Brand of YOU

Mike Wagner at Own Your Brand has an interesting post on branding.

He’s got five points of branding:

• Difference: Tell me what makes your business or organization different.
• Invitation: Passionately invite clients to purchase your offerings or members to join your organization.
• Relevance: Your clients should be saying, “These people understand me. They get it!”
• Truthfulness: Organizationally tell each other the truth, hear the truth from your customers, and act on that truth.
• Yours: Insist (and I do mean INSIST) everyone in your organization “drinks your Kool-Aid.”

The post is mostly about Whirlpool: the company itself, and what it’s doing with its brand.

But when reading it, I actually thought he was going to develop the idea of each individual person as their own brand – within their sphere of influence: colleagues, clients, partners, friends, family, and acquaintances.

So I’m going to adapt his points for each individual person. For you. For me.

• Difference: Why are you different than 50 million other people (in your own country, and around the world)?
• Invitation: Be generous: give all acquaintances opportunities to benefit from your unique gifts and perspective.
• Relevance: Listen – sincerely – much more than you talk. Then only say things that are relevant to the person/people you are with.
• Truthfulness: Fooling yourself is a temporary luxury you cannot afford. Seek honest feedback continuously, and respond to it with real, visible change.
• Yours: Always, always, always ensure that you get proper credit for your work – without being or seeming pushy, arrogant, or needy.

One thing to keep in mind: a brand is much more about who you are than about how you want to be perceived. Inner reality always surfaces eventually.

So none of the above will work over time unless you become who you want to be.