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Case Study:
Ophelia's Makeover
Attractive and slim wearing a chic pink Chanel suit, Ophelia cut an elegant image when she came into my office. It was quite a contrast from the phone conversation we had a week earlier when Ophelia tearfully described being laid off six months earlier by an elite Wall Street firm and her very frustrating job hunt.
Up until that day, Ophelia had led what would seem to many as a fairy tale existence. The granddaughter of an Asian business tycoon, Ophelia attended prestigious schools in New England and Europe and spoke five languages fluently. After business school in 1997, she started her career on Wall Street.
Life was sweet for several years until her specialty, merger and acquisitions advisory work in the telecom industry, went sour. And she was out on the street.
My jaw dropped when I asked Ophelia where she would like to see her career in five years. It had almost no relationship with what she was doing now or what she was looking for.
Ophelia childhood dream was to be an entrepreneur like her grandfather.
The twist now was she wanted to develop her own business advising Western luxury goods manufacturers on increasing business with the Chinese new money class.
SelBrand Strategy
Job number 1 for Ophelia was to develop a personal brand strategy and marketing plan that would get her pointed in the right direction. Our first problem was Ophelia's glaring absence of business experience in Asia and with luxury goods. To fix that, we developed a market research study to measure perceptions of US and European luxury brands that Ophelia could field with the newly wealthy in China.
Then, we drafted letters to the key luxury goods manufacturers (all the companies that were on Ophelia's hot list of places to work) telling them that she was off to conduct a feasibility study of the luxury market in China, and was including their brand in the study. Ophelia offered to meet with them after the study was completed to share her findings.
Results
The strategy worked like a charm. Ophelia got responses from twelve out of the first fifteen execs she sent her letter to, a truly astounding response rate. Her successes was propelled no doubt by the feeding frenzy of Western firms in tapping the new affluent China market. It was clearly the right thing at the right time. She even booked six appointments with senior executives at fashion houses before she even left for foreign soil.
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