The Art of Creating Yourself
In this article we focus on the power of differentiating your personal brand with creativity and the need to position yourself creatively in the market place. There needs to be an emphasis on the ‘feeling and emotional’ aspects of your personal brand. This means that you need to understand the power of developing an ‘engaging brand experience’.
Engaging clients in this manner is the underlying fuel to successful marketing and branding initiatives. How you position yourself is essential to attracting and winning an ideal client. Creative positioning is like a game of chess in that you need to carefully and strategically visualize all your moves. Think of creative positioning as the way in which you want to be perceived in the marketplace.
Understanding the power of your personal brand to motivate, engage and inspire is how some of the top global entrepreneurs are standing out and getting their message heard, and ultimately building a stronger brand loyalty. Differentiating your personal brand in this manner works to create a new personal brand experience. By applying creativity, you can weave your personal brand into many facets of an organization including:
· Brand Building
· Innovation
· Communications
· Sales and Marketing
· New Customer Presentations
· Customer Relationships
Strive to compete for emotions
Today’s top entrepreneurs are competing to connect with the emotions of the clients they serve. If you continue to market solely based on features and benefits, you are simply connecting with your customers’ heads and you risk being perceived as a commodity with no meaningful point of differentiation. Rather, use creativity and focus on connecting with your clients’ hearts and you will win them for a lifetime. The shift in marketing today takes into account two significant principles that I would like to highlight here. In the past, many entrepreneurs focused solely on features and benefits. Today, you need to introduce two vital ingredients into your marketing mix, ‘identification and experience’. By integrating these into your marketing you are communicating to your clients that ‘we know what you feel and what you are going through’.
So why is this essential today? Remember, your personal brand is what ‘they” say it is. This is where creativity can help you differentiate your personal brand in the marketplace. Creativity can be defined as:
Talking action and building momentum
Creating unique market opportunities
Standing out and differentiating your personal brand
Becoming a master presenter and communicating like a champion
Re-thinking and challenging convention
Striving for a higher level of magnificence
ZIG when others ZAG
Playing bigger and living life on purpose
And what is an innovative entrepreneur? A problem- solver that uses creativity and intuition. Look for ways to infuse creativity in all aspects of your personal brand. Strive to cultivate an innovative culture in your brand community by continually and consistently drawing on ideas from your network. Creativity can be an inspirational thrust that helps you build momentum. It allows you to cultivate more meaningful relationships with everyone around you. It defines a higher level of innovation within your personal brand and distinguishes your brand with greater impact. Creativity is passion and at the core of exceptional entrepreneurs.
Get Creative with everything you do.
Think of some of the top brands and the emotional attachment that you feel when you experience them. Some of my favorite brands that are great at invoking emotion include Apple and Starbucks. Think about the feeling that you get when you look at an IPOD:
Sleek, Leading Edge, High-Tech, Quality and Ahead of its time
‘ZIGGING’. So why is this essential today?
Remember, your brand is what ‘they’ say it is. This is where creativity can help you differentiate your brand in the marketplace. To differentiate means that you need to adopt unconventional systems and marketing strategies to reach your customer. Look for ‘fresh’ ways to engage your customers from creative events and workshops to thought provoking discovery sessions - strive to cultivate an innovative culture in your organization by continually drawing on fresh ideas from your team.
Use Thematic Experience to Differentiate your Personal Brand
[Themes] are effective tools in strengthening your message and displaying consistency in the eyes of your customer. Roll out themes over a 3-6 month period focused on igniting various hot points. Creative differentiation through themes can be the inspirational thrust that helps you cultivate more meaningful relationships and ‘BUZZ’ with your customers. It defines a higher level of innovation in the marketplace and separates you from the competition. Most importantly, it clearly helps you ZIG when your competition ZAGS.
‘Picture it: you overhear a great conversation among your top customers praising you and describing you exactly the way you want to be perceived.’
Too often I see top-level sales people with no ‘defined brand’. All of us have the potential to influence the perception of others. Think about it, a brand is only given life by what we all think, feel and say about it. Branding is about developing an experience or soliciting an emotional response.
We all have a personal brand. It can also be referred to as our image.
From the clothes we wear to the foods we eat to the skill sets we display at our place of work every day. We are sending out signals to people all around us. Others are forming opinions of us based on these signals and the perception of our brand. So what are you doing to create, express and project your brand?
For me it can be defined this way:
Canada’s Creative Coach® with a mission to creatively inspire 1 million people to action.
Here is a tip: approach those people closest to you and write down some words that they use to describe your brand. For instance, you may receive comments like:
Dependable, inspiring, engaging, supportive, positive, passionate, educational and highly motivational
It is crucial that you solicit feedback on a continual basis in order to gauge the effects of the signals that you are sending out. Let’s face it - an organization is only as strong as the sum of its parts. In the marketplace, the organization will communicate a certain culture and we as consumers will define what the brand is to us. As users of the brand we will further define what this brand means to us by the way in which people feel. However, once our customers start to look beyond the face of the organization they will get to know the people within and form immediate impressions that can last a lifetime.
Remember, your brand is what ‘they’ say it is. This is where creativity can help you differentiate your brand in the marketplace. To differentiate means that you need to adopt unconventional systems and marketing strategies to reach your customer. Look for ‘fresh’ ways to engage your customers from creative events and workshops to thought provoking discovery sessions - strive to cultivate an innovative culture in your organization by continually drawing on fresh ideas from your team.
Use Thematic Experience to Differentiate your Personal Brand
[Themes] are effective tools in strengthening your message and displaying consistency in the eyes of your customer. Roll out themes over a 3-6 month period focused on igniting various hot points. Creative differentiation through themes can be the inspirational thrust that helps you cultivate more meaningful relationships and ‘BUZZ’ with your customers. It defines a higher level of innovation in the marketplace and separates you from the competition. Most importantly, it clearly helps you ZIG when your competition ZAGS.
‘Picture it: you overhear a great conversation among your top customers praising you and describing you exactly the way you want to be perceived.’
Too often I see top-level sales people with no ‘defined brand’. All of us have the potential to influence the perception of others. Think about it, a brand is only given life by what we all think, feel and say about it. Branding is about developing an experience or soliciting an emotional response.
We all have a personal brand. It can also be referred to as our image.
From the clothes we wear to the foods we eat to the skill sets we display at our place of work every day. We are sending out signals to people all around us. Others are forming opinions of us based on these signals and the perception of our brand. So what are you doing to create, express and project your brand?
For me it can be defined this way:
Canada’s Creative Coach® with a mission to creatively inspire 1 million people to action.
Here is a tip: approach those people closest to you and write down some words that they use to describe your brand. For instance, you may receive comments like:
Dependable, inspiring, engaging, supportive, positive, passionate, educational and highly motivational
It is crucial that you solicit feedback on a continual basis in order to gauge the effects of the signals that you are sending out. Let’s face it - an organization is only as strong as the sum of its parts. In the marketplace, the organization will communicate a certain culture and we as consumers will define what the brand is to us. As users of the brand we will further define what this brand means to us by the way in which people feel. However, once our customers start to look beyond the face of the organization they will get to know the people within and form immediate impressions that can last a lifetime.
Your personal brand is always in motion, from the clothes you wear, the foods you eat to the words and expressions that you choose in meetings. So remember your brand is the ultimate reflection of who you are.
Gerry Visca, Canada’s Creative Coach™
International Speaker Author Coach
Gerryvisca.com
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