A lot of what I focused on so far in this cause has been very specific, actionable recommendations.
Now, what I want to do is take a step back and look at things from a bigger picture so that you can
put together a more comprehensive grand plan to do that.
I'm going to reference the strategic grain management, which you can see her on the right, how they
recommend getting it if you want to go deeper into strategic planning.
Now, what I've done is I've grossly oversimplified what is required to put a grand plan together,
and you can see it on the left.
Now, there are two sections.
There's this left column, which is your brand strategy, essentially, and then the right column,
which is your brand tactics.
So one of the most important things I need to call out that I mentioned before is that your brand is
a separate asset from your products and your services.
It creates its own value.
And often that value is more on the intangible side.
So your services, for example, may help a company produce a higher return on investment or reduce
their cost savings or get more customers.
It may be very sort of tangible.
But the value your brand creates is sometimes very, very different.
The other thing is that your personal brand is going to apply to a whole spectrum, a whole portfolio
of products and services that you may sell now and into the future.
So that's something to consider, is that you may need to take a broader position with your brand or
is your individual products and services can be much more specific, narrow positioning.
So there are basically three types of value on the strategic side that are created from the first a
psychological.
So this is typically what people think of when they think of brands as the psychological benefits.
Right.
This makes me feel luxurious.
This makes me feel safe.
I'm more confident hiring this person or this agency because there's this confident personal brand connected
with it surrounding the CEO or whatever position it is that you have.
Now, the second value, the one that perhaps people don't think about as much as the functional value.
So an example of this would be that your brand is a signal of the benefits that you offer.
OK, so if you're selling fashion and you look very fashionable, then it's signaling the value that
they get from buying your products.
If you are a marketing guru and you're present yourself as the marketing wizard, you have this peculiar,
distinctive icon, icon of a wizard cartoon or something.
He's the marketing wizard.
What you're signaling that you know how to do marketing, you know, and you're showing in the form
of a mascot that you can do very aggressive marketing so that that's a functional benefit.
There's also monetary benefits associated with brands.
So, for example, if you're very famous and you endorse a product, then that may increase your customers
ability to charge more for that product.
So having your brand pegged to their products increases the price they're able to charge.
So that's a monetary benefit of your personal brand.
Another example of monetary benefit is just signaling price.
So if you dress in a power suit, then you may be able to command a higher price than if you dress in
a V-neck t shirt or something like that.
So you're signaling that you are an expensive premium, perhaps boutique consultant instead of sort
of a cheap mass market type of thing.
So those are the three categories of value that brands create and that that's the strategic value creation
process of brands that is disseminated through the tactics.
And we're going in the tactics in just a minute.
Now, the second part of the strategy for your brand is the target market.
Now, the target market is the five CS.
And what most people define target market as is to target customers, but when you're developing personal
brand, there are other aspects of the market that are very important.
So I'm just going to call it two of them.
One is context.
So, for example, if something is very trendy right now, so, for example, I did a course on linked
in advertising and I expect linked in advertising to grow in the future.
That's the context of the social media marketing world.
My my capacity to sell that LinkedIn advertising course is going to increase over time because I'm in
the right to participate in the right target market, a growing target market.
OK, so fashion trends, things that are kind of following waves, that's contextual stuff that's important.
And sometimes it's independent of who the target customers are.
Now, the other one that people often ignore is the collaborator's, so collaborator's would be like
other brands that you're partnering with when you do joint podcasts, webinars, etc, which are talked
about as being one of the most important elements of elevating your brand awareness so that that's the
whole target market.
And you need to understand that your brand creates value for those people as well.
So, for example, your partners, by having your brand on their show, maybe it helps them enter a
new audience that they didn't have before.
So you see this all the time in entertainment where you'll get like a young, innocent musician partnering
up with kind of an older, more street cred musician.
So what they're able to do is provide each other markets.
They don't have audiences they don't independently have access to.
But together they get a much bigger audience.
So their strategic value that's created from your brand for these potential partners that you could
be working with, they could be retailers, other other brand personalities, other media companies,
companies that you're partnering with on a business to business level to go business to business, to
consumer, all all types of partnerships.
I think it's one of the most underutilized aspects of marketing and branding.
OK, now the nitty gritty is is the tactics, the brand tactics.
And there are basically two categories of these.
There's the design of the communication.
So design is typically what people think of the branding.
Actually, it's the logo.
So your logo could be born out with personal brands.
You need to make a distinction, if you want, between perhaps a brand name that you're going with or
a pen name and maybe you have an agency name.
If you if you run like a marketing agency or maybe run a media company, you need to make some decisions
about how closely tied you want things to your personal name and whether you want to create a name that's
more memorable if your name is not very distinctive distinctiveness being one of the drivers of memorability
that we talked about.
So that gets into the brand naming aspect which will tie into the logo.
The other thing is a mascot.
So I gave the example as a marketing consultant, maybe you're the wizard and then you have a wizard
mascot, maybe wear a wizard hat.
This is something this is an idea I've been toying with long has gone with sort of The Unicorn is Graffin
brand sounds in personal branding.
This is going to be exemplified in things like video.
So there'll be like a little intro video and it could be like a like a Netflix boom boom kind of thing
that helps solidify your brand identity.
And the other part of design is things you associate with.
So it could be, for example, the famous tower, the pyramid structure in San Francisco.
If you if you want your brand closely tied to San Francisco, Silicon Valley, maybe that kind of imagery
is an association you want to make, or it could be associating it with associating your brand with
home sewing.
So always have pictures of nice middle class homes, aspirational imagery.
If you're an artist, maybe you want to draw associations between yourself and the luv, whatever,
whatever you want people to think of when they think of you, start embedding those things into their
subconscious through the imagery that you use.
Now, one of the most important associations that you need to make in the design is tied to the buying
scenario.
Now, this this is perhaps less true if you're selling yourself as an influencer and that's your thing
is just having an audience.
But often people that develop personal brands are ultimately trying to sell something else.
So they're trying to sell their backpacks, for example.
So there's this the bucket list family.
They have items like backpacks that they want to sell, their media companies that are selling like
marketing services like Gary Vaynerchuk.
So whatever the underlying product or services that you're selling, what you want to do is associate
your brand with the trigger event or the buying scenario.
So, for example, you're the security threat expert.
You're the guru of security programming.
The scenario that you want depicted in your designs and your videos, et cetera, is boom.
There was a huge crash.
There was a blackout.
There was a hacking attack.
And then and then you come in as the hero.
Your personal brand is the hero.
So what gets embedded in people's mind is virus attack.
John McKenzie, OK, oh, virus attack, John, John McKenzie oh, marketing ni decker Fraser oh, social
media marketing, blah, blah, blah, like whatever that is.
Or like fashion consultant.
Oh, wedding coming up.
Oh, the photographer.
Like, that's the kind of.
Memory you want installed in people's minds is that association with the buying trigger?
Now, so there's developing the portfolio of design elements that form your brand tactics, but then
there's the actual dissemination of that.
Now, this is a part that I get frustrated with companies.
They create all these excellent assets, but they haven't really thought through how to disseminate
them.
And that's arguably the bulk of the effort.
Right, is not just creating these things, it's making people aware of them.
We've talked before about bringing brand fame, being the number one success metric of a brand market.
So you need to think through the various touch points that you have with prospective buyers or in the
case where you're not actually selling something other than you as an entertainer, then you're really
just thinking of the audience, not the buyer, but just the viewer, the reader, etc..
So what are those various touch points where you want to communicate with them?
Is it through LinkedIn?
Is it through Facebook?
Is it through TV?
Is it through journal articles, through guest blogging?
Is it through PR pitches or is it through our apps and proposals?
Think about that.
The other aspect of communication is the positioning, so in brand.
Strategy, brand communications, what we're thinking about is the position we want to hold in people's
minds.
That we want to occupy the brand with, and usually that's centered around like a few central ideas,
so might be like luxury and sport.
And maybe high price or maybe it's just one thing, could just be like high end linked in advertising,
Sarsae marketing, and you can go more broad with the positioning or more narrow.
Now, if you're selling a very high priced consulting service, for example.
So fifty thousand dollar contracts, million dollar contracts on the very high end, what you can probably
afford to do is take a very narrow positioning, right?
I help large companies with this specific type of things, a specific type of merger, specific type
of lawsuit, something like that.
Now, if your price point is very low and you're selling like five dollar bracelets, then you kind
of got to go mass market, right.
Your positioning is going to be broader.
And it's harder to do that, it's harder to go for the mass market appeal, and often what you need
to do is establish some sort of beachhead like, OK, I'm going to start this narrow space, but my
long term vision over five years is to gradually broaden.
Now, the other thing to consider, and I've mentioned this before, when I was talking about consistency
and the importance of consistency in building memorability of your brand is a brand got such a brand,
God is going to dictate certain things like this is the tone of voice that we use in our brand.
This is the color scheme.
This is how I dress.
This is the hairstyle I use.
This is this is these are the colors I can dye my hair.
This is how I'm presented.
I'm always in front of a podium or I'm more down to earth right in your face having a personal conversation.
Or maybe I'm more academic because most of the influencers in my space are more kind of hacky experimenters
or I'm less epidemic and more down to earth.
Like these are the types of things you need to think about in your brand guide as you start to grow
and you need to formalize your brand in a solidified way.