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Old Rule:
| Get a good education and work hard and you’ll be successful.
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New Rule:
| A good education and hard work only gets you in the door;
You need a personal brand strategy to be successful.
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Excerpt from Chapter 4
Find a Great Self Brand Strategy to Get Great Results
Strategy is the brains of branding.
A good self-brand strategy is similar to a brand strategy for a company or a product. Strategy is developing a winnable position in the marketplace with a smart game plan and tactics for achieving it.
When you look at the successful people around you, you might notice that they may or may not be the smartest or the most talented, but I’ll wager they each had a strategy (whether or not they called it that).
Smarts and talent are important but overrated. We all know lots of smart and talented people who are not doing well professionally.
Even luck is overrated. Sure, luck helps. But most successful people create their own luck. Then they give their stories a more romantic spin by saying it was luck and not hard work that got them there.
Strategy is underrated and much more valuable…
Develop a Self-Brand Strategy
Your self-brand strategy should be short and focused.
It should be short enough to write on the back of a business card. If you can’t say it briefly, your strategy is probably muddled.
Your strategy should dramatize a benefit. And it should be unique enough to intrigue people and make them want to know more.
The verbal counterpart is the elevator speech, the story you could tell about yourself in the amount of time it takes to go several floors in an elevator. The elevator speech articulates your strategy in a conversational way so that you can use it when meeting new professional acquaintances or at job interviews and the like.
The ability to articulate what your brand is about is important. After all, if you can’t articulate it, how can you expect anyone else to get it? You need to create the focus and the sizzle.
Ad agencies use a simple format for brand strategy statement. They aim for a punchy statement of the positioning that sets the brand apart from its competitors. They follow the positioning with proof points—concrete examples—or credentials that support the positioning strategy.
Another way of putting together a brand strategy is though analogy. Try to put two different ideas together to express your brand, such as “I’m a cross between ________and ___________,” or “I’m like _________ meets _____________.” For example, Tazo defined the brand strategy for its tea as “Marco Polo meets Merlin.”
Strategize Differently
Truly great self-brand strategies often meet resistance at first as any new idea does.
When you take a different stance, you are, well, different, and that may cause discomfort at first. Your brand strategy might not appeal to everyone, and that might make you uncomfortable.
But if your brand strategy does not have a bit of an edgy quality, it is probably a strategy that a lot of people are using.
Remember, if the way you talk about yourself and what you can do doesn’t have some sizzle, chances are that people will peg you as a commodity. You have to be intriguing enough to stand out in your category.
Be Authentic
Your strategy must come out of who you are.
Remember, the sign over the entrance to the Delphic oracle’s temple read “Know thyself.” You’ll never make it by copying someone else’s strategy or image. Your quest is to uncover yours.
One way to start is by eliminating what is superfluous, what is not intrinsic to who you are. When Michelangelo carved a statue, he believed that the sculpture was already there in the rough piece of stone. His job was to eliminate all the superfluous stone and reveal the David or Pieta hidden underneath.
Your job is similar. You must eliminate things that are not unique to you. Focus on what is authentic—your human truth—and what resonates with the people you are targeting.
In short, here are the four essentials of a self-brand strategy:
- Be different: Imitation will make you only a B player.
- Focus: Limit yourself to a dozen words or less so you can bore into the essential idea in a quick, punchy way.
- Be authentic: Your strategy must be based on who you are and the assets and experiences you can claim. (Of course, you may create some new experiences.)
- Resonate in the market: If you don’t get a reaction in the marketplace, go back to the drawing board.
Get Great Results with a Strategy
In this chapter, we will explore 10 self-brand strategies:
- Be the first
- Be the leader
- Take the anti-leader position
- Own an attribute
- Invent a new process
- Be the expert
- Be preferred
- Set a high price
- Use your special heritage
- Own a cause
…Try each on for size to see if it fits. You might be surprised to see which one has potential for you.
To be fully free to develop your self-brand strategy, you must find the confidence to let go. You have to let go of what worked in the past. Let go of your assumptions of what would work in the future. Let go of feeling powerless and small. Often, the strategy you reject the quickest is the very one that has enormous promise for your career success.
A great way to conduct your strategy exploration is to create the kind of war room used by ad agencies and marketing boutiques. You might find it easier to jump-start the process and pluck the winners from the losers if you can see the different strategies you are considering hanging on the walls.
Write a strategy for yourself based on the format in the next brainstormer.
Brainstormer
Creating a Self-Brand Strategy
Choose 1 out of the 10 self-brand strategies and then think of proof points, or reasons why your target audience would believe this brand is true of you. Write your responses in the spaces provided below.
My brand is
because
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On a basic level, your self-brand strategy statement represents a promise. It’s a promise of what your brand has to offer its target audience. The support points are the reasons to believe that promise, why you—and not others—can deliver on that promise.
Put your various brand strategies up on a wall. Then, one by one, take down the weaker contenders. The one that’s left will be your winner—your self-brand strategy.
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