I want to talk a little bit about what LinkedIn has to say about branding now, as I mentioned at the
beginning of this course, one of the number one most important rules is that when you're doing personal
branding, you want to make sure that your memory.
So what does the LinkedIn think tank have to say about what makes brands memorable?
Well, they're basically just two criteria.
Number one, the brand has to be distinctive.
So different, maybe a little bit weird, and the second thing is that it needs to be consistent.
So using the same colors, the same language, the same style, the same choice of words, these types
of things.
Now, consistency is something that you can maintain by having a formal brand guide that says, here's
the kind of terminology, here's the tone of voice I'm going to use.
Here's the style or the color scheme that's going to be applied whenever I present myself.
Here's what the Incap is going to look like on my video's front.
Cap the headlines of my all my videos are going to have the same format, like this type of thing builds
consistency.
Consistency is also applied in terms of maybe the topics that you talk about or the depth or how narrow
the conversation is that you're you're taking.
So a good example that I'm going to highlight once again is this social media icon, Dooralong, who
has done a very good job of being distinctive, of being strange.
So, for example, we look at her.
Kind of cartoon depiction of herself, it's the mother of social dragons, she's breathing fire, she
has this unicorn on her head, like I showed you earlier, with her headband.
And it's very is very strange and distinctive, it doesn't look anything like any other social media
marketing manager that I've seen out there.
So she's definitely nailed the distinctive part to break through the crowd to become memorable.
Now, the other thing is she is she's consistent.
It's not just random strangeness.
There's there's a method to it.
So the color scheme, for example, this red blue color scheme, you see throughout her, her brand
design, you notice she's always using the unicorn.
If it's not on her head, it's next to her on a couch.
She has certain types of bright colors she likes to wear.
She has she does her hair as well.
There are it's not these things are not random, there's a level of consistency, even though it is
a bit strange, it's consistently strange.
So the key thing that the LinkedIn tells us is don't be bland and boring because bland and boring people
are fagone.
You want to be memorable.
And being memorable sometimes requires a bit of risk taking.
As we see here with Dooralong, the mother of social tractions.
Can't wait to meet this person Sunday.
OK, so what else does LinkedIn say about brand marketing in general?
Well, the slogan they keep repeating is aim for fame.
Basically, they're saying the number one goal of brand marketing is to be famous because of this point
here.
Famous brands are always considered.
And this is like what I was showing you earlier with Dr. Jeffrey Pfeiffer was that if you're memorable,
your pet, if you're not remembered, you're not even considered.
So when a company is looking to hire you, let's say you're a consultant, you want to be one of those
names that pops into their head.
If you're not famous, that's just never going to happen and they're just going to go with whoever sort
of readily available when they do a Google query or when they ask around, like, who do you recommend?
Who have you heard of?
That's what's going to happen if you're not famous now.
That's if you're a consultant if you're on YouTube.
Well, people are going to search for certain people that they know that are influential on YouTube
or whatever the trigger point is.
Maybe it's a lawsuit.
Who's a famous lawyer that you think of?
Whatever area you're in, you want to be famous for whatever that is.
So aiming for fame is your number one goal now a lot of marketers overcomplicate brand marketing and
they say, oh, it has to do with brand perception, it has to do with purchase intent.
And it's like, you know, you can monitor those things.
You can monitor brand awareness generally.
But basically the goal is, are you famous or not, within the target market that you're focusing on?
The other thing I want to point out, and I'm going to go in a bit more detail on this later, is that
your brand is fundamentally different from your product and your services.
Brands can be changed as well, so you can apply different brands, different personalities to different
products and services to to add value, because sometimes sometimes brands destroy value in certain
contexts.
So.
When you think about the brand and the service as being separate items, you realize that the brand
creates value in one way and the products and services that you sell create value in different ways.
And what that means is that the brand positioning can be quite a bit different from the product positioning.
So the main point I want to make here is that when you're thinking of your personal branding strategy,
it's more of an emotional thing, generally speaking, because it's, for one thing, dealing with longer
time horizons.
With brand marketing, you're focused on building memorability beyond six months, whereas when you're
marketing a specific offer, like a consultation or selling advertising space on your channel, something
like that, the positioning can be more rational because you're dealing with short term decision making.
But when you're trying to drive long term impact and memorability, then you want to aim for an emotional
impact.
So that's why a lot of this discussion around personal branding is things like style and impact and
how you convey yourself in superficial ways, because these are things that create more of an emotional
position, whereas rational things are more like here are the case studies of what I achieved in the
past.
I got ninety nine percent uptick in social media traffic with that sort of thing.
That's less that's not really a branding thing.
That's a a service marketing or product marketing type of thing.
And those are very different.
So just keep in mind that the number one goal of brand marketing is to be famous, you want to become
the default choice for whatever it is that you're selling.