BrainTease - What do Personal Branding, Corporate Responsibility and successful businesses have to do with each other??
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What is the common thread that ties Personal Branding, Corporate Responsibility and Successful Business Models together? Yup brainteaser! Go ahead - comment here and tell me about it!
BTW- this blog is about business - so while it’s a bit about ethics, if you can master this, I believe you can build a successful business!
Alright, here goes my connection between all three. You prepared for a rant?
First what is branding from a business perspective? In a (couple of) word(s), branding a business is about creating a “persona” around a business. I strongly advise you to go read think two products ahead by Ben Mack - it’s a book essentially about using branding without the big agency budget (a good thing!).
The question is, when a company has a “brand” - isn’t it nonexistent? Is it all an illusion? Is it unethical? Before companies used to be so into branding, wasn’t the personal connection and social status what created a society - and not a brand? Doesn’t this sully our life? If not, how not?
There are many people who think that corporations are evil or inefficient, and play to our human weakness of greed, and create a lack of responsibility. For example, Naomi Klien, the author of No Logo, lays her claims that because corporations create a false “being”, it shields the real owners, and causes us to be living in a virtual reality, where marketers spend billions a year on keeping the deception up in order to keep making money.
To be honest, some of her ideas are compelling, and there is definitely what to be improved. However, many of the conclusions she makes are flawed.
In my opinion, having a “being” like a corporation allows thousands of people to band together and create something noone could have created alone. For example- the railroads in the 1800’s. There is no way that the US would be today what it is without the railroads. And those railroads were only made possible through the investments of hundreds of thousands of people into a corporation. I think the positives outway the negatives. Alright, so we’ve touched corporate repsonsibility.
Personal Branding: What is a personal brand? I claimed that the definition of a corporate brand is creating a persona around a company. People already have a persona. So a personal brand is your persona -and how people perceive it.
I believe that personal branding is much more powerful than a companies brand. That is because at the end of the day, a company is not a real being, it is merely an entity, and therefore the desired branding isn’t as consistent. There are people that tend to influence it the most like the founder, president or CEO, but it depends on how much the leader can instill those values into the employees.
Personal branding on the other hand is consistent by definition. For example, let’s say that you are inconsistent about something- that is part of your brand. It’s alot easier to change the way you act - and hence your branding, than to change you and all of your employees.
In short, Personal Branding & corporate branding stand on opposite edges of a challenge. While a single person can create and disseminate a vision, they are limited by their own time available. A corporation - or any large company has the opposite challenge. They have many many hands, however, the number of people - each with their own personal brand can often dilute the intended message.
For example, if the company employs customer service reps at $6 an hour, and doesn’t motivate them to be a part of the brand, the first impression any customer will get is one that the company doesn’t care. The challenge is to have one vision that everyone shares on their own level. The successful business -whether it’s a work at home mom, or the multi national comapny will find that the more they connect with their customer - through both what they say - and how they fulfill it, will find more and more success.
So take the lesson - whether you are a small business or a multinational company - for your own longevity - focus on how your brand presents itself.
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