For successful organisations, branding starts with the staff and getting their engagement, and that then provides the platform to drive everything else
HEADLINES
- Can we be a brand as an individual? Is the idea of personal brand ridiculous? How do personal and corporate brands interact?
- The key to any successful brand today is authenticity
- Employee advocacy is great and very powerful, but it needs to be natural and genuine, not scripted by the firm (e.g. Amazon)
KEY CHALLENGES
- Do individuals feel pressure to conform to a corporate identity? Or indeed to be consciously different so they stand out?
- Different and diverse is good for the corporate, but as an individual you need to be sufficiently aligned to the corporate culture and values to be comfortable to bring your whole self
- Car brands typically get the strongest reaction, and hence have significant value, much of this is driven by their heritage. In FS we seem to have forgotten our past, and the power of heritage.
- Organisations have marketing teams to SEO all of their material, and optimise their emailing; how do we do the same as individuals? How can we make sure that our email gets read, or that our CV gets picked out by the algorithm?
- How do you build consistency between online and physical presence? How can FS organisations deliver experiential marketing (contrast with consumer products)? Why haven’t FS organisations leveraged social media influencers like consumer brands? (Top up your pension today like Kylie Jenner, anyone?)
CONCLUSIONS/SOLUTIONS
- For successful organisations, branding starts with the staff and getting their engagement, and that then provides the platform to drive everything else. Younger staff care much more about working for an organisation with a “higher purpose” in the core of what it does – this is far more important than a spray of CSR.
- Technology can be a great facilitator, but sometimes it becomes about the bells and whistles, and actually nobody wants or needs those. Make sure you use technology at the core of what you do.
- As an individual, the sales cliché “Network = Net Worth” remains more true than ever, in an era where everyone has 1000+ linkedIn contacts.
- Successful corporates and individuals all bring:
- Authenticity
- Credibility
- Consistency
