Are you a Fake Brand?

One of my favourite heated "discussions" I love to have is with a colleague / friend (depending on how heated our discussion has been) around personal brand.

He who shall remain nameless, argues that your personal brand is a bullshit term made up my marketers to justify their jobs... he is totally on the money (and so are us marketing folk)! However, it doesn't mean that it's not a thing, you see being a small business that is producing, selling, delivering or whatever your model looks like, it's coming from you.

Your it, and the game is much more aggressive than a game of primary school tag.

Take, for example, Richard Branson, heard of him? He has a few small to medium sized businesses floating around - some are floating around literally...like, in the air. The perfect example of a person that creates brands and / or businesses that epitomize him as a person. Modern, sharp, people orientated, fun and happening.

At no point does he deliver to market an overly formal, traditional or conservative brand. He lives and breathes his brand and how it is seen by the world...

And so should you! As I've discussed before, our consumers have more information at their fingertips then ever before, if you aren't prepared to be unique to yourself then your consumer isn't prepared to either.

Someone else will be though.

So what? You're quirky, loud, creative, quiet, an introvert, an extrovert. USE IT. Create your marketing around that, develop your content just how you would if you were talking in person to your customer. Don't apologise for who you are and how you got there, leverage it. Make your personal brand the reason your business is successful.

Being true to your personal brand will create consistency in your marketing and sales approach for your business, trying to keep up a fake persona will create stress and applying stress to an object results in cracks.

This does come with a warning, not everyone is going to resonate with your brand, news flash! That's OK. You don't particularly like what everyone else is putting out there so be cool with it and move on.

Fake is out.