“In the journey of your career, don’t travel alone”, an ex-Boss of mine once told me “..get yourself a horse to ride on”. Those “horses” are what we discussed in the last post. Those are the people who matter to you. They are your Target Audience. They are the ones who will facilitate your success. They can do things for you that you can’t do for yourself.
But there’s one thing you need to do for your ‘horses’. Keep them interested in you. There’s no point in having a horse that rides fast but shakes off its rider half-way to the destination! The ‘fodder’ for that horse is what you need to focus on.
There’s one golden rule in life. People like to help people who like to help them. In what way are YOU going to be of help to your Target Audience? In what way do they benefit by their association with you? Sure, this may make you feel like a brand of soap - “I will keep your skin soft and smooth, so please buy me!”. If it does, good! Time you started thinking and feeling like a brand. That’s the whole idea, my friend!
You are no different from a soap or a toothpaste in that sense. You solve people’s problems, they like you and buy (into) you. You don’t, they drop you like a hot potato! And head for somebody else who does!
Now let’s say you have noble intentions. You have identified which people matter to you most and want to be of help to them. How best can you help them? Should you be the shoulder on which people can comfortably cry? Or should you be the ‘fixer’, the person people run to when they need quick-fix solutions? Maybe you should be the ‘walking browser’. They google YOU for information because they think you’re the one who always seems to have loads of information about anything and everything.
Do you realize there could be a MILLION different ways in which you could benefit people? The good thing is, we just need to pick a few of these. And as usual the starting point for this exercize is your very own strengths.
There’s no point in trying to help others with figuring how to get the best out of Microsoft Excel, when you yourself are an amateur at it! Your focus should be on what you’re good at. Everyone is good at something or the other. Many people are good at saying that they’re really good at nothing.. I don’t buy that. That kind of talk just stems from lack of self-esteem or even laziness, which in any case are universal problems. You ARE good at a few things. Dig deeper.. figure out what your strengths are. If you come up with none… dig deeper again.
Once you think you have a few strengths, apply these filters:
1) A strength is a consistent pattern of behavior. Is what you call a strength a consistent pattern of your behavior or do you see that behavior only occasionally?
2) A strength must be demonstrated even in times that test you. Does your strength help you in tough times? Or is it something that doesn’t work at the first sign of trouble?
3) A strength must be perceived by others. It’s not enough that only you think you are strong at something. Others around you should believe that as well.
Once you have a few strengths that pass these filters, figure out if these could lend themselves to create benefits for your Target Audience. Let’s say one of your strengths is that you are very good at public-speaking. And that is VERY GOOD considering that the number one fear of most human beings is the fear of public-speaking (the number two fear is DEATH!). Could you help your Target Audience improve their public-speaking ability? Perhaps you could give them tips. Or constructive feedback. Or even encouragement. You think they’d value that? You bet they would!
There has to be a match between what benefit you offer (and have the competency to offer) to your Audience and what benefit they desire and look forward to. If you have that match, you are on your way to creating a bond with your Audience. If what you are doing to help is not being valued, change what you are doing! Perhaps there is something else you can do well that will click well with these people.
When you help people, help them in a way nobody else can. Set high standards for yourself. If you want to be seen as a resource your management can count on in a crisis, you must be able to handle extreme situations in order to live up to that image. If delivering commitments on time is a benefit you offer, then you must be able to do that 99% of the time. At least you should endeavour to do so. If you think you can’t deliver high performance on this, look for something else that you can do really really well.
Your aim should be to continuously improve the way you deliver your benefits. Just the way a consumer electronics brand offering the benefit ‘user-friendly technology’ would work harder and harder to improve the user-friendliness of its products. Philip Kotler once said “In the new millennium you have to run faster to stay in the same place”. And that applies to you as well! You are not the only one trying to get the attention of your Target Audience. Nor are you the only one delivering the benefits that you do. Your Target Audience is likely to get those benefits from others as well. If you don’t improve over time, chances are one day you will not be as good as someone else in your circle who is constantly improving.
As brands mature over time, they reassess their relevance to their consumers. Depending on the changing needs of their consumers they tweak what they have to offer, the manner in which they deliver that benefit, without fundamentally changing what they stand for. You need to be open to reinventing yourself too over time. Since you are at a very early stage of brand development you have the luxury of experimenting with different kinds of benefits before you figure out what really clicks with your Target Audience. Once your personal brand is strongly established you may not have the flexibility to do so.
One last thing. As a human being you are much more multi-dimensional than a physical product on the supermarket shelf. It is possible that you are very talented and after working on and understanding yourself, you may uncover several strengths and therefore several ways of benefiting your Audience. Should you look at maximizing the ways in which you benefit them? The point to remember is that any brand, whether it is a product brand or a personal brand is likely to be remembered for just one or two benefits (maybe a Max of three). You would therefore be better off focusing on just these two or three benefits than projecting yourself as a Jack of all trades, in which case you run the risk of being remembered for nothing in particular.
The good thing about a personal brand is that the basic product (YOU) is already in some form (unlike product marketing where you have to develop the product from scratch after working out the concept for the brand). You can finetune your product (read that as working on your strengths and your abilities) even as you parallely work on shaping your brand positioning.
Working out what benefits your brand delivers is at the heart of the personal brand positioning process. The nature of your benefits will predominantly define what your brand will stand for. Spend time on this invaluable step. Do it well and you would have built a strong foundation for creating your own destiny!
In case you want to share what benefits you are planning to deliver to your Target Audience with myself and readers of this Blog, post it as a comment on this article. Not only will you get clarity about yourself, you might just set an example and inspire other readers as well!
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