Brand You – an ideology of change!

At times these days, it seems that we live in a world where if it is not on Instagram it’s debatable about whether it actually happened!

The entire planet seems to be trying to get noticed and get attention – one way or another. Yup, I believe my neighbour’s son wants to identify as a transgender cat. Seriously, as a person who started marketing in the 80’s I now look back at the personal branding ideas that worked then and frankly many of them seem silly now, but at the time they were really ‘cutting edge’. Printing something with your face on ‘in colour’ was quite avant-garde, as was the idea behind using a personal slogan. These basics are still there but in new forms. Maybe the head and shoulder’s picture with too much hair is now a touched up sexy avatar, and the slogan is now #myhashtag and surprise surprise we have rediscovered the sophistication of black and white images.

Basic principles in good personal branding are resilient, and the objectives are essentially the same but now in some aspects it is both easier and others, far harder. Getting noticed amidst the cacophony of media is certainly more difficult now and attention spams have plummeted. We have moved from mass impact (‘shotgun branding’) to personalised (‘sniper marketing’). This change is all about doing more homework and preparation for a targeted or niche market – the identified category of types of clients you are trying to reach with the objective of ‘funnelling’ to identify and tweak to the individual. Of course this change has been driven and supported by technology.

For those with big budgets and mega data the type of targeted reach we are now used to receiving from big brands is through algorithms making brands like Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Whatsapp), so we are now used to having a chat in front of the ‘Google Lady’ or ‘Siri’ about having a sauna and then seeing emails and popups appearing offering the latest sauna specials in your area.

The power of big data is already available to individuals not just big tech. We can pay for our ads to appear on Google at the top of the search results, and even more impressive we can post social media ads to target “50 year old men living in Constantia with an interest in vintage cars and horses” and frankly that power is still not that expensive in South Africa (it is way more costly in USA and Europe).

AI is going to not only revolutionise how these tools work but it will also create new ways to utilise older tools like emails, websites, blogs, directories etc but it is now time to give one ‘old thing’ thing more serious consideration than ever before. That one thing is (still) relationships. It is the future as much as it is history.

At a very fundamental level we no longer trust what we read and what is presented to us. (You can Google the same research I have read if you want.) We know we are being marketed at constantly and in an increasingly targeted manner. While it is certainly better to get ads that are relevant to us, the entire issue of trust could never be more powerful, or valuable. At the heart of your own Brand You strategy, the issue of relationship building will be challenged by the tools you use but the goal remains the same – to get people to “know you, like you, trust you” which is still embodied in the term ‘relationship marketing’.

In the 80’s the formula was quite simple. We were taught that based on research 15 contacts within a year would do the trick to create a relationship if these contacts were consistently identifiable hence the emphasis on the three essentials, being the logo, the personal slogan and personal picture. Of course there was more to it than that but really a flyer a month type idea pretty much did the trick. This was based on a basic effective strategy of ‘broad repetition’, and in the 90’s if you wanted to be really fancy you would have added to that, the idea of ‘one big thing’ so sponsorship or a competition or an event of some sort became very popular but this was just ‘broad repetition plus’.

By the end of 90’s we were all used to the term CRM and using a Customer Relationship Manager and every company started giving their sales staff access to one encouraging them to upgrade from their Excel spreadsheets, but as powerful as these were, few sales people ever mastered them and from my own experience and observation 90% of the time they were poorly used poorly managed and not very friendly for sales people who are very often not gifted administrators. Hence the continued use of those Excel spreadsheets! If these CRM’s were used at all, their full power was not, and poor data capture made them a double edged sword. We have all received mass emails addressed to Mr Andre Surname_Here or as I received only last week, Dear Andre [Empty Field].

Now in 2023 we see that using software that integrates with mega data that is professionally managed and well ‘scrubbed’ has resulted in many sales people using a new type of CRM tool that replace the stand alone CRM’s. This may be software that is either part of a social media structure or offered as an upgrade (LinkedIn is a good example) or a separate CRM that integrates with social media or other meta data (usually through an API) like ‘big bucks’ $ales Force. Those extra add ons really cost! This has enabled us to move from ‘broad repetition’ which is no longer that effective to ‘narrow deep repetition’.

In the last ten years what was effectively used by some was applying a ‘journey’ or funnel which was usually applying a drip campaign to a category of clients who expressed some interest in your product or service. In many instances these are templates that are poorly implemented with gimmicks like countdown timers and spinning discount wheels that may work selling products but are negative where relationships are an objective.

Enter AI and a whole new ball game game. What is now possible and on offer is fundementally different – a true paradigm shift. It offers true personal experience replacing relationship marketing with relationship preservation at the heart of all contact, and the death of spam as it just won’t reach us with intelligent filters in place. Highly individualised messaging will be linked to unforgiving levels of accountability that will require very high levels of trust and reputation and most contact will be permission based where being blocked will have a whole new meaning and consequence for business.

What needs to be done NOW by anyone who wants to not only remain in sales but become a lot more successful and secure in a sales career, is to clean up your act. What that means is another article and it will redefine what you think of the word “influencer”, so be sure to subscribe to the BrandYou newsletter for my next article on this topic.

– Andre de Villiers
Blu Ink Projects / Brand You