“Personal branding” is a new term, but not a new concept. Going back thousands of years, the legends have been people not companies. It wasn’t until the era of mass marketing that companies became famous. As mass marketing loses its influence, we are moving to an era of individualism; where we trust people people not entities. In other words, this era marks the return of legends. Except instead of Davy Crockett, we have Steve Jobs.

In many ways, personal branding is like running for the mayor of a small town. We call it “Youville”. It has a population of around 10,000. In this race, not everybody needs to know who you are; just enough to create buzz. Of course, doing a little advertising and PR doesn’t hurt - but the real work is going to the Rotary lunches, meeting with influencers, hanging out at the coffee shop, etc.

Let’s take this out of the allegory to the reality. The above scenario applies to anyone that really wants to be relevant. If you are a CEO, you are the face of the company. If you are a consultant or freelancer, you are the product. If you are a salesperson, you know that your customers by from YOU not your company. In short, you have to own your own brand. These means going beyond resumes to create an on-line and off-line presence.

If you want to learn more, we are conducting a workshop about personal branding on May 9, 2008. Click here for more info.

“Please help yourself” … Why don’t the sample tables at your local mega-food-warehouse just put out signs that say this instead of manning it with a little lady in a hair-net? Because they’re not crazy about just giving away free stuff for the heck of it … thats why.

If we could sample the wares without having to consider buying anything, Costco would be full of messy-faced soccer moms running willy-nilly from the organic rice pilaf table to the juju-berry juice stand with no regard for lines or or how many samples they take “I am taking one for my husband, he’s over in the power tools section…” yeah right.

The wisdom behind their method of manning the table with a warm body isn’t for crowd control completely. They are representatives of the vendor’s census bureau; their job is to walk you through your experience of sampling the product. To make sure you get as much of the ’story’ as possible to help convince you that committing to a purchase might be worth it.

Similarly, many businesses have demo’s or samples of product/content available in a similar fashion; on their website, or on a counter in their office, completely free and un-monitored … the soccer moms start circling.

This kind of un-controlled free sampling can be a veritable leak in your company’s potential profit machine. Demos or samples that are distributed without any mechanism in place for tracking or continued communication with those sampling the product aren’t a loss-leader … they’re just a loss.

Consider the products or services your company gives away freely; this could be tangible goods or even the time you give away in free consulting. Ask yourself these questions to determine if you are maximizing the return on your efforts:

• Are we tracking the distribution?
  • Yes
    • What are we doing with the metrics we are producing?
    • Can we quantify the new business relationships we have generated from those who have sampled?
    • Who is following up with the samplers?
  • No
    • How can we begin to track it?
    • To close the loop, once we start tracking it, how can we use the data?
    • Who’s going to be in charge of tracking it? quantifying it? communicating back to the sampler?

• Why are we offering this for free again?
  • Is it smart?
  • Is it leading to a ‘next step’?
    • If so, how successful are we at the transition?
    • Are we motivating the sampler to take the next step?

• When they sample, are we expecting anything in return?
• Are we hurting our efforts by limiting the features or access offered to the free user?
• Are we offering too much for free?
  • Could the ‘next step’ be reached more efficiently if we scaled back the free features and left them wanting more?

Care should be taken when offering anything free to your audience.

Your brand is on the line if the process and the rewards aren’t well defined.

As has been discussed far and wide, the average tenure of a CMO is somewhere around 21 months.  Rarely is it the incompetence of the CMO.  Most of them are bright, accomplished people. In most cases, it is because the CMO was set up to fail with unreasonable revenue expectations or asked to market a bad product.   What is interesting is that this trend doesn’t seem vary much with great companies v. poorly run companies or good products v. bad products.  It appears that the modern CMO may be the most transitional executive position.  Why is this?

• Effective CMOs are typically big idea people.  They tend to be strategic marketers not tactical marketers.   Rare is the person who can excel at both the big idea and in the minutia of the execution.  As such, the execution of the tactics is handled by Brand Managers, Marketing Managers, etc. - in essence, the “assembly line supervisors” of the marketing system. 
• Speaking of “system”, the execution of marketing is a commodity.  Once the idea is created and the execution system is in place, it is natural to drive costs out of the system.  In short, it is cheaper to pay several tactical people than to pay one CMO. 
• If the big idea and strategic marketing are successful, what does a CMO do?  After the launch, most of the details will be handled by managers.  Unless the company has other initiatives, there are really only a couple of places to go - out or up; either leave the company or get promoted to CEO.  The latter is actually occurring more frequently. 
• CMOs typically get one shot to be right.  If they are brought in and their strategic marketing/branding plan doesn’t work, they are typically shown the door.  It is a bit like being a football coach at a big time college - win now or die.  There is not a lot of patience to build a brand internally by focusing on quality control, creating employee evangelists, opening up the marketing to allow customers to participate, etc.  Most Boards and CEOs want results NOW.  Unfortunately, sometimes greatness takes time.

The biggest issue that creates the “temp” feeling of the CMO role is that the marketing rules have changed.  When done properly, modern marketing is about creating a large enough customer base to reach word-of-mouth critical mass.  This means an initial outlay of external marketing dollars, but only to reach the point where your customers become your primary marketing driver.  At this point, almost all marketing should turn inward.  As such, the CMO must evolve to a role of something more like “Chief Branding Officer” or “Chief Experience Officer” (CXO?) - someone who obsesses about the customer experience, customer feedback, product quality, etc.  Unfortunately, in most corporate hierarchies, these are Department Head-type roles, not executives. 

In light of all this, it is no coincidence that the CMOs with the longest tenure, that have overcome the “temp” curse, are in innovative, forward-thinking organizations.   In fact, they may not even be called “CMOs”.  It is likely that they started with a strategic marketing role, but because of their own flexibility and the innovative culture of their organizations they have continued to evolve their role to provide value to the over-all brand.  This follows the “Good to Great” philosophy of the “right people on the bus, in the right seats”.  Who says they can’t change seats?