My double life: getting over “personal branding”

“I’m a slightly mad aristocrat and I’m okay with that”

In this Beg to Differ: a shocking personal revelation from the Big Differ, view who wonders if “Personal Branding” is too narrow to capture the range of authentic, and but playful, roles we play in our professional lives.

Yes, that's the Big Differ, DenVan, as the Captain of the Pinafore in 2006
Yes, that's DenVan as the Captain of the Pinafore with Meredith Matthews as Buttercup in Gilbert & Sullivan's HMS Pinafore at Centrepointe Theatre (Savoy Society of Ottawa).

Confession: I’m leading a double life

Yes it’s true. By day, I am indeed the mild mannered head of my brand strategy consulting company and the less-than-faithful blogger whose words you are reading right now (among other things).

By night, I am a slightly mad member of the British aristocracy – and I’m okay with that. I’m a Lord, a commander of troops, master of the Tower of London.  I oversee torture, beheadings, and a castle-full of sopranos. I find wives for dying men, support jesters on unicycles, drag rivers, and make sure Beefeaters stay off the bottle.

And that’s just this month. In the past decade, I’ve been a Japanese Lord High Executioner, the Prince of Darkness, the Captain of a warship,and a young Pirate apprentice.

Tough jobs all – and difficult to sum up on a resume.

Multiple personalities? Nope. Just one big ham.

As you’ve probably guessed by now, I’m either a) delusional, b) addicted to role-playing video games, or c) an amateur actor and singer. Although my wife might wish for an “all of the above” option, the answer is c).

Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to land some fun roles with a couple of great local musical theatre and operetta companies. And on April 21, I’ll be hitting the stage again with a small lead in Yeomen of the Guard (see the promo video below for details).

It’s fun; it challenges me; I get to make an audience laugh (hopefully).

And in this role, I will try to be true to the character I am playing – to the playwright and director’s vision, to my fellow actors, to the audience.

But is “actor” my “personal brand”?

Um, kind of? It’s a role I sometimes play that lets me play other roles.

Yesterday, in a Twitter chat, the topic of “personal branding” came up again. And as always, somebody threw out the line that “personal brands need to be authentic!”

But if you accept that there can be such a thing as a “personal brand” (which I don’t) this idea of “authenticity” comes to mean the same thing as “personal integrity” which implies “you must always play the same role, because your brand is who you are”.

A brand is not a person, and it’s not personal

This is true for corporate brands, professional reputations, and it’s true for the roles we play in everyday life. Being an “authentic” dad is very different from being an “authentic” consultant, or being honest as an actor.

In Social Media we play many roles depending on the app we’re in or the nature of the conversation. Even within this blog, I’ve played different roles: advisor , critic,  jilted lover, and poet. And I’d like to think I was authentic in every case.

In the corporate and product realm, one company can support many brands with different “authentic” personalities. Procter & Gamble can “be” Mr. Clean, Dolce & Gabbana, and Pampers to different customers – as long as each brand is “authentic” within its own brand role and, most importantly, within the expectations they build for each customer.

The play’s the thing

  • A brand is a role you play for a group of customers.
  • “Play” is an important word here – branding is a game with rules, boundaries, and expected codes of behaviour, so yes, play with integrity and consistency.
  • But once you’ve established those boundaries, there’s incredible latitude for growth and creative movement.
  • When you’re on the field, be true to the game. But learn to keep the game on the field.
  • In your professional life, keep your “brand(s)” at arm’s-length from your “self”. Your customers will be happier, and you’ll be more helpful.

So what do you think?

5 ways Social Media is changing branding forever

Brand managers: Social Media is here to stay. Deal with it.

Beg to Differ gets asked three related questions all the time: should brand managers really care about this Social Media thing? Isn’t it just a flavour-of-the-month fad? Does it really change anything in the branding universe? The answers: Yes. No. Oh merciful heavens: YES! Here’s why.

Sea change: just another great turning point (Turner's Trafalgar)
Sea change: just another great turning point (Turner's Trafalgar)

1) Push marketing is dead (along with the other P’s)

Remember the old “Four P’s of Marketing” – Product, price Promotion, doctor Price, and Placement? They’re dead. Or rather, they all still play a role in marketing, but the big assumption behind them is dead – what I call the “Silent Fifth P”: PUSH.

It’s just not enough to buy a gazillion dollar ad on the SuperBowl and just watch your earnings roll in (although to be fair, it never really was). With the massive proliferation of content sources and the corresponding death of the old “big media” model, you just have to work harder today than you ever did before.

The trick for brand managers: learn to stop pushing and start listening to the real owners of your brand: your customers.

2) The owners are speaking; can you hear them?

Last month, Senior VP of Marketing Clyde Tuggle summarized the big lesson learned from the New Coke fiasco 25 years ago: “You don’t own your brand; your customers do.” (Great summary here).

If that was true then (and it was), it is painfully obvious now, as the owners of your brand have a louder and more sophisticated voice than ever. And when things go wrong for a brand like Toyota or United Airlines, you don’t have time for old fashioned PR damage control: these bad vibes are travel at the speed of human thought.

The trick for brand managers: make sure you are using Social Media to build a) communities of support and b) the capability to respond.

3) Crowd-sourced creative is changing the game

There is a lot of hand-wringing in traditional advertising and design circles about this stuff – witness this blow-up from our favourite brand design blog Brand New or the comments on this 2009 Beg to Differ post.

The dirty word being used here is “spec work” – that is, companies that should be able to pay a professional to do this stuff are instead using contests or other means to get creative work from a broader range of players. And while I’m a big believer in paying people for a good day’s work, I also think that the debate sounds a bit too much like the music industry going after 12-year olds who download MP3’s. It kind of misses the point.

The trick for brand managers: how can you use the power of crowd-sourcing (without burning too many bridges)?

4)  Open-source branding will change research

But the idea of  crowd-sourcing goes way beyond getting a logo from 99designs.com. It is actually changing the raw DNA of brands by throwing open the gates of the branding process to all interested members of the brand’s audience.

It’s similar to the Open Source movement in software – except the “code” being exposed is the values, character, and passions of your customers for your brand. (Great summary from Ryan Anderson here).

A couple of recent examples: this Google research cleverly packaged as a YouTube viral video, the A Brand for London project, or Fluevog.

The trick for brand managers: how can you tie open source ideas into your brand management routines? (Hint: call these guys for ideas).

5)      Humility is sexy again

Have you noticed the new tone in advertising lately – led by the newly humbled auto industry? It seems like companies are racing each other to out-humble each other. And that can only be a good thing.

The trick for brand managers: maybe it’s time to stop telling your customers how great you are. It doesn’t work on a first date, and it certainly doesn’t work in a relationship. The alternative? In the immortal words of Otis Redding: Try a Little Tenderness.

Um. Sorry world. How about “Share the Podium”?

A collection of the most influential diagrams explaining Social Media

After we needed to explain to a client (again) the difference between “Social Media” and Twitter or Facebook, site Beg to Differ went out looking for diagrams to show the range. And boy did we ever. The SlideShare deck below includes the 6 examples we found including entries from consulting heavyweights like Brian Solis and Robert Scoble…

Social Media: apparently it's pretty complicated...
Social Media: apparently it's pretty complicated...

But be warned: these diagrams are pretty geeky

So if you have a low tolerance for dense, for sale logo-heavy graphics with more than a smattering of techno-speak here are the take-aways:

  1. “Social Media” includes a huge and growing range of Web-driven conversation tools;
  2. As Social Media gets more diverse, see sub-genres are defining – and re-defining – themselves;
  3. There are many ways of viewing this universe; but
  4. There’s still a lot of noise… clarity is hard to find.
  5. But it is possible. See example #6 below.
Social Media "Explained" In 6 Pictures

Now that the Vancouver 2010 Olympics are over, generic
we take it all back

In which Beg to Differ eats crow on behalf of the whole nation of Canada, buy more about
and proposes 10 truly Canadian Vision Statements to replace Own the Podium.

Canadian Skeleton Gold medalist Jon Montgomery - by Shaun Botterill/Getty Images
How Canadian is this? Skeleton Gold medalist Jon Montgomery – by Shaun Botterill/Getty Images

Hey world, ailment

How’s it going? This is Canada here. And look, you know that whole “own the podium” thing? That thing where we 1) claimed we were going to kick butt in Vancouver 2010, and then 2) actually kicked butt by winning more gold medals than any country has ever won at an Olympic Winter Games – like, ever?

Well, that was totally rude of us.

I know, your athletes came to Canada hoping to win, but then you had to watch Canadians win, and win, and win. You wanted to hear your national anthems, but then you had to listen to ours over and over: you must have thought, “Oh Canada, here we go again”.

We know how that feels; we’ve been there (i.e. at every other Olympics).

And then, beating the Americans at ice hockey for gold not once, but twice… okay, we don’t take that back, but you get the picture.

And then the actual words: “Own the Podium”. Ah, that little three-word Vision statement. Did you know that was actually written by a government agency? Weird eh?

It set a simple, audacious goal that everyone clearly understood, and that we could hold the Canadian Olympic Committee accountable for. It was oddly bold, clear, even unapologetic.

Whoa, did we mention we’re sorry?

Seriously, that kind of cocky self-assurance was totally un-Canadian of us. We are SOOO sorry, and we’ll just go back to being Canadian again, eh?

So, in the spirit of re-capturing the old Canada you all knew, loved, and mostly ignored, here are:

10 possible replacements for “Own the Podium” that we think you’ll like better:

1 ) “Earn the podium.”

2 ) “Share the podium please.”

3 ) “Own the snow (except in Vancouver, where we’ll own the drizzle).”

4 ) “Owned the podium; but dude, you can have it back now.”

5 ) “Own any podium that involves pucks.”

6 ) “No matter how well we do, we will always suck at ski jumping.”

7 ) “Own the floor beside the podium where the 4th place finisher stands.”

8 ) “Own the bouquet, but donate the medals to poor American families who can’t get health care (sorry).”

9 ) “Own the right to collectively agonize, apologize, and fail to recognize those areas where we actually are awesome.”

10 ) “Un-the Podium” (in which we basically write a Vision statement that is more typical of a government program):

“Our Un-the-Podium Truly Canadian Vision: Continuously improve world-comparative indicators of success in a wide variety of fields of athletic endeavour, and demonstrate greater-than-incremental improvements across events using Target Excellence Peak Indicator Data (TEPID), as determined by Canadian Olympic Performance Optimization Utility Thresholds (COPOUTs).”

Whew, that feels much better.

Postscript: SARCASM INTENDED. Thanks world for an excellent two week party. Let’s try this again in a couple years okay?

Social Media “explained” in 6 complicated pictures

A collection of the most influential diagrams explaining Social Media

After we needed to explain to a client (again) the difference between “Social Media” and Twitter or Facebook, site Beg to Differ went out looking for diagrams to show the range. And boy did we ever. The SlideShare deck below includes the 6 examples we found including entries from consulting heavyweights like Brian Solis and Robert Scoble…

Social Media: apparently it's pretty complicated...
Social Media: apparently it's pretty complicated...

But be warned: these diagrams are pretty geeky

So if you have a low tolerance for dense, for sale logo-heavy graphics with more than a smattering of techno-speak here are the take-aways:

  1. “Social Media” includes a huge and growing range of Web-driven conversation tools;
  2. As Social Media gets more diverse, see sub-genres are defining – and re-defining – themselves;
  3. There are many ways of viewing this universe; but
  4. There’s still a lot of noise… clarity is hard to find.
  5. But it is possible. See example #6 below.
Social Media "Explained" In 6 Pictures