This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Your personal brand promise is critical. If that brand promise is broken, that’s when the value of your brand starts to be questioned, and that’s when you start to look at other alternative suppliers—if you would, whether that be in the consumer world or whether that be in the B2B world.
However, mistakes are recoverable. If you recover from a mistake with style, you can actually increase your brands value. So whether it is a mistake that you publicly apologize for—like the Tylenol example, when it made its huge groundbreaking apology. But this principle also applies to personal simple things that you do every day and the way that you handle that with your personal brand.
It all begins with your personal brand promise. A brand remains relevant by “dialing up or down” core attributes in line with customer needs and wants. Your promise might need to change over time. Your brand promise should be ready to “activate” an attribute depending on market needs and wants.
Key point: Always ask, is what I am doing right now consistent with my brand.
Relationship
Forty-two percent of people use brand to drive their decision making due to their familiarity with the brand. The brand is known. If you think about familiarity with your brand, how many people know of your brand? Think about the new forms of media that you can use to have your brand known in the marketplace such as online advertising and word-of-mouth advertising. There are many ways that your brand can become familiar.
Familiarity of a personal brand has a lot to do with networking. Networking is important. Being known by your customers, being known by others in your company, and networking in the environment help you to form relationships. Just to note, 48 percent of people will try another brand if someone recommends it.
If you look at the latest business-to-business research, one of the highest areas that people look at is references, which is a recommendation from a colleague or customer. Not only are word of mouth and references key in product branding, but they are core in personal branding as well. Do you know who your references are?
Think through how your personal brand leverages relationship. In Figure o2.2, you see a wheel of relationships of the people with whom you
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