts directly (horror of horrors), promoted my upcoming big-name teleclass (even though they had never heard of me), and invited them to unsubscribe from my list (which they had never signed up to) if they didn't want any more contact from me (which they hadn't wanted in the first place).

An uncomfortable 24 hours followed, as email after email of some of the nastiest, most vitriolic personal attacks I've ever seen poured into my inbox. However, as soon as I realised my mistake I put into action a recovery plan which earned me a lot more emails of thanks and understanding.

Personal Branding Magazine

While I was preparing for my recent trip to Toronto I completely missed the fact that the second edition of the new Personal Branding Magazine has gone live over at personalbrandingmag.com.

Branding quote of the week

I'm starting a new slot on the blog. Each week I'll be posting a quote related to personal branding, corporate brands, personal style and other related fields.

To start things off, this quote from John Kay was originally intended to show how brands make a statement about the consumer. However it also illustrates very niely how our personal brand is built up by everything in our environment and everything we do.