The Power of Personal Branding: Creating Celebrity Status with Your Target Audience

“So whether the brand is you or your client, bare in mind that your strongest asset is YOU, The person driving the business or your music.”

Having being in the showbiz for almost a decade now, I have enjoyed my share of success and failures which I learned a great deal of experience. The artists I worked with have grown to be super respected brands in the entertainment industry.

I want to take this time to share one of my success FACTORS on artists’ management and also share the failures that both artists’ managers and artists find themselves in a crater of poor results. We are all mobile business units and Jay Z explains my point adequately on Diamonds Remix a song he is featured on by Kanye West by saying “I sold kilos of coke, so I guess I can sell CD, I’m not a Businessman, I’m a Business, Man! Let me handle my business.

Based on his lyrics he has realized he is not just an artist, but a brand in the hip hop game and perhaps hence the name HOVA referring to himself as the Messiah of the game. My point is this, prominent personalities didn’t just become popular, they worked on crafting their personal brand in order to occupy space in their target audience minds and influence their purchase decision making process.

First and foremost its crucial for the artist to know his or her SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats and secondly as an artist/musician/actress etc It is very imperative for you to work with managers who don’t operate like receptionists waiting for prospective clients to phone request a quotation, you need people who will treat you like their brand or company cause after all they make money through your growth.

When someone meets you for the first time, here’s the scoop—good or bad:

• In one-quarter of one second, a person makes up his or her mind about you.
• In the first five seconds, a person’s first impression of you flips back and forth 11 times.
• Your first impression is more important than your next five combined.

Napoleon Hill once said: “People buy your personality and ideas long before they buy your products and services.” Harry Beckwith echoed the same sentiment in his bestselling book What Clients Love. Beckwith reports that even though the statistics overwhelmingly show that most people buy the person first, company second, products/services third and price last, the facts reveal that most of us try to sell exactly the opposite. So what we do most of the time is to sell price first, products/services second, company third and ourselves last.

In simple terms what I’m saying is that in the showbiz your success is determined by the strategy you implement on your Personal Brand and how you market and position yourself, in a nutshell Personal Brand and positioning are far more important than price, product and, yes, even smarts.

A Personal Brand shouldn’t be something you can choose to have or not have. Well my personal believe is that everybody in the showbiz has to create a Personal Brand. What you can choose is whether the Personal Brand is positive, negative or neutral.

What is a Personal Brand?

A Personal Brand is the personal identity that stimulates a meaningful emotional response in another person or audience about the qualities or values for which that person or business stands. For example, when you think of Nelson Mandela, what are the values or attributes that come to mind?

What’s sad is the majority of people think that marketing principles only apply to brands like Coca Cola, MTN, Vodacom etc and they don’t look at themselves as brands.

The single most important step in building an effective Personal Brand is accepting that what you think of yourself is nearly irrelevant: Branding is all about the perception others have on you.

The authors of 22 Immutable Laws of Branding: define the process of branding as “reserving a word or phrase in the mind of another.” Building the Personal Brand, you begin by identifying the emotion you want to evoke in your audience. Then you identify the word or phrase that reflects that emotion, and which you want others to associate with you. Lastly, you must consistently engage in intentional behavior that promotes and reinforces the word or phrase you have chosen.

How to Build your Personal Brand?

What I always did in with all the artists I worked with was to firstly sit down with them, try to comprehend their ambitions, drive, values and their personal vision or dream. Second step was to device an angle for the most important success components namely:

(a)  Strategic positioning

(b) Effective communication

These two are the most important “mantras” guiding brand success in today’s competitive marketing environment. Corporate are ensuring all possible efforts to promote their brands and to grab the customer’s mind share. The impetus is on attracting the customer’s attention and developing positive associations not just to influence recall but also to induce trial and eventually effect purchase decisions.

We living in an era where marketing or promoting a brand is no longer as exorbitant as it used to be. The Social Networking platforms, digital and mobile mediums have bridge the gap between brand and consumer interaction. These very platforms are very inexpensive and their effectiveness is easily measurable.

Here are 10 steps you can use to develop a successful online and mobile marketing campaign:

Step #1 - Define the purpose of your online or mobile marketing campaign

Step #2 - Develop a clear call to action

Step #3 - Personalize your e-mail message

Step #4 - Develop an interesting subject line

Step #5 - Remind your subscribers where and when they opted-in

Step #6 - Provide an unsubscribe link or short code

Step # 7 - Check and test your mobile, digital and e-mail

Step #8 - Use fixed-pitch font and proper formatting

Step #9 - Track all sms, mms and email links

Step #10 - KISS (Keep It Simple and Short)

(I will share more details on how to apply these key points on my next article)

Information overload

Considering the daring fact that an average person is being sold different things everywhere he or she is. While driving billboards on the side of the roads with different brands, radio commercials promoting campaigns, while at home television advertisements, sms promos on their mobile phone, it is not hard to see that everyone is gunning for the same consumer you’re targeting.

Information overload is the third reason Personal Branding is essential. Each of us will be bombarded with 3300 e-mails this year. The average person will have watched well over one million commercials by the time he or she is 18 years old. The amount of information available on the web doubles every 45 minutes. As the availability of time shrinks, the importance of Personal Branding increases.

A Personal Brand plays an invaluable role in simplifying the complexity of the buyer’s choices. An effective Personal Brand is a safe haven amidst the world of information chaos. The Personal Brands that win today are those that filter out what Beckwith refers to as “the noise.” The best Personal Brands offer something specific and simple. They present themselves as the safe choice.