Remember when Stuart Baggs referred to himself as ‘the brand’ in the last season of The Apprentice? We are all guilty of being a bit like Stuart either individually or with our businesses and the problem is not really understanding what your brand is or even worse thinking you understand it but everyone else having a different idea. The best description of what a brand is “it’s what people say about you when you’re not in the room“. Stuart’s idea of his brand was “I’m not a one-trick pony, I’m not a 10-trick pony, I’m a whole field of ponies”, yet what we all said when he wasn’t in the room was he was an ass.
We have plenty of analogue outlets for conveying our (desired) brand either by dressing a certain way, hanging out in certain places or making sure we talk about particular subjects during conversations. The interesting stuff happens when we cross over to digital, social media methods for conveying or developing our brand.
Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook allow us to be ‘Friends’ with and ‘Follow’ whoever we choose. Careful selection means that we can associate with people just like us – or at least people we THINK are like us. We can fill in our Facebook profile with our favourite music, book, TV shows and other interests to help hammer the message home to whoever chooses to look. Making use of location based features of apps like Foursquare, Gowalla or Facebook means that with our smart phones we can ‘check-in’ to certain places digitally whist being there in the real world and making sure we let everyone know about it (advertisers dream).
Don’t end up on the wrong side of your brand
This is all well and good but if we were to misunderstand our brand, we risk turning into a Stuart Baggs and that wouldn’t be great would it? We can avoid this disaster by reviewing and asking ourselves the following:
- what do we do?
- how do we do it?
- who do we do it for?
- where do we want to end up?
By looking at our competitors and peers it’s also important to decide:
- what don’t we do?
- how shouldn’t we do it?
- who don’t we want to do it for?
- where don’t we want to end up?
Having a clear picture of the points above should steer our brands in the right direction and make sure we keep getting invited to the party. It’s important to be honest, don’t try and be everything to everyone and remain confident. Chopping and changing direction is never a good idea and wreaks of uncertainty, is off-putting and makes people nervous.
It’s also interesting to find that many people have a different online brand to their real life brand. I’ve read that people are also much more socially active online than in real life. One day we will all be sitting at home at our computers living our lives through the internet (sounds like me already!
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You’re right Adham. I know more about some of my friends via Facebook than actually speaking to them. It’s a live stream into their lives.
I’m as dull in real life as I am online.