Why Some Personal Brands Don’t Work
Have you ever been in that position where you’re listening to someone talking about their brand or business, either in real life or via video and thought: I just don’t get it. I don’t trust this person. Can’t tell you why, but I just couldn’t work with them.
If you’ve ever had that feeling or you’re finding it hard to onboard new clients, recruits or grow your team, here’s a really simple concept I want to share with you.
I grew up in a house of performers. My mother and father met in theatre and my father was, I guess you could say, a motivational speaker long before the term was used. As I didn’t have a lot of confidence as a child, my parents decided to get me into speech and drama to help build my skills in an area that I was relatively competent in: speaking. From there I started acting training and completed a bachelor of arts in theatre and film, followed by film and television training at TVNZ in Wellington. For me however, the real training happened when I started performing with theatre companies professionally, touring the country and learning about business and sales.
Text and subtext
You’ve probably heard of the terms ‘text and sub text’. The text is what a character delivers in a performance and the subtext is the underlying motivation or the thought patterns that we resonate with more on an instinctive or intuitive level.
Let’s take an example of the amazing film: Life is beautiful. An Italian Jewish Man in Nazi Germany basically uses humour and physical comedy to alleviate the horror for his son of being in a concentration camp. It’s hilariously funny but on the flip side, we are resonating with the underlying grief and terror that the man is experiencing.
The same thing happens when we meet people that on the surface seem like they have it together or that for them ‘life is beautiful’ and on paper STATISTICALLY would be someone we would associate with or admit into our circle of friends and yet our ‘spidey senses’ are telling us something different. Or you can’t explain it, but you instantly don’t feel comfortable or even LIKE that person.
Creating an authentic brand
So this is what I know: In my experience and understanding of people and character, when you’re not gelling with a brand or business or someone offering a service or putting themselves out there as an ‘influencer’ it’s because their text is not in alignment with their sub text. And that’s what you’re resonating with. You can see when people aren’t being real right?
So, what about you? Are you living a life that is in alignment with your authentic self? Or are you playing a character?
Creating an authentic brand leads to trust and higher levels of trust is more likely to clinch a sale. It starts with WHO YOU ARE, your WHY and the promise of what you deliver to your clients: not the nuts and bolts of what you sell but the VALUE you are going to give them to make their lives better.
This can be broken down into the following areas:
- Positioning – How are you useful for your customer?
- Promise – What do you promise to do for your customer?
- Personas – Who are the heroes in your story? Who are the persons you’re trying to help?
- Personality – Who are you?
- Product – What will you offer, over time?
- Pricing – How much is this going to cost your customer?
Pulling all this information together into one cohesive brand is where the magic happens and when you become a brand or business that’s trusted.
If you’d like to know more about creating a strong and authentic personal or business brand, my company YourFix Communications specialises in this. And it all starts with you. To find out more about how we can help you, head to the website: www.yourfixcommunications.tv
Hi I'm Monique Bradley.