The Business Growth Blog by Rob Cuesta

Hey listen, have you got a feel for your brand?

A few months ago I was at a presentation by a marketing consultant. At the end he asked for everyone's business card for a little experiment (what a great way to collect cards, I thought - duly noted). He then asked a volunteer to close their eyes and take the cards one at a time, and give feedback on what the feel of the card said about the owner.

Well, there were all sorts. Flimsy, cheap, worn out, lightweight - and I won't say what she said about the cards! Of course, there were some she liked. Glossy finishes equated to 'polished', thick stock was associated with reliability and professionalism, and so on.

Personal Branding for Technologists

Rajesh Setty, author of Beyond Code: Learn to Distinguish Yourself in 9 Simple Steps!, has written a free 40-page ebook on Personal Branding for Technology Professionals. The principles he sets out are valuable not just for technologists, but to everyone. Here are my reflections on what he says:

1. build your brand before you need it: too many professionals start thinking about their next job or client only when their current one is over or almost over. The time to start thinking about it, however, is as soon as you've won the current one!
2. give and get lots of help: building a brand is about creating value for other people. As I explained in my last post, you should look for ways to help those who are best placed to help you: they'll be more inclined to help you, and if you need to call on them they'll remember who you are
3. leverage all your projects: if you don't manage your brand then you're only as good as your last project or piece of work. If you go through the full cycle of the personal brand strategy, from discovering what your brand is, through finding ways to express it, to building it into the way you live your personal and professional life, you can make sure that people are aware of, and take into account, all of your skills, experience and accomplishments
4. Practice patience: creating a strong personal brand is not a 5 minute exercise of writing an elevator pitch and getting some glossy business cards printed. It takes time and effort. Not everything you try will work first time, but you have to be ready to learn from the failures, pick yourself up and keep going. I once managed to accidentally spam 50,000 people. My inbox was full of what amounted to hate mail for days, my internet account was suspended and various people thereatened me with everything from ethics tribunals to investigation by the US Secret Service (I'm not sure that their jurisdiction extends to rural England though, so I'm pretty sure I was safe). Over the days that followed though, I put in place a recovery strategy, and slowly the mail turned into praise for how I had handled the situation. One of these days I'll have to blog it so that others can learn from my mistake, and my follow-up.
5. Be comfortable with being uncomfortable: the world is changing all the time. Sometimes you just have to go out on a limb, but the people you interact with will know if you're congruent, and comfortable with yourself, or if you're faking it. LIke I said above: be prepared for failures, and be aware that a failure is just an opportunity to learn and to do it better next time
6. Balance is critical: I've lost count of the number of professionals I meet (especially, as it happens, technologists) who spend all their time with their head down, doing good work and waiting for recognition. Then they discover personal branding, and all of a sudden that takes up all their energy and time. Then I have to remind them that the branding process is not everything: they need to balance it with all the stuff they used to do before, too. That's just one way in which a brand strategist can help: by providing tools and guidance to ensure that you're covering all the bases and making progress but not at the expense of their career

Personal Branding for Students

It's that time of year again at my old business school, Warwick; the time when MBA students' thoughts turn to dissertation.

Regardless of what school you are at though, if you are a student thinking about an upcoming dissertation or thesis, ask youself how it can help you to build your personal brand. If you are in a position to influence the direction of your study, then think about what would help you most in your upcoming career.

What companies would you like to make contact with? What people in those companies would it be most useful to know? What topic would give you an excuse to contact them professionally? Is there a company that supplies those people, with a complementary interest to your own?

For example, say you want to go into operations consulting. You want access to the COOs of half a dozen of the larger FTSE/Fortune 500 companies, but you don't think they'll talk to you. How about a dissertation on the role of logistics companies in the supply chain. Now, is there anyone in your school's alumni network who works for a large commercial carrier, who would sponsor your dissertation. They may be able to get you in front of their key clietns, or you may be able to use their name to get an appointmnet.

Suddenly you may find you're being paid to build your professional network, and getting put in front the very people you most want to know for the future.

So far so good. But now think about how you can help the people you are interviewing. Will the sponsoring company allow you to share the results of your study with the companies you interviewed? Could you introduce your interviewees to each other and help them grow their own network?

At the end of the day, your personal brand is not so much about the value you create for yourself as the value you create for others. So look for ways in which your dissertation can create value for the people who can help you carry it out: they'll be more inclined to help you, and when you call them up after graduation they'll remember who you are.

R

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