Building your brand in the WSJ

Thought some of you might find this interesting…

Building Your Brand

By ALEXANDRA LEVIT (WSJ 4/28/09)

It used to be enough to walk into a job search with an impressive résumé. If you were really enterprising, maybe you’d have a portfolio to showcase your best work. Now, though, people want a better way to stand out, and that has resulted in the very 21st-century concept of personal branding.

If you’ve been in the workplace longer than 10 years, you might be thinking that personal branding was actually born in 1997, when management guru Tom Peters wrote about “the brand called you.”

But never before has personal branding been so mainstream. The Internet makes it possible for everyone to establish a brand, and if you don’t know what yours is, now is the time to find out.

Experts such as Dan Schawbel, the author of “Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success,” define personal branding as how we market ourselves to other people. Your brand should be strong and memorable enough to set you apart and to make a positive impression on people you don’t know.

Show You Can Do the Job

“Personal branding serves as career protection in uncertain times,” says Mr. Schawbel. “It’s also a critical tool for reinventing yourself because you can leverage the reputation and skill set you already have to prove you have the ability to do the job you want.”

A veteran of the recruitment research field, 41-year-old Jim Stroud developed an early interest in social media. Hoping to launch a new career in the field, Mr. Stroud built an online brand as “The Searchologist.”

“A searchologist is … someone who is proficient in searching the Internet” for people who aren’t actively seeking new jobs, he explains. His presence in search engines and networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as a podcast series and blog, led Mr. Stroud to his job as social-media development manager for EnglishCafe, an English learning community for global professionals.

So how do you create a personal brand? Start by understanding where you are in your career and where you’re going.

How Are You Perceived?

“The personal brand is, first and foremost, about the person,” says Mr. Schawbel. “The clearer you are about your destination, the easier it will be to communicate why others should pay attention.”

In addition to showcasing your own blend of expertise and experience, your personal brand should communicate the qualities and values you want to be known for — for example, being cutting-edge, helpful, provocative, approachable or honest.

If you need some help, do an informal focus group with personal and professional contacts to get their feedback on how you are perceived. Ask if they see you as the type to thrive under high-pressure situations, or if you’re more comfortable knowing exactly what to expect and having time to prepare for it.

Mr. Schawbel recommends taking a course in Web development or graphic design so you can translate your brand visually.

Become familiar with the tools, including online communities, of your industry, and make sure your presence on all of them is always updated to consistently and accurately reflect your brand — you.

Geoff Moore re-cap 4/17/09

“If you grew up with it, it’s not technology.”  This was my favorite quote from guest speaker Geoff Moore this morning.  As he demonstrated to us that electricity and light switches are not ‘revolutionary technology’ to us because our brains were wired for these technologies from childhood, Geoff dramatically flipped on and off the lights.  Conversely, we do think of improvements in computing and now web-based innovations as technology because these notions were not ‘hard-wired’ into our brains as we grew up.

As Jennifer promised, Geoff really did make great use of an organizing framework (Tech Adoption Lifecycle/Market Development Model) to explain how he views the world:

Tech Adoption Lifecycle (from Everett Rogers):

1. Innovators (Techies)
2. Early Adopters (Visionaries)
3. Early Majority (Pragmatists)
4. Late Majority (Conservatives)
5. Laggards (Skeptics)

Geoff is most well-known for his “Crossing the Chasm” concept (made into a book by the same name).  This notion is predicated on the idea that there is an important gap (‘chasm’) between Early Adopters (Visionaries) and the Early Majority (Pragmatists).  Brands/companies that successfully ‘cross the chasm’ are well-positioned for market share capture through the ‘tornado.’  But, getting viability ‘at the bowling alley’ is a tough accomplishment and a (most often) necessary prerequisite to market share capture in the tornado.  The big driver of success is winning over the pragmatists in the early majority.

The five steps in Geoff’s model that line up with the lifecycle framework are as follows:

1. Early Market (innovators and early adopters) à Get Visibility

• Brand the Technology

1. Crossing the Chasm à Get Viability (Bowling Alley)

• Brand the Problem

1. Early Majority à Get Market Share (Tornado)

• now, Brand the Company

1. Early Main Street à Profitable Growth

• Work with the brand you have

1. Late Main Street à Profitable Relationships (traditional marketing firms (P&G) are experts here)

• Take your brand private

o How to execute this step was the most unclear part of the day’s lecture, in my mind

Geoff’s consistent ‘reliance’ on this framework was commendable, and I was surprised how infrequently I felt the framework references were a stretch.  (So often, these frameworks break down, in my mind.  And, this one really seemed to hold up…or Geoff is just really compelling as a speaker and is very adept at identifying corroborating evidence/examples.) J

Key takeaway was:

• Adapt your brand to the appropriate stage in the lifecycle of the industry/category.  Or, as he colloquially put it: “different horses for different courses.”

As Geoff talked through the five steps in his model, I also found the following insights interesting:

• Two type of business model paradigms necessitate different brand/company strategies:
  • Complex Systems (part of early market development cycle) are all about reputation
  • Volume Operations (more important in later stages) require strategic brands to help communicate with consumer because realistically a company cannot have high-touch salesforce deployment at purchase location for every consumer
  • Getting visibility in the early market (Stage 1) is key, but defining what is successful visibility is changing today based on shifts in the news industry (Fortune Magazine features are not what they once were)
    • The separation of adoption from purchase has provided challenges (i.e. monetization of ‘successful’ internet businesses has not yet been solved)
    • Proving viability is often about reaching the tipping point with the right audience (pragmatic, but willing prospects)
      • Clear references to Gladwell’s work on the importance of mavens, promoters, and connectors)
      • Gaining market share sometimes is a ‘patience game’ – Apple had to know how to ‘stick around’ while it re-grouped so that it could be re-birthed as a pre-eminent company following ‘darker times’
        • Knowing your niche and how to communicate to it is critical for ‘chimpanzees’

Gotta be true to the market power of your brand (which can change over time)