Tony the Tiger, Axe Body Spray and You
A brand doesn't just classify who you are, but helps the right audience self-select what you offer. When you truly understand the purpose and the process of building a brand, you will uncover a powerful tool that not only ensures that people looking to hire find you, but that the RIGHT people looking to hire YOU find you.
Branding is the practice of intentionally presenting a clear, coherent, concise idea of who you are, what you are about, who your target customer is and who your target customer isn’t. It entails any content you create, and public conversations you have. It entails how you dress, speak and behave in public settings. It entails not only the product of your work, but the process as well. In entails your networking, who you choose to associate with and who you don’t.
In this article, we are going to focus exclusively on creating content that will get you found by (and ultimately hired by) the right people. But the general principles behind these specific elements also apply to all of the other areas outlined above. Ultimately, finding a job (or a better job) should be your full-time job. Anything you do in or around your efforts to land that job should be undertaken with your personal brand in mind.
That’s why successful consumer products have brand teams behind them. Everything they do with or around that product is done with careful attention to reflect a carefully crafted brand.
Consider Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, or Unilever’s Axe Body Spray. These are well-known brands with clear, consistent voices. If you are not a customer of either product, that’s not an indication that their marketing is broken. In fact, given the success of both products, it is a strong indicator that it’s brand message is exactly on point.
With both Frosted Flakes and Axe, if you’re not a loyal fan, it’s because they don’t want you as a customer. It’s nothing personal against you ; it is business strategy. By targeting a specific slice of the breakfast foods and personal care markets respectively, it is easier to resonate with a moderate audience than they would if they’d tried to appeal to a larger, more generalized audience. Their branding clearly reflects the target audiences they are going after.
Frosted Flakes are for kids who want to achieve at the highest levels. Axe Body Spray will attract supermodel- level attractive women to average- looking young dudes. How do we know this ? Every piece of communications put out about these products tells us this. Grandmother's don't buy Axe Body Spray, because (most likely) they aren’t interested in getting mauled by a mob of pheromone-crazed young women way out of their league. Cross Fit enthusiasts don't buy Frosted Flakes, despite the fact that "They’rrrre Grrrreat!" Not for themselves, anyway.
Good branding works in two directions: it specifically targets a focused niche market, AND encourages people outside that target to self-select out of the relationship. Again, it’s not that they are excluding those people for any personal reason. They are simply focusing on attracting ONLY a specific slice of a universal market. The product isn’t designed to appeal to anyone outside that slice, and so dollars spent engaging anyone outside that slice are wasted AND dissatisfaction with the product and customer service issues would compound. It’s best to be as clear with the people the product is NOT for as you are with the people it IS for.
Your personal brand should be doing the same. If you’re trying to appeal to everyone (and not exclude anyone), you’re going to put out a brand image that is bland and unappealing. Plus you’re opening up the possibility to eventually getting hired by a company that isn’t a good fit for your talents, ambitions and personality. You need to be clear with your prospects AND those who aren’t your prospects in order to avoid wasting anyone’s time and creating unnecessary tensions down the road.
What you want to do is create content on a site you control that lets your personality, your experience and your talents create your brand story naturally. Then you want to use social media to sprinkle bread-crumbs of those elements broadly, leading people back to your site so they can learn more about you. There they can either fall in love with you, or give you a pass. Which is ultimately going to work out better for you in the long run.
What You Need To Do.
1. In your content, let your personality and voice shine through. In the beginning, as you write, imagine you’re explaining the ideas to your best friend, if your best friend were hiring for the position.
2. Make clear the kind of things that are important to you in the workplace.
3. Offer counterpoints to prevailing thoughts in your industry that you disagree with.
4. When you’re networking, online or face-to-face, focus first on listening to them. Let the conversation be about them. Then, give them your card, which should prominently lead them to your site, so they can in turn learn what makes you "you."
5. Realize that a company that doesn't like you because of these things is a company you won't like working for… and they won't like you working for them either. You want them to self-select out so you're not wasting each other's time.
6. Your work will resonate with someone. Create content with the kind of boss you'd like to work for in mind. Those are the only people you really want to interview with anyway.
In upcoming posts we’ll take deep dives into related areas… like setting up a site for your personal brand, controlling the picture that social media paints of you for prospective employers, how to quickly and easily create content that tells the story your want for your brand, and more.
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