The Brand Mapping Strategy

Design, Build, and Accelerate Your Brand

Karen Leland

• Publisher: Entrepreneur Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781599185897
• eBook ISBN: 9781613083390
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

A fundamental paradigm shift has occurred in marketing and branding. Today the most successful CEOs, executives, entrepreneurs and enterprises set their sites on developing a long-term platform instead of a short-term strategy that supports and builds buzz for their personal or business brand. That’s really the key to the new business mindset — the recognition that branding and marketing are an ongoing, steady stream of small efforts, not a series of gigantic pushes. Social media, blogging and other business development activities — both online and off — are about the persistent, ongoing process of building a platform, creating credibility and increasing the number of people that you funnel into your potential client and network pipeline.Converting those people into clients or fans may take a month, a year or two years, but the new mindset leads you to strategies that will keep that pipeline full. In short, you need to start a bunch of small fires to keep your brand burning hot. How can today’s CEOs, executives and entrepreneurs keep these fires going and powerfully get their messages across, motivate others to action and be authentic — all while simultaneously shepherding initiatives from creation to implementation in high-demand markets?CEO, executive and team branding are key factors that enable effective leaders to achieve peak performance, gain greater influence in their industries and generate increased engagement within their companies. By creating a brand (business or personal) by design instead of default, leaders and companies bring their brand promise into every interaction across the board.A personal, team or business brand is not just a single statement or a clever quip but a multilayered, congruent narrative told across multiple channels — online and off — within the organization and to the business community at large. The power is in knowing how to tell the story.The book will introduce CEOs and executives in Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurs in SMBs to the SMG Brand Mapping Process©, a process that will
guide them in creating personal, team and business brands that work in harmony and parallel with each other.

PART ONE

Ready, Aim, Brand

CHAPTER ONE

The New Branding and Marketing Mindset and Myths

How to Brand Yourself and Your Business in the Digital Age

In its heyday, when The Oprah Winfrey Show was the holy grail of marketing, every new client would invariably ask, “Can you get me on Oprah?” They were all convinced that whatever they were hawking (everything from self-published books on CEO skills for daddies to a new and improved peanut butter) was a perfect fit for the queen of daytime television. If only they could reach that peak of media greatness, the magic would rub off and they would rake in millions. In reality, about 95 percent of them were not a good fit for the show and its audience. Regardless, clients still insisted, “My main goal is to be on Oprah.”

Very few ever made the cut. In the first place, getting on the show was extremely difficult (the realm of the lucky few) and could take months, if not years. For those who did succeed in being booked (full disclosure: I was on as a guest expert based on one of my books), the show did not always turn out to be the panacea that cured all their promotional ills. Guests whose books and products were actually a perfect fit for the Oprah audience had strong results, but for others, it gave a boost to their credibility but did not necessarily translate into more business or higher sales.

I did some consulting with one bestselling author who was strongly leaning toward turning down interviews with several prominent media outlets simply because she was already scheduled to appear on Oprah. When I suggested that wasn’t a strategically sound branding move, she retorted that she had been on the show with her first book, and as a result of “the Oprah Effect,” it had become a hit.

“I understand your temptation to take this approach,” I said, “but your first book was several years ago, and the internet and social media have changed things. The audience and the way people buy books have shifted.”

Nonetheless, she insisted on focusing the vast majority of her book-branding efforts on Oprah and privately expressed to me a few months later how disappointed she was that it had not resulted in the flood of book sales and seminar enrollments she had expected.

In fact, her publisher—anticipating the Oprah windfall—had published a much higher than usual number of books for a first run. In the end, she did sell books from the Oprah appearances, but about 50 percent fewer than her publisher had planned for.

Fast-forward to today. The Oprah Winfrey Show is no longer on the air, and overall, a paradigm shift in branding and marketing has taken place. The most successful entrepreneurs, business owners, and individuals have set their sights on developing a long-term platform for brand and buzz building over time—instead of hoping for an overnight success.

That’s really the key to the new branding (and marketing) mindset—the recognition that building a brand, be it personal, team, or business, is the result of an ongoing, steady stream of consistent small efforts, not a series of one-off, gigantic pushes.

As a branding and marketing consultant, I’ve observed three specific shifts in my field that every entrepreneur and executive needs to be aware of.

SHIFT 1: FROM THE LUCKY FEW TO THE PERSISTENT MANY

Social media has leveled the playing field and made obsolete the old mindset, which favored the lucky few. In other words, if you were fortunate enough to get written about in The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times (or appear on Oprah), you moved to the top of the press heap and considered yourself as having arrived. That was the old model.

Today, businesses (big and small) that are consistent in their branding are getting PR, buzz, and attention. It doesn’t take a big, complicated marketing plan, but it does require a persistent approach to promotion.

Consider the world of book marketing. In the past, when an author would sign a book deal, a publisher would do all the legwork to promote the book. An internal PR department or external PR agency hired by the publisher would send out press releases and create a campaign to get exposure for the book and its author. The highest-profile authors (the lucky few) got the most PR support from the publisher, and the larger pool of smaller fish received just a month or two of minimal PR support.

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Be Ubiquitous

In the past, you put your business, book, or product out there and hoped the media found you. Today you become ubiquitous in your field of expertise, and journalists and potential clients looking for experts find you. The goal is to become the haystack high up in the field, not the needle buried deep down in the pile. This new mindset is all about how your proactive efforts put the power and the possibilities of being known within your reach.

For example, I know one woman who almost died due to a severe soy allergy. Inspired by her experience, she began writing widely about the topic on food allergy forums, nutrition blogs, and other relevant online venues. After she had spent about a year consistently contributing via blogs, recipes, comment sections, etc., a reporter from The New York Times who was writing a story on the subject called wanting to interview her.

Since my client was neither a published book author nor a nutritionist, she was curious as to how the reporter had made the connection. “How did you find me?” she asked. “I Googled the topic, and your name came up everywhere,” the reporter replied.

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In the interest of getting their books sold, many authors hired a PR firm at their own expense to do additional publicity, which could cost them $20,000 to $40,000 for a four-month campaign. The results were all over the map, and once the four months were up, the book was not considered new or fresh enough to promote further—at least not with any intensity.

Today, many authors, whether their books are self-published or traditionally published, have taken book promotion into their own hands with the background support of PR firm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: The Power of Conscious, Authentic Branding
• Part One: Ready, Aim, Brand
• Part Two: Your Personal Brand in Action
• Part Three: Creating the Brand-Centric CEO and Company
• About the Author
• Index