The Personal Branding Blog by Rob Cuesta

It's "just" a word, and "just" a brand

I was in a branch of Marks & Spencer the other day and saw their new in-store promotional materials. If you're not familiar with M&S, it's a British chain of department stores, not unlike Sears in the US, or The Bay in Canada, but notable primarily for the fact that they only sell private label goods: there are no big consumer brands.

Adult ADHD or renaissance (wo)man?

Not strictly speaking a personal branding item, but I spotted an article in yesterday's Times Career supplement that the WHO now 'recognises' that ADHD (attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder) can continue into adult life. Apparently, the symptoms include a compulsion to move on to the next project once the most challenging bits are done, and getting fidgety after sitting still for too long.

Personally, I prefer to point clients to Belbin's definitions of team roles - not everyone is a completer-finisher; some people thrive on challenge while others are quite happy to let someone else handle the challenges then take over and manage the project through to its conclusion.

Alternatively, take a look at  "What Do I Do When I Want to Do Everything?" If you're one of those people who is fascinated by anything and everything; if your bookshelf looks like the main stack at the British Library; if your workshop is full of half-completed projects, fear not: you may be a 'scanner', and the world needs you. Read this book to find out if you are, and why everyone needs a scanner around.

Check back in a few days for a more detailed review

What is marketing?

OK, it's been a while since I posted. I've been busy with a major branding project overseas and I have some professional exams coming up which need my attention too. I'm also in the middle of setting up a couple of new joint ventures. Add in the need for some R&R after a very busy last two years for the business and it was about time I took a break.

But now I'm back, and I was asking myself, just what IS marketing? What are we, as marketers (and everyone is a marketer, whether they call themselves that or not) trying to achieve exactly?

What were they thinking?

Several years ago, Gerald Ratner - a famous UK entrepreneur - virtually destroyed his successful high street jewellery chain by boasting on national television that his products were basically cheap and nasty but that if you market it the right way people will buy almost anything. Needless to say the customers proved him wrong.

A few years later, the CEO of Volkswagen came close to 'doing a Ratner' (the expression has ended up in the language as a euphemism for a very public marketing gaffe) when he boasted that Audi A6s, Passats and the latest Skodas all shared many common parts and technologies, and were even made on the same production line. It was something car buyers knew, deep down, but they didn't want it made quite so public.

Now Lurpak, the Danish butter manufacturer, is running a new advertising campaign and you have to wonder what their marketing director was thinking.

When clutter becomes junk

OK, confession time. I'm going to let you in on a secret. One that I'm actually rather ashamed of.

I walked into my study last weekend. Well actually, I didn't so much walk in as step gingerly in, around and over various piles of accumulated junk. I've been working out of town a fair amount lately, and I started renting an office in the centre of town, so my home office hasn't been used as much as it used to. But now it's got to the stage where I can't use it, and something has to give.

Consumer Generated Media

The internet is a dangerous place for brands, even personal ones.

Last year I bought a new car. It's red, it's fast, it's very low to the ground, it still makes me grin like a maniac every time I sit in it even after 12 months. More importantly though, it had rave reviews. I'm not talking about journalist reviews, though. My car buying strategy focused on driver reviews. I trawled the web for sites where motorists poured their heart out about their cars. Some of the news was good, some of it was bad, but you got the feeling that this was impartial advice, advice based on real use of the vehicle rather than a weekend spent driving a review vehicle, picked and prepared by the manufacturer. This was, in other words, advice I could trust!

Last week I was looking for flights to North America. I'm heading over to North America for a month in the summer and I have an intense dislike of cattle class, so I was looking at premium economy or business class. Before parting with my hard earned cash, though, I searched for reviews of the various airlines I could choose between: what were the seats like? check-in? in-flight service? the food? It's all out there: satisfied customers and dissatisfied; stories of holidays turned into dreams by an exceptional airline, stories of business trips to hell and back because of incompetent airlines. Then I did the same for the hotels I could pick from.

This is Consumer Generated Media at its most valuable, and its most destructive. For those of you who haven't heard the term before, it used to be called word-of-mouth, and it's the latest buzz in marketing circles. But a lot of marketers still haven't come to terms with it. 

When I studied marketing they used to say that a satisfied customer would tell, on average, six people about your service, whereas a dissatisfied customer would tell a hundred. That was embarrassing but manageable. That was before the internet. Now, a single consumer can reach billions of your potential customers with a click of the mouse: a review on a web site, a post in their blog, a comment on yours. It's a marketer's nightmare: a medium that no amount of money can control, and where the cost of firefighting will probably outweigh the benefit.

How does this affect your personal brand? Try googling yourself (as many of your potential customers or employers may well be doing even as you read this). Then google elements of your brand environment: your company, the car you drive, the brands you wear, the areas you live and work in, the organisations you belong to, the people you mix with. All of these brands interact with yours, and they all say something about you. But is their message what you think it is? And how many people are seeing that message?

:)

Every blog has to start with a first post...

(Originally posted 14 Jan 2007)

4^th March 2002 – the day my hitherto shining career came to a grinding halt. The date is etched in my memory. It was an ‘aha’ moment – the kind of ‘aha’ you really don’t want to have, but I guess I needed the wake up call.

The truth is I’d spent 12 years building my CV not a career. I started off after university training as an accountant with one of the ‘Big Six’ (or eight as they were at the time) – my first brand. After four years I left and, for a brief period, became an interim manager, but I felt exposed so I joined a major finance software company as a consultant – my second brand. A few years later I was headhunted to join a small consultancy but again I felt the brand wasn’t strong enough so after a year I left and joined the management consultancy arm of another of the Big Six. And that was where I was on that day, having my appraisal.

My career progress had been based on two things: working hard and knowing a lot. As I sat listening to my manager the realisation dawned that I had come as far as those two were going to take me. Not so much ‘Aha!’ as ‘Gulp!’

First, I had one of the highest ‘utilisation’ rates (the percentage of your time you spend out with client) in the firm – not surprising given that I’d spent the preceding 6 months working 60-80 hours a week, including weekends. On the plus side, the partners were happy to see so much billable time. On the minus side I was just a name on a spreadsheet – I was never in the office so very few of them knew who I really was.

Second, I was seen as an expert in my field, and was responsible for training new starters across Europe in my practice. As a result the firm was unwilling to transfer me to another practice, with a broader business base.

Finally, I had applied for a place on the firm’s sponsored MBA scheme. Unfortunately, as a manager I was too senior to qualify.

I walked out of the meeting not really certain what to do. The strategies that had got me this far were obviously not going to get me any further. And so I left, set up in business on my own, and took an MBA.

Looking back now it’s easy to see where I’d gone wrong. I had always relied on someone else’s brand to ‘sell’ me, and had never learnt to sell myself. I hadn’t built a brand called me, so I’d become a commodity.

I’ve seen it countless times since then:

• Successful professionals who work hard, build a bank of knowledge, but struggle to move past a certain point in their career.
• IT people who have spent years learning their skills, and have found themselves pigeonholed in that field.
• Consultants who the firm could swap for someone else and the client would barely notice.
• Lawyers who struggle on their own to find clients even though they were a star in their old firm.
• Accountants who ‘do the books’ for a client until another accountant offers to do it cheaper.
• Managers hoping to be noticed so they can get a seat on the board, but with little idea of how to make it happen rather than having to wait.
• Executives who wander from company to company, barely mentioned in passing in the Annual Accounts and have to watch their peers making the TV and press interviews and conference speeches that would allow them to share their own wealth of knowledge and experience.

It didn’t take me long, once I’d set out on my own, to realise that I had to brand myself or go bust. I just didn’t realise it was what I was doing.

I’ve spent the last four years learning how to present myself, how to mark myself out from my peers and competitors, how to track how I am seen by the market, and ensure that it represent the real me by making sure that I ‘live my brand’.

Today, I am a Personal Brand Strategist. This blog – The Personal Branding Blog – is one way in which I help my fellow professionals to keep their career on track. I also present regularly to MBA classes on career management, and coach and consult to managers, executives and professionals in a wide variety of industries.

Over the coming months I’ll offer a variety of tools and advice through this blog, along with my own personal musings on the sometimes weird, sometimes wonderful, world of personal branding.

To get you started, why don't you try this free assessment of your own personal brand (click here)

Until the next time!



Rob

Shooting yourself in the foot...

Or how to turn a brand building exercise into a PR mess

Earlier today I went to a certain large bookshop which sounds like it could be on the frontier between two countries... Let me explain, though, that there's nothing special about that in itself - I spend large amounts of time and money in that particular chain of bookstores.

Anyway, here in the UK they're running a loyalty card scheme. You get a stamp for every £15 you spend, and once you have 6 stamps you get £10 off your next purchase - I worked out that's about 10% discount. So far so run of the mill. It's still not as much as I could save by going to Amazon, but I love the immediacy of walking into a store and walking out with my book.

So today I bought £40 worth of books and redeemed a full stamp-card in part payment.

Problem number 1: I hadn't told the cashier that I wanted to use a stamp-card before she rang the sale through. Now, in any other store that doesn't seem to matter much - they ring your voucher or coupon or whatever through and the balance goes down as appropriate. Not so here. The cashier had to cancel the whole transaction and start again. Since I was eager to get on the road for a 200 mile drive that wasn't too impressive, but then things got worse.

Problem number 2: as she handed me my books I asked the cashier for a new card with 2 stamps - for the extra £30 I'd spent on top of the value of the old card. 'Oh no,' she said 'we don't give new cards if you're redeeming one.' Now, if I'd been told that at the start I'd have split my purchases, used the card against one, and got a new card for the other. As it was I was only missing out on two stamps, but imagine if I'd just bought £400 of books instead of £40. I felt like queueing up at the next till and returning the whole lot. Instead I'll use my blog to rail against the stupidity of the scheme.

More importantly though, the store has lost my custom for a while. The incident lost it a lot of goodwil, and with no partially completed card to lure me back I think I'll go and pay full price for my books somewhere else. Heck, I may even get them from Amazon!

Now, how does this apply to personal branding? All branding is promotion, and in a rare show of symmetry, all promotion is an act of brand creation (hmm, does that make sense? I'll have to come back to that in a later blog). Many independent professionals use promotions of one sort or another to build their brand - twofers, discounts, rewards for referrals, the list goes on. If you are one of them then ask yourself a few questions:

1. are the rules of the promotion clear and well understood by your clients?
2. are the rules sensible?
3. is it easy for your clients to call on you to honour the promotion? In other words, is the experience of claiming on the promotion enjoyable? Or is it a chore?

If your answer to any of these questions is no then rethink the details of the scheme until it is clear, sensible and simple.

Rant over :-)