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Amazon
The Brand Called You
Category:
Business/Investing
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
ISBN-10: 9780071597590
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 275
Copyright: Jan 1, 2009
Co-written with Peter Montoya, The Brand Called You is the definitive guide to Personal Branding for solo practitioners: doctors, lawyers, architects, financial planners, Realtors, etc.
If you're in any business where you ARE the business--where your name is on the door and people come to you for professional service--then you have a Personal Brand. It's the implied promise that your name carries, and it's critical to attracting the best clients and growing your income even when the economy stinks.
The Brand Called You is the ultimate guide to crafting, launching and maintaining a Personal Brand that shapes people's perceptions, endows you with a halo of unbeatable value, brings you the best clients while chasing away the deadbeats, and helps you grow your business in any economy, so you can work less and live the life you want. Filled with celebrity case studies and practical to-do lists, it's the guide for any independent professional who wants to stay independent.
Excerpt
WHAT IS A PERSONAL BRAND?
A clear, powerful, compelling public image—that’s the very definition of a Personal Brand. There’s a lot of talk about corporate and personal brands these days, and as a result, there’s a great deal of confusion. When you hear about Nike or Anheuser-Busch spending
$30 million on a brand development campaign, it can be easy to conclude—incorrectly—that this branding stuff isn’t for you. So let’s cut through the clutter and talk about the three things that a Personal Brand is.
First of all, your Personal Brand is you, enhanced and expressed using polished, well-crafted communication methods. It is designed to convey two vital pieces of information to your target market:
1. Who you are as a person
2. What you specialize in doing
Your Personal Brand is the mental picture your prospects get when
they think about you. It represents your values, your personality,your expertise, and the qualities that make you unique among your competitors. That’s why it’s so important to remain authentic to yourself as you create your brand. People want to work with you, not with some slick marketing creation.
Second, a Personal Brand is a promise. It tells prospects what they can expect when they deal with you. It’s an implied covenant between a service provider and a client that makes the client believe, “Every time I see this person, I will receive a certain quality of service and care.” You see this all the time with consumer product companies such as Apple Inc. Apple’s customers are among the most fiercely
loyal in the world; they hang on every new product release and line up for blocks to get new gadgets like the iPhone. They expect a certain set of valuable qualities from Apple: beautiful design, intuitive
functionality, and innovative features. That’s Apple’s brand promise, and as long as the company continues to deliver on that promise, its brand will remain strong.
A Personal Brand creates expectations in the minds of others of what they’ll get when they work with you. If you can figure out what your target market values and create a brand that promises to deliver that value again and again, prospects will beat down your door
and burn up your phone lines. The catch: you’ve got to deliver on that promise 100 percent of the time. More on that later in the book.
A great example of a Personal Brand promise is Charles Schwab. Once upon a time, he was a lone financial professional, but now he’s CEO of one of the world’s largest discount brokerage houses. But his Personal Brand still carries a powerful promise: when we invest through his company, we’ll be treated as if we’re wealthy.
Finally a Personal Brand is a relationship that wields influence
over prospects and clients. The attributes of your brand will deter-
mine how much influence you have. For example, if your best friend the carpenter tells you that you need to stop smoking and lose weight, you’re probably going to scoff, but if your personal physician tells you the same thing, you’re going to take it more seriously. The attributes of the relationship give the physician more authority in his or her area of specialization. In this book, you’re going to learn how to create a brand that will help you build a relationship with your clients that casts you as a key influencer. This will help you reach three important goals:
1. Attract more new clients more easily
2. Increase your prices or fees to increase your income
3. Create client delight and generate a steady flow of referrals
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