Everyone in his Town Creek subdivision knows him. You wave to them when you get home from work.
Do you have many friends. A guy takes his new Remington rifle to hunt with you in the fall. Another likes to come watch his favorite NFL team on his 52″ Magnavox HDTV.
You and your wife attend PTA meetings for your children. You see everyone at Deerfield Community Church on Sunday. You coach the Little League baseball team.
You know that it is essential to meet a lot of people to get ahead in your business, that’s why you are a member of the Civitan Club and attend the monthly lunches. You meet customers for a cup of coffee at Starbucks to get to know each other better.
But do you have a personal brand in your hometown?
Listed above are Town Creek Subdivision, Remington, NFL, Magnavox, PTA, Deerfield Community Church, Little League, Civitan, and Starbucks brands.
These names are brand names, but Are you?
Make people in your city I know youlike these brand names?
how many people in the city i really know you?
Is there 500 or 5000?
How much more income could you earn if you had the same brand name as those branded companies and institutions?
Corporate branding is essential for business.
Rolex is so well branded that you wouldn’t think of buying a Rolex watch at a discount store. Now in Rolls Royce.
“Coca-Cola” is so marked by more than a century of marketing and advertising that even a picture of that little curved bottle without seeing the logo instantly communicates the brand.
Personal branding, like corporate branding, is also vitally important to all professionals, entrepreneurs, and small businesses. But most don’t know how to do it or think the cost is prohibitive. Most freelancers have never dared to imagine that they, too, could be indelibly etched in the public mind like national brands.
Without a second thought, we all know that television is the most influential brand-building venue in the world. If you can be seen constantly on TV, whether locally or nationally, you will be a brand! TV branding is how any national icon is born!
But the restricting and limiting factor in TV branding is the cost of TV marketing and advertising.
Gunthy-Renker raked in $1.5 billion in sales last year creating TV infomercials costing up to $425,000 each. The most successful of the infomercials that branded themselves on television last year was George Foreman Grill, which sold 65 million items.
The “cause-effect” of the corporate brand is evident.
The personal brand, or self-branding, also enjoys the same “cause-effect” relationship as the corporate brand. Now, for the first time, personal branding, like corporate branding, can be achieved with repetitive TV exposure as cheap as the cost of a newspaper classified ad! Now, with the help of the Internet, the efficient use of TV branding can be combined with a website for extremely inexpensive personal branding. “Unleashed markets,” even niche markets, sparked with prime-time commercials and late-night television broadcasts can be linked to an Internet site that can “tell the story” needed for private labeling. FCC-mandated “leased access” stations and “selective area” cable networks can brand your image and your service or product on television for less than the cost of the newspaper ad.
The most powerful place ever available for branding, as with a “red hot iron” seared into the mind of the public consciousness, can now be linked to the Internet to provide personal branding previously only within the grasp of the corporate giant. .
