Archive for the 'Branding' Category

We have come to the final post featuring our interview with Professor Buford Barr. As past students of Professor Barr, we both remember the lecture that he gave us on creating a personal brand. This lecture may seem irrelevant to some, but it has turned out to be one of the most valuable things we learned in college. Professor Barr is very passionate about this topic and did not disappoint us in this section of the interview.

Darcy & Hannah: One of the things that we really appreciated you teaching us was the importance of creating a personal brand. How would you advice an individual working in a B2B (specifically with engineers) on how to form their personal brand?

Professor Barr: When I started my career, I joined, what at the time, was probably the finest engineering company ever, General Electric. Not only did GE have a strong engineering tradition, but they also conducted their own research and development. Everybody in sales and most people in marketing were engineers, so I very quickly had to learn how to communicate credibly with engineers and I had to learn how to take technical information and turn it into advertising, public relations and brochures. You’ll hear companies today say, “You need to take the technological information and translate it down to your target audience,” but this was not the case for me. My target audience was brilliant engineers! They didn’t need anything toned down. They needed the right information that they could see would meet their needs and their wants. So my challenge was, “How do I understand what that is?” I learned to communicate with engineers. I had a little technique that worked quite well for me which was that everywhere I worked, I would go find an engineer that could speak English (something besides engineering), and I befriended them. I would take them out to lunch, I would take them out to drinks, whatever it would take, and they were my source. I could go to them and say, “Joe, what are the primary benefits of this device? Talk to me about this. Why would somebody want this product?” and they would tell me, and then I would be able to talk about it intelligently. Then I took some engineering type courses and tried to learn more about it. If you can’t speak engineering, you are not credible. You will not be respected if you are not credible and do not understand, and therefore will not have a strong personal brand. I think going into high-tech scares a lot of students off because you do need to learn a little bit of something about technology so that you can have some kind of value added.

Everything about positioning and branding a company also applies to an individual. When people hear, “Darcy” or “Hannah”, what comes to mind? Is that what you want to come to mind? What can you do about it? If you don’t brand yourself, the market will. You have to position yourself, and you have to build your own personal brand. You do it by how you look, how you act, how you interact with people. That’s why personal branding is so important. They have to know who you are, and it has to mean something. It’s not just awareness. Awareness just gets you into the game. One of the failures of the dot-com era was that everybody thought that name awareness was all that you needed, but you have to have an immediate perception to go along with that. When you hear a name like, Nike or Toyota, what’s the word that pops in your mind? How pervasive is that word? Is it the right word? “Unreliable” is probably not a word you would be looking for. In building a personal brand, what are the properties that go into the one word that you want people to think when they hear your name, and those are the characteristics that you adopt. Remember that you’ve got hard skills, but I was reading the other day that soft skills are really what people want today, and it’s what differentiates you from everyone else. Your personal brand needs to be managed, you can’t just let it lie along on the ground as you go. The bottom line is that personal branding is exactly the same as corporate branding. It’s the same effect, it’s the same strategy, same process, same everything. You need to sit down and figure out your personal brand strategy and write it down. You need to go through the same exercise of positioning yourself as you would for your corporation. Then you have to deliver on that brand promise.

This post concludes our three part interview with Professor Barr. He has really helped both of us to form our personal brands, and if you have not given your own personal brand consideration, we hope that this post will inspire you to start now!

For those who have worked on creating your personal brand, what has been your strategy and what efforts have you made?