is to offer you a complete system that covers every possible aspect of building a leadership personal brand for yourself. This book goes beyond the theory of personal branding to bring you tangible applications for your brand within your day-to-day work life. It’s a do-it-yourself, no-nonsense guide to achieving greater success at work through branding yourself. It’s simple, easy to read, and has worked for thousands around the world.
Master the Brand Called YOU™ is designed to take the guesswork out of figuring out what your brand is and how to make it work for you. Through this proven step-by-step system, you will:
•Define your own brand using a Leadership Personal Brand Positioning Statement format, which is modeled off the six core positioning elements used by the most successful product brands in the world.
•Communicate your leadership personal brand through a Leadership Personal Brand Marketing Plan that will help you take charge of the five activities you do every day that most impact your brand.
•Avoid damaging your leadership personal brand by learning from the mistakes of others. This is one of the most unique and fun parts of the system—my Leadership Personal Brand Busters®. These will help you bypass the most common pitfalls to establishing your brand so that you’ll know what to watch out for before you even get there.
•Use the graphic labeled “The Proven Pathway to Branding YOU™” above like a map to understand each step of this leadership personal branding system. Don’t worry if it doesn’t all make sense to you right now. It will—I promise.
I will also give you tangible tools to help you check the development of your leadership personal brand three months from now, six months from now, and further down the road. You will discover ways to assess your progress so that your brand will stay on track and evolve as your career moves forward.
As you read these pages, I hope you will experience many “ah-ha!” moments that stem from the power of thinking of yourself as a unique and individual brand. I hope you’ll see how you can use leadership personal branding to make tangible changes in your career. Those changes can bring you the kind of success you have always wanted but weren’t sure how to achieve, resulting in increased income, greater job satisfaction, and faster career progress.
Input Equals Output
Master the Brand Called YOU™ is an interactive, action-oriented experience, but your leadership personal brand won’t be handed to you on a silver platter. I can guarantee you one thing for sure: What you put in to defining and communicating your brand as a leader is exactly what you will get out of it. The more time and energy you devote to this process, the faster and better your results will be.
Get ready to feel empowered as you take charge of your brand and become the Brand Manager of YOU™.
2
The Power of Brands
A brand is a living entity—and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures.
— Michael Eisner, former CEO of Disney
No book about leadership personal branding would be complete without an understanding of the powerful and influential role that brands play in our modern-day lives. Time magazine once reported that the average American citizen living in a large urban area runs across an estimated 3,000 brands every single day. When I first read that statistic, I couldn’t believe it. But then, the proof was right in front of me when I would walk down Michigan Avenue in Chicago and look at all of the signs, or I would stand in Times Square in New York City and see brand after brand after brand.
In fact, I suspect that seeing 3,000 brands—which is almost certainly an even larger number today—holds true for anyone living and working in a large urban environment anywhere in the world. Ride in a taxi from downtown Bangkok out to the airport with hundreds of billboards lining the way, or walk down a supermarket aisle in London with the myriad of brands peering down at you.
Think about it. How many brands have you seen today on product labels, the side of a bus, the top of a taxi, or on the Internet? Everywhere you look, brand names are screaming for your attention. Brands are everywhere, and they are such a part of our day-to-day lives that we may not even think about them.
But out of those thousands of brands you encounter every day, if you’re like most people, you will probably stay faithful to a handful of brands throughout most of your life. After all, great brands build intense loyalty. How about you? What brands are you loyal to? Would you consider it out of the question, for example, to buy anything but a Canon camera or to switch from using your Gillette shaving cream? Why? What is the allure of that favorite brand of yours? What does it offer you that no other brand can?
Brands can be extremely big and influential, too. Take Coca-Cola as an example. That one brand alone brings in an estimated $16 billion in sales every year, more than $1 billion every single month. As of this writing, that represents more than the Gross Domestic Product of 86 different countries. How’s that for powerful?
The Untouchables
So, what do we know so far? We know that brands are everywhere, that they can create intense loyalty, and that they can be mighty big. Is there any question why I find brands so fascinating?
But what’s even more amazing about brands is that they are all this … yet, you cannot touch them. You can smell the aroma of a Starbucks cup of coffee, you can taste the kick of a Mentos when you pop one in your mouth, you can hear the sound of Microsoft’s Windows booting up, you can feel the wet aluminum of a cold can of Sprite in your hand, and you can see the golden arches of McDonald’s logo. But you cannot touch a brand. The smell, touch, or sight of a product is really only a representation of that brand. The brand itself is actually intangible. Its power exists only in your mind.
Can these intangible “brands” truly influence the way we act and think? Let’s explore.
Powerful Brand Images
Great brands are like people. They have a personality and a character all their own. To demonstrate what I mean, pause for a moment, look around you, and find two doorways that you can see from where you are. In the first doorway, imagine that Mercedes Benz—the brand—is standing there as a person. What kind of person would the Mercedes Benz brand be? Is it a man or a woman? What profession does this person have? What is this person wearing? What is the income level of this person—low, medium, or high? What is his or her favorite pastime?
Now, look at the second doorway, and imagine that Ferrari—the brand—is standing there as a person. What kind of person would the Ferrari brand be? Is it a man or a woman? What profession does this person have? How is this person dressed—more formally or more casually than Mercedes Benz? What is the income level of this person—higher or lower? What is his or her favorite pastime?
Compare the answers to both sets of questions. If you’re like most people, your answers will be quite different. Even though Mercedes Benz and Ferrari are both high-end luxury cars that can get you from one place to another, the brand images of Mercedes Benz and Ferrari are not the same. That’s because you perceive, think, and feel differently about these two brands. Those perceptions, thoughts, and feelings have been carefully created in your mind by smart marketers who understand the art and the science of branding.
That’s right. Branding, whether of a product
