Building An Irresistible Brand-1
Tips for Building An Irresistible Brand-1
1. What drives you? Is there an emotion, need, desire, or past event that motivates you to take action? How can you infuse some of that energy into your brand?
2. What are you passionate about? What gets you excited, angry, or motivated to take action? How can you let your passion come through in your brand?
3. What are your strengths? Everyone has specific skills or personality traits that they are especially good at. What are yours? How can your strengths help support your brand?
4. What are your weaknesses? Weaknesses are nothing to be ashamed of. It just means you’re not as strong in those areas. In fact, acknowledging your weaknesses instead of hiding them makes your brand more human.
5. What is your personality type? Are you a “type-a” personality? A “pleaser?” Maybe you’re an extroverted sanguine or an ambitious choleric. Getting to know your own personality traits is the first step to infusing your brand with your personality.
6. What is your story? Everyone has a story. Yours might be a “rags to riches” story or maybe an inspirational “beating the odds” story. What elements of your story can you bring to your brand to make it more interesting?
7. What is your background? Where did you come from? What are your training, your education, and your experience in your niche? Did you change careers when you got started in your current niche, or did you grow up doing what you do now? Where does your background fit within your brand?
8. What are you most talented at? What is the one thing you do better than anyone else you know? Is it part of what you’re doing now? If not, why not? Can you integrate your special talent into your brand?
9. What do you have the most experience doing? Sometimes what we’re talented at and what we have the most experience doing for a career are two different things. Does your experience match up with your talents? Where does your career experience fit in your overall brand?
10. Why did you choose your career / niche / topic / market? Why did you start doing what you do now? Was it by choice, or were you forced into it? Are you passionate enough about it to build a brand around it?
11. What do you plan to offer? What products / services do you plan to promote? Are you going to be providing information as a resource only? If you are going to sell something, what will be your flagship product? How does that decision affect your branding?
12. What makes you unique? Are you a punk rocker who munches apples and writes about stories? Maybe you’re a reclusive hermit who writes about social media. What elements of your personality, experience, skills and niche can you blend together to put a fresh spin on your topic? How can you build a brand around that uniqueness?
13. What hobbies or interests do you have? What interests and activities do you enjoy outside of your niche? How can you integrate elements of those interests into your brand to help make it unique? Can you become the “skateboarding CEO” or the “mountain-climbing granny” to infuse some personality into your brand?
14. What are your core beliefs? Remaining true to your core values is an important part of making your brand authentic. How can your brand reflect what you believe and live by?
15. What makes you uncomfortable? Are you afraid of public speaking? Does confrontation make you squirm? Knowing what makes you uncomfortable will help you prepare your brand for dealing with those situations when they arise.
16. If money were no object, and you could do anything you wanted for “work,” would you still do what you’re doing now? This is more of a “gut check” question. Before you spend the time and money building a brand around what you’re doing, are you sure you want to continue in that niche?
17. What are your favorite colors? Colors convey specific messages and affect response rates, so choosing the right colors for your brand is important. How do your favorite colors compare with the colors preferred by your audience?
18. Is there a specific design style that you really like? Do you prefer modern, futuristic, minimalist, or some other design style? How does the style you prefer compare to the style preferred by your audience?
19. What emotion(s) do people associate with you? Do the people around you describe you as happy, impatient, angry, or some other emotional trait? Does that emotion come through in your brand?
20. What brands / designs from other companies make you jealous? Don’t try to copy the look or style of someone else’s brand. However, looking at other brands may help spark some ideas for your own.
21. How do you describe what you do? If you had only one sentence to describe what you do, what would you say? Are you using the same words your audience uses to describe what you do?
22. What are your goals? It’s important to plan for the future when creating your brand so it will stand the test of time. What are your plans for the future, and how does your brand fit into that picture?
23. What is your message? When your audience sees your brand, what is the primary message you want the brand to convey? Is there a specific emotion you want them to feel when they see it?
24. What are you really selling? Someone once said “people don’t buy drill bits, they buy holes.” What is your audience really buying from you, and how can you reinforce that with your brand?
25. What is your level of commitment? This is another “gut check” question. Building, implementing, and maintaining a brand requires commitment. How committed are you to the brand you’re building? Will you still feel confident you made the right decisions about your brand five year
Prof. C.J.M. Beniers
NL Zoetermeer
30-03-2011
© Copyright 2010
About Professor C.J.M. Beniers
Prof. C.J.M. Beniers is a well known authority in the field of modern and international communication techniques. He developed the Six-Component-Model. This model enables companies, institutions and politicians to communicate and negotiate with counterparts from all over the world successfully. His career began as international manager at Philips and later he earned his doctorate as professor in communication. He has more than 35 years experience as manager and management trainer. Thus he knows both sides – theory and praxis – very well. As scientist, Prof. Beniers conducts frequently research in the field of intercultural communication. The results of his interesting research can be found in news articles, free pod casts, audio books and his E-books such as “Bridging The Cultural Gap.” Here, modern managers learn how to prepare for business meetings with people from different cultures; they acquire the techniques and tools to handle situations in times of crises successfully, master intercultural barriers, country-specific communication patterns, looking into personal cultural values & systems. Knowing all this, men can prevent cultural misunderstandings and misinterpretations – not only in business but also in private life.
Contact:
Prof. C.J.M. Beniers
Amaliaplaats 2
2713 BJ Zoetermeer
The Netherlands
Telefone: +31 (0) 79 – 3 19 03 81
Mobile: +31 (0) 6 2 061 8494
Email: info@beniers-consultancy.com
Conversational Analysis (4)
Conversation Analysis (4)*
4. ‘Banal’ Explanations
Conversation works in two ways. First, we are influenced by what others say (as with memory and others controlling our minds). But, second, their talk can provide us with a set of resources for interpreting and influencing what they will say and do (reading others’minds).
Take the case of observing that somebody is looking glum. How do you read their minds in order to find the source of their gloom?
Sacks* suggests a common response to such an observation: ‘If you’re sitting with somebody and they look glum, then one of the things you routinely do is try to figure out what it is about here and now that they might be glum about’.
Wherever possible, then, we will seek what Sacks calls ‘a local explanation’ for anything untoward that happens. Moreover, this search for the ‘here and now’ extends from such trivial events as a gloomy expression to large-scale happenings. For instance, the intial reports of bystanders in Dallas at the time of the assassination of President Kennedy were not of shots but of hearing a car backfiring.
Why do people work at producing banal explanations as their first thoughts? When interpreting a gloomy expression we probably look fors ome local cause because in the presence of the gloomy person we have a lot of clues to hand. But what about events like assassinations or, say, UFO sightings?
It seems that, although mental patients may be correct about some of their interpretations, few of us want to appear as crazy or even stupid people. Thus in any explanation we give we have an incentive to show that we have first sought the obvious, mundane reason for an out of the way event**.
It is also probably the case that such large-scale happenings take on a special meaning when we can relate them to something local or personal. For instance, many older people will still talk about the Kennedy assassination in relation to what they were doing on that day in 1963. In this regard, Sacks asks us why people resond more to tragedies when they involve local people? For instance, for the American people during the Vietnam War, the deaths of local soldiers ‘brought home the war’. As Sacks suggests:
It turns out that a major way that a war comes to hurt the government doing the war, is by it happening that people from small places die…It’s about the only way that they can come to seriously feel about it. For one, if everybody knows the parents of the person who died, then everybody has occasion to be told about it, and in talkin gabout it come to talk about the war.
Sacks is showing us that, when we tell a story (unless we are bore), we try to find an audience to whom the story will be relevant. Indeed, without such an audience, we may not even remember the story.
Storytellers also prefer to display some kind of ‘first hand’ involvement in the events they describe. Indeed, people are only entitled to have experiences in regard to events that they have observed and/or which affect them directly. For instance, in telephone calls, events like earthquakes are usually introduced in terms of how you survived it, and they become newsworthy less in terms of when they happened but more in relation to when we last talked – our ‘conversational time’.
In this way, Sacks notes, we seek to turn events into experiences or ‘something for us’. However, this shows that telling someone our experiences is not just emptying out the contents of our head but organizing a tale told to a proper recipient by an authorized teller. In this sense, experiences are ‘carefully regulated sort of things’.
Introducing the notion of ‘regulation’ into something so apparently personal as ‘experience’ is just one surprise that Sacks has in store for us. Moreover, for Sacks, in everyday life, we cannot even count on an objective realm of ‘facts’ to balance apparently subjective ‘experience’
Scientists usually assume that first they observe facts and then seek to explain them. But, in everyday life, we determine what is a ‘fact’ by first seeing if there is some comvincing explanation around. For instance, coroners may not deliver a verdict of suicide unless there is some evidence that the deceased person had a reason to take their own life. In that sense, in everyday life, only those ‘facts’ occur for which there is an explanation***.
* Silberman, David. Harvey Sacks Social Science and Conversation Analysis. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 0-19-521472-2
**Beniers, C.J.M. Bridging the Cultural Gap. http://www.slideshare.net/beniers/bridging-the-cultural-gap-1136131
*** Beniers, C.J.M. Barriers To Communication. http://web.me.com/beniers/Barriers_To_Communication-1/Film.html
Prof. C.J.M. Beniers
NL Zoetermeer
029-08-2010
© Copyright 2010
About Professor C.J.M. Beniers
Prof. C.J.M. Beniers is a well known authority in the field of modern and international communication techniques. He developed the Six-Component-Model. This model enables companies, institutions and politicians to communicate and negotiate with counterparts from all over the world successfully. His career began as international manager at Philips and later he earned his doctorate as professor in communication. He has more than 35 years experience as manager and management trainer. Thus he knows both sides – theory and praxis – very well. As scientist, Prof. Beniers conducts frequently research in the field of intercultural communication. The results of his interesting research can be found in news articles, free pod casts, audio books and his E-books such as “Bridging The Cultural Gap.” Here, modern managers learn how to prepare for business meetings with people from different cultures; they acquire the techniques and tools to handle situations in times of crises successfully, master intercultural barriers, country-specific communication patterns, looking into personal cultural values & systems. Knowing all this, men can prevent cultural misunderstandings and misinterpretations – not only in business but also in private life.
Contact:
Prof. C.J.M. Beniers
Amaliaplaats 2
2713 BJ Zoetermeer
The Netherlands
Telefone: +31 (0) 79 – 3 19 03 81
Mobile: +31 (0) 6 2 061 8494
Email: info@beniers-consultancy.com