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Diving in the Fascination with Personal Brand Branding - DP Knudten
67 Plays3 years ago
When did building a personal brand become so important?
Does everyone need a personal brand?
DP Knudten has some great insight into why a personal brand is a key part of how to operate professionally and personally.
He looks at the keys to success and the mistakes made by people along the way.
As well, DP talks about his Non-Fiction Brand approach to personal branding.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Personal Branding
00:00:05
Speaker
Hi, it's Mark Evans and you're listening to Marketing Spark. When did a personal brand become so important? Why does it matter? And how do you build a personal brand?
00:00:17
Speaker
For entrepreneurs looking to break through and break out, a strong personal brand is a must-have. But building a personal brand requires a combination of hard work, creativity, energy, and strategy, and it can't be built overnight.
DP Knudin's Philosophy on Branding
00:00:32
Speaker
Amid the sea of people talking about personal branding, DP Knudin stands out. His nonfiction brand philosophy helps entrepreneurs discover and communicate the completely true and completely you brand. Welcome to Marketing Spark.
00:00:47
Speaker
Oh, thank you so much for having me, Mark. So let's start with a softball question because it's an obvious question that I need to ask. And it's probably one with a multifaceted answer. What's your definition of personal branding?
00:01:01
Speaker
No, it's a really good question because so many people that are talking about personal branding are not talking about personal branding. They're talking about becoming an Instagram influencer or having brands come to me and wear their clothing and that gets my fans and all that stuff to buy the stuff. Influencers are a subset of personal brands, but personal branding is much, much bigger.
The Origins and Basics of Personal Branding
00:01:26
Speaker
And i always refer back to the very first time i ever heard that phrase personal branding or personal brands and that is in tom peters nineteen ninety seven article in fast company magazine called the brand called you i mean literally go to fast company dot com search for the brand called you and read that article because that is the.
00:01:49
Speaker
That is the Rosetta Stone of personal branding. And it's not about being an influencer. It's not about wearing a bikini and having your wind blowing in the air on a beach in Belize. It's not any of that stuff. It comes down to what Tom thought was the benefit of packaging yourself and using the same techniques that have been time tested and proven of consumer packaged goods.
00:02:17
Speaker
Meaning, for example, let's take a consumer packaged goods, a good that everybody knows, Wheaties, the breakfast cereal. It is a wheat flake of some sort. I don't know how it's made, I don't know what it is, but I do know this.
00:02:34
Speaker
Wheaties is the breakfast of champions. It comes in an orange box that I can see from across an entire supermarket. And if I'm in the market to buy Wheaties, I look for that, I grab it and I go because in my mind, Wheaties are gonna make me perform better. Why? Because they have created a brand that's all based on that concept, which is we're not some sweet candy like cornflake or wheatflake.
00:03:02
Speaker
We are a performance serious adult oriented wheat flake. I'm talking about wheat flakes here. We're talking commodities. And yet this commodity is an incredibly high performing brand. So Tom Peters basically stipulated that everything Wheaties did, you need to do for yourself. You need to package yourself. And I saw that article. I still remember where I was when I read that article in 1997.
00:03:31
Speaker
and I've been thinking about it ever since. And finally, I've come up with my take on it and put it into a book, which you mentioned, Nonfiction Brand, Discover, Craft, and Communicate, the completely true, completely you brand, you already are, which is kind of my marketing way of saying, do you see how packaged that book title is?
The Art of Packaging Your Brand
00:03:51
Speaker
That enables you, Mark, to introduce me in a way that
00:03:57
Speaker
gets people going, huh, what's he got to say? Because that's kind of interesting. And by the way, nonfiction brand, that implies that there is such a thing as fictional branding. Is there? Well, yes, there is. See how a conversation has started all based on the fact that I packaged my philosophy, gave it a title that's very similar to Wheaties or Fruit Loops, and then made it a product that people want to know more about.
00:04:22
Speaker
and consequently, me. So personal branding is about packaging who you are, what you do, and how you do it in a way that other people can understand it, prefer it, share it, evangelize, become your unpaid sales force because they know exactly how to introduce you
00:04:43
Speaker
based on who you are what you do and how you do it right it sounds like a lot of the work that i do with bt bs as companies when it comes to positioning and messaging yes same but basics right we're establishing a personal brand or corporate brand in that case so i can see you know the similarities in how you would approach brand building both personal perspective and corporately.
00:05:03
Speaker
Yeah, well, exactly. Okay, so both of us share a deep marketing background in. I understand that you came from the journalism side of stuff and now are in the marketing space. I came from the theatrical side, if you will, because my degrees in theater of all things, but I discovered that I could write well and that people would pay me. Well, does that make me a writer? Is that my personal brand?
00:05:28
Speaker
It influences my personal brand, but it's not at the core of who I am. Like if I get down to the first principle DNA level of who I am, the first word I'm going to throw out there is creative. I always have to be creative. Whether I'm writing songs that no one listens to in my basement studio, or if I'm presenting to a client, I'm always creative, entertaining, and fun. You know, stuff like this, that creativity affects every single thing I do.
00:05:58
Speaker
Now, writing is a tool I use to express my creativity and it also provides a handy, what I would call brandle, a brand handle for other people to understand. So if they say, hey, that DP Canute guy, what's he do? Well, he's a writer and he's pretty funny or he's really touching or he understood our difficult concept and distilled it down into nuggets of truth that make it very easy for us to go to market.
00:06:28
Speaker
So again, you're talking about working with SaaS companies, right? Software as a service. You've got to convince me, because I've been buying boxed software for 30 years, tell me why I should spend $15 a month for your service. And in my mind, I'm doing the, well, let's see, if I bought that for $90, that converts to how many months and all that stuff. And if I'm doing that conversation, that calculation, you've lost me.
00:06:56
Speaker
But if you're talking about the benefits that I can get from your service as software, then we can have a conversation because if you're talking to me about what I want, which are the benefits, not the features, we can talk about features on our third, fourth, fifth date.
The Importance of Differentiation in Branding
00:07:14
Speaker
But branding is about getting that first date
00:07:18
Speaker
And then beginning a conversation that creates a relationship and that relationship creates a lifetime of transactions. Right. I guess what fascinates me about personal branding these days is that it seems to be everywhere.
00:07:33
Speaker
I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn and there is post after post about the importance of personal branding, how to do it. I do wonder why there's so much fascination and personal branding because I suspect it's been around for a long time and people have had personal brands for hundreds of years. I mean, Beethoven had a personal brand, but I am curious about why it's become such a hot
00:07:59
Speaker
commodity is it a growth industry? So a lot of people have gravitated to being gurus and consultants. Is it a result of the volatile economic conditions in which we live or is there something else? Well, I think it's a combination of all those things. You know, the, the idea, as I said earlier, Tom Peters kind of threw it out there in 1997. It's had a lot of time to percolate through the culture.
00:08:23
Speaker
But a big thing that has happened is, and I don't think a lot of people are consciously aware of this, but there is a fear of commoditization, meaning if I'm a writer, I'm one of many. If I'm not known for anything, I'm just a writer that's easily replaced for someone who's either cheaper, younger, faster, whatever you perceive them to be, and I have less value to you.
00:08:51
Speaker
And you know this from branding. You have basically in my world, in the way I think, there are two positions in the market. Commodity or brand. Commodities are purchased for the lowest possible price, but brands command a premium. Now, all I have to do is mention one company and you'll understand what I mean. Apple.
00:09:14
Speaker
I'm a huge appie aficionado and by the way, I own Apple stock full disclosure because I love that company. I started out on computers with a green screen with an A prompt where I had to type in park.exe to park the heads on my hard drive, which I installed and it was a whopping 20 megabyte hard drive.
00:09:34
Speaker
I have photos on my phone right now that are bigger than that entire hard drive capacities was. So I'm not afraid of tearing stuff apart, but I've reached the point in my life where I value the Apple It Just Works. I value the Apple User Experience Focus. I love the design aesthetic that they create. I don't love everything they do, but they are more aligned with what I choose to align with.
00:10:01
Speaker
Meanwhile, I know people like my brother happens to have more of an engineering mindset. And so he was all about, well, why are you paying $800 for a phone that has $200 worth of components in it? And I said, because it just works. It just works with my computers, which are all Apple. It works with everything. It just works. I don't have to go into a config dot sys file ever again in my life. Right. So that's a value to me. And by the way, I, the consumer, get to determine what is valuable, right?
00:10:31
Speaker
Apple has made it very easy for me to select them by being very clear in what their brand is. And they are a premium commodity. In some cases, a super premium commodity. My MacBook Pro, which costs $2,000 is, if you're an engineer, the same as a Dell laptop that costs $800. To which I say, au contraire, mon frere. They are not the same thing at all. Why?
00:11:00
Speaker
for all the reasons I just listed.
Longevity and Protection Through Branding
00:11:02
Speaker
Sorry, what you're saying is that a personal branding is important or even necessary if you are gonna be, if you wanna position yourself as more than just a low cost commodity. Yeah, you have to because look, obviously if you're listening to this podcast, you don't know this, but I have this nice salt and peppery gray beard. I've been around this earth for quite a while and twice in my career I was hit with the,
00:11:27
Speaker
what I like to call your ex years. You're experienced, you're expert, you're expensive, and therefore expendable. And anyone who's reached a certain age knows that if you lose a client, you look at the spreadsheet of how many people are getting paid what, and you look for the guy at the top and say, we can have five of those for one of him, let's get rid of him.
00:11:50
Speaker
And that happened to me twice because I was in an anonymous commodity, not necessarily to the people I worked with directly, whether they were creatives in my creative group or with clients, but in general, it's easier to keep five of those lower cost people than keep one, right? And the other truism is if you don't own it, it's not yours.
00:12:16
Speaker
they can let you go anytime for any reason. And again, when you reach a certain age, that's another X years thing. It's like, you know what? Advertising marketing is a young man's game. And if you have not distinguished yourself in any way, my perception is that a 28 year old copywriter is as good or better than a 55 year old copywriter. Why? Because they're commodities.
00:12:45
Speaker
If, however, I had personally branded myself throughout my career as an absolute expert in B2B SaaS companies, and we had met and you knew who I was, what I do, and how I do it, I would have a career
00:13:03
Speaker
as long as I wanted it to go. And I can do things like I'm doing now, which is speaking at conferences and stuff like that because people seek out the experts in those X years. I like to call these years also the Yoda years. Yoda was a lightsaber swinging Jedi for a lot of years until he decided, you know what? I'm gonna spend the rest of my life in my comfy little swamp on Dagobah. And all you Luke Skywalker's out there,
00:13:33
Speaker
you come to me when you want to learn really how to do this i can do that now because i have been actively personally branding myself for the past i would say seven years seven to ten years. I guess the question and this is a bit of a provocative question because you spend a lot of time helping clients develop their own personal brands.
00:13:55
Speaker
but is a personal brand necessary in today's modern business world? I mean, what if you're a super smart entrepreneur
00:14:04
Speaker
You're not a Jeff Bezos or an Adam Newman or any of those high flying entrepreneurs. And you want to, you like to operate in the, in the shadows because you're focused on the business. You're focused on doing the best job possible. And you don't care about a personal brand. You don't care about being on stage. You don't care about media coverage. You just want to do the job. Are those types of entrepreneurs making a mistake? And are people in general who don't build a personal brand making a mistake?
00:14:35
Speaker
The quick answer to your question is consider your audience. And I don't mean a wide, vast broadcast audience. Every single person on this earth has a niche audience that they want to be somebody to or within, you know, a community. So let's take the smallest kind of communities possible or the most, I like to use this example just because it's so extreme, but it really illustrates the concept.
00:15:02
Speaker
There is somebody, and I don't know who they are, so don't ask me that question. But I am sure there is someone on the face of this earth that is the absolute 100% recognized expert on Civil War buttons.
00:15:18
Speaker
And they know what button was worn by what unit at what battle and oh you know your your reenactment uniform is incorrect because you've got the wrong buttons and stuff like that. And I just know that in that very small again picture this Venn diagram the entire world there's a tiny little circle in there about people who give a crap.
00:15:40
Speaker
about Civil War buttons, but there is one person who is notable and owns the expert levelness of that small niche. You don't have to be hanging with Kardashians. You don't have to be going up on Blue Origin with Jeff Bezos. But you do want to be known within what you do as an expert. How do you become an expert?
00:16:07
Speaker
You could say, this is everything about me 24 seven. I'm sharing what I ate. You know, I'm having a bad day today. You can do all that stuff and you'd be falling into the influencers trap of everything I say is important. It's not. If you are a personal brand, you have to practice what I call selective authenticity, which is
00:16:30
Speaker
If truth be told, I consider politics a blood sport and it's my favorite type of sporting event. So I follow politics very, very closely and deeply. And yet I maintain my, let's call it
00:16:47
Speaker
You can't really know for sure. You probably think I'm one party or one blue or red, whichever, but you never really know because I don't rub your face in it. Why? If in our culture right now, were I to go stridently one way or the other, I would lose perhaps 45% of my potential sales or engagement audience, right? So I selectively
00:17:11
Speaker
I'm authentic by sharing that which i care to share that is illustrative of my core concepts which i like to call the key three my key three three words concepts or phrases that sum you up my key three are creative we already talked about that.
00:17:28
Speaker
collaborative, I work with other people, even when I'm working alone, I have to work with you to get the input to listen deeply, to then go away and do my writer stuff. And then I come back and collaborate with you again to calibrate that and make it great. And I've realized early on,
00:17:45
Speaker
I'm not a poet that exists up in a garret writing their own vision on paper. I have to work with other people. So collaboration is deeply part of who I am and what I do, right? The third word, and this was hard for me to understand until I talked to enough trusted individuals. And they said, you know what, people don't always like what you have to say, but you always make them think.
00:18:08
Speaker
And I went, that's my value. And that's true. So taking that value and coming up with the word that best fits it, the word is provocative. So creative, collaborative, provocative. I have got to provoke, you know, I don't go out of my way to slap you in the face and call you an idiot to provoke you. But I do try to bring you concepts that make you think and say, oh, we could never do that. Oh, no, we could. Wait a minute. We could.
00:18:35
Speaker
Maybe we could do that because as a creative collaborator, I only bring you value when I give you something you couldn't do yourself.
00:18:46
Speaker
We'll get into your philosophy and approach when it comes to personal branding, but I did want to ask you about some of the mistakes that people make when they're trying to build a personal brand, because there's no lack of advice and guidance out there. And there's this feeling that I need to build a personal brand. If I don't want to be a commodity, I need to stand out somehow. But what do you see in terms of how people build personal brands and you go, man, I wish they hadn't done that.
Common Pitfalls in Personal Branding
00:19:16
Speaker
Well, I can point to somebody that I think everybody probably is aware of, and that's Gary Vaynerchuk. And I think of it as Gary Vee syndrome. I love Gary Vaynerchuk for who he is. Not all the time, because he's pretty spicy a lot, and he's a little bit too spicy for my taste a lot of the time. But I love the fact that he is, I think, absolutely authentically Gary Vaynerchuk. And I've followed him all the way since his first
00:19:45
Speaker
uh wine library video on youtube in how i want to say like 2006 maybe 2005 something like that and i've watched him grow huge you know he drops f-bombs he's in his 40s i think now but he still dresses like he's a skater boy you know all this stuff and to me yeah that's gary v he's being authentic
00:20:09
Speaker
The big mistake, to answer your question, the big mistake is especially a lot of young males. They think they've got to ape Gary Vee's style, you know, or, and they, they like the fact that he can drop F bombs. You know, I want to be that kind of in your face F bomb dropping guy and.
00:20:30
Speaker
And so what they do is they get in front of a Lamborghini that has fat stacks of cash on it and they and they stop start posting stuff like. 10 ways to get to a hundred or a six figure income fast you know and they all do the same stuff they are parroting they are literally a parody.
00:20:53
Speaker
of what Gary Vaynerchuk does so well. And again, I want to stress this. I think Gary Vaynerchuk is 100% completely true to who he is as a person. And he dials it up volume wise, but it's still the same song, you know? It's like ACDC is still loud, even if at very low levels, but the second you amplify it, it gets, you know, ear bleedingly loud. Gary Vaynerchuk can do that, but
00:21:23
Speaker
He's also starting to show a little bit more selective authenticity because he was the insurgent leader up in the hills with guerilla fighters now with VaynerMedia and all the other stuff he's doing. He's kind of mainstream. So he's starting. And if you've ever seen him, I saw him once on the Steve Harvey show when that was on Steve Harvey, the great comedian. And he meets Gary Vaynerchuk for the very first time on that episode.
00:21:51
Speaker
And Gary Vaynerchuk was, let's call it, if he's normally at 11, he was at three, you know, in terms of volume. And I'm like, who is this guy? That's not Gary Vaynerchuk. And yet he, his volume, or what I would say the song he was singing was so fresh and exciting to Steve Harvey that at the end of the interview, he just turned to him very honestly and said,
00:22:19
Speaker
I think you and I have got to do some work together. Right. And you know that here's Steve Harvey, this big, you know, he's got a universe of entertainment that go that's going on. And one interview with someone who is completely true to themselves what they do and how they do it gets the attention of this guy and gets them to the point where they say,
00:22:39
Speaker
let's figure out something to collaborate on. So I think what you're saying is be true to yourself. Yeah. Present yourself sort of what you see is what you get. Don't try to posture to position yourself in a way that you think the world should see you, but operate the way that you operate and people will either rally around you and your brand or not, but that's okay because at least you'll be distinct in the marketplace.
00:23:05
Speaker
Well, for example, Mark, I'm looking at your website, the about page, it says about marketing leadership for B2B SaaS companies. You know what that doesn't say? Fast fashion. You know what it doesn't say? Quick serve restaurants. You know what it doesn't say? Petroleum stations, cigarettes, tobacco, you know, any of that stuff. It's very clear that you are not for 90%, maybe 95, maybe 98% of the things that are sold on this earth.
00:23:35
Speaker
you don't want to touch.
00:23:38
Speaker
Why is that? Because I'm guessing, and I'm just meeting you for the first time, but based on the personal brand you've presented to me, here's what I'm getting from the personal brand you're presenting. You're a deeper, more thoughtful individual. You've got a background in journalism, which gives you a reporter's nose for news. And by the way, in the case of marketing, a reporter's nose for news means that you've got a nose for the most important things. Not every fact.
00:24:08
Speaker
but the most important ones because again this is so much of what we do i often refer to it as dating. So much of what we do is merely a first date which is what's the goal of a first date. To get a second date you know and the first date is a nice smile and eye contact from across the room that gets you to cross the room and say hi what's your name.
00:24:33
Speaker
You've done that to just about any B2B SaaS company out there who may have looked you up on Google. Now, I don't know what else you're doing when it comes to social media or how you're extending your personal brand, but let's say that you do a periodic post on LinkedIn. Why?
00:24:53
Speaker
Facebook has no time for you and you have no time for it, I'm guessing. However, LinkedIn, where people do business, is a good place for you. Not necessarily to go hard on sales, but maybe a little bit of thought leadership, maybe a little bit of curation of, hey, did you guys see this great article? Did you see this wonderful TED talk that relates to something that's going on? Whatever.
00:25:17
Speaker
You are demonstrating. And that's the key thing, the word demonstration. You're not just telling people you're demonstrating who you are, what you do and how you do it by what you do, how you do it and all that stuff. But I didn't I don't want to talk about me and personal branding, but but there was a post on LinkedIn recently about consciously building a personal brand versus subconsciously.
00:25:43
Speaker
In my own case i don't think i say to myself every single day i gotta work on building my personal brand i gotta do something that will make the hands or make it or amplify it i just do what i do i have a focus which is marketing for b2b sass companies i'm active on.
00:26:02
Speaker
linkedin twitter i have a podcast and i just do my thing because i'm passionate about it i'm interested in i'm curious in it i am wondering whether that's just the way the good personal branding works as you're not thinking about it you're just living it every day.
00:26:17
Speaker
Well, it is, but I also think that it doesn't hurt to say that, you know what? I'm going to do something just to maybe 15 minutes a day to focus on my personal brand in one way or another, the same way that people go to the gym, because let's face it, you don't have to go to the gym if you eat well and you walk your dog and you go on the occasional bike ride. But if you want to perform at a higher level,
00:26:46
Speaker
you're going to go to a gym and you're going to work out. And anyone who's ever gone to the gym the first day, you know, is a very hard day. The next day gets a little better. The third day you're doing better and you're lifting heavier weights, you're doing more cardio, you're doing whatever you do, right? It gets easier when you do it every day.
The Nonfiction Brand Approach
00:27:05
Speaker
So all I'm suggesting is, is that you go to the gym every day for even a little bit of time because here's the reality of it.
00:27:15
Speaker
When I go to the gym, the hardest thing about going to the gym is just getting in the car and driving to the gym. Right. Once I'm there and I walk in and I say I'm only going to do 15 minutes, I'll end up doing an hour and a half. Why? Because I'm feeling better the entire time I'm doing it. There are some days where the best I can do is just drive the car to the gym, walk in, say hi to the front desk, and then turn around and walk out.
00:27:39
Speaker
But at least I made the effort. And Mark, you're doing all the right stuff. The king of content when it comes to personal branding, I think, is a podcast because it puts your ears or your ideas and your voice and your presence and your personality in people's heads, literally. And we can talk for days about why podcasting is an incredible unlock for personal branding. But I agree with what you said.
00:28:10
Speaker
I think the key thing is that you make it a little bit more conscious so that you can say, I only have 15 minutes before the next phone call. Well, guess what? 15 minutes, that's enough time to go to LinkedIn, look at the key people I wanna connect with, see that they have a nice post, react to it. And by the way, I have a whole technique I call comment marketing, how to use comments.
00:28:35
Speaker
to build your personal brand. And I do want to share this with your listeners if they're interested. They can go on nonfictionbrand.com slash gift to download three PDFs that can get you started on your nonfiction brand personal branding journey.
00:28:51
Speaker
But if you have that 15 minutes, it could be wasting time looking at TikTok or whatever, or it could be going to LinkedIn, finding Mark's comment that he put or post, commenting on it, beginning a conversation with Mark so that ultimately you build a relationship. It becomes a conscious thing you do. The same way going to the gym is about consciously being
00:29:18
Speaker
in better shape, healthier, extending your youth, whatever.
00:29:26
Speaker
So we're a half hour into our conversation and we haven't even talked about your non-fiction brand philosophy towards or approach or methodology towards personal branding. So let's get into that. How does it work? How did you develop it? How is it different? Provide me with the nitty gritty of your approach to personal branding versus all the other people who are focused on personal branding these days.
00:29:53
Speaker
Okay, well, the first thing is anyone who's doing branding right is doing the same stuff. There is no secret sauce. There is just expert practice and disciplined practice. So when I say nonfiction brand, let me tell you very quickly the story about that. I was a young copywriter at McCann Erickson in Atlanta, Georgia, working on Coca-Cola. I would always have my butt handed to me when I would go present concepts and they'd beat me up on three words, authenticity, refreshment, and sociability.
00:30:23
Speaker
That's the key three of Coke, or it was when I worked on them. Everything had to communicate, authenticity, refreshment, and sociability. What does that mean? I could spend two hours talking about that, so I'm going to skip that, except to go on to say, one day, I got a creative brief that said, write some stuff. And again, a creative brief is, you got to tell the writer what you're writing, like a TV spot, an outdoor board, a brochure, a webpage.
00:30:50
Speaker
What are we doing it's a webpage what do you want to say two for one this week only okay supplies are limited these are copy points i need copy points why. When i got that creative brief that said write some stuff i walked into the account manager's office and i said dude what is this i'm not a fiction writer.
00:31:13
Speaker
And what I was trying to say to him was, I can't make up stuff. You at least have to tell me that it's a Fourth of July special or something. Give me something, dude. You know, because I'm not writing fiction.
00:31:26
Speaker
Well, we dealt with the situation, but I kept in my mind, it kept going around in my head. I'm not a fiction writer. And that doesn't mean I can't write fiction that no one wants to read because I can, believe me. But I kept thinking, well, I'm not a fiction writer when it comes to advertising and marketing. Why? I have to tell the truth. That doesn't mean I'm not afraid to buff things up to a high gloss.
00:31:50
Speaker
But there has to be some truth involved. For example, if I worked on a Coke ad and said Coke helps you lose weight, that would be a lie, a big fat lie. But if I wrote an ad that said Coke will remind you of weekends with your grandpa, I would go, yeah, that's true, because I would always go to grandpa's house and he would have Coca-Cola, which was and he would sneak it to me because my parents didn't let me drink, you know, sugary sodas and stuff like that. And all of a sudden,
00:32:19
Speaker
I realized, oh, Coke was about authenticity and refreshment and sociability, those three key three words, because their competitor made the same product, commodities, sweet brown, bubbly water. Pepsi, Coke, are they that different?
00:32:36
Speaker
Yes, if you're a Coke aficionado or a Pepsi aficionado, if you've ever been to a restaurant and have the server come up and say, oh, I'm sorry, we don't have Coke here. We only serve Pepsi products. You know exactly what that Coke lover feels like when they say, oh, I'll just have water. If I can't have Coca-Cola, I just want water.
00:33:01
Speaker
That's when I realized the power of a brand. And so the nonfiction part of it was that, oh, this is not about making something up. It's about taking the truth and enhancing it. Authenticity, Coca-Cola, 1886, it went nationwide.
Authenticity in Branding
00:33:18
Speaker
A year later, Pepsi did. Guess what? Coke's the real thing, because they were the first. They were always the real thing. And we could go into a long discussion about new Coke and that mistake.
00:33:31
Speaker
What that was, was the marketplace telling Coke, no, you can't mess with grandma.
00:33:38
Speaker
Grandma is spicy. She's a little bit acidic, but we love grandma and you don't mess with grandma. And if you were old enough to remember the new Coke debacle, you know that Coke messed with grandma and the marketplace forced Coca-Cola to be true to who they are, what they do, and how they do it. They literally, they, and that's a key thing for people to understand when you're doing branding, right?
00:34:03
Speaker
You own your brand and they do too. And by they, I mean the people who work for you, the people who buy from you, the people who recommend you, the people who are, who constantly look to you to be exactly who you are. The nonfiction part goes into the, what I would call the deep consideration of who you are, what you do and how you do it. Like I said earlier, I'm a writer.
00:34:27
Speaker
But that's a tool. I can also design, maybe not that well, but I could be a designer. I'm a bad video editor. I edit my own podcast. So I do all these things. And the common denominator of all of them is creativity.
00:34:44
Speaker
I don't follow recipes, I create, literally. Show me a basket full of fruits and vegetables and protein and I'll make a dinner. And it may not be great, but it's creative. I guarantee that much. So when you work with clients, it's all about finding their true selves, their authentic selves, and then packaging that in a way that's believable and authentic. Yes, and making sure that they adhere to it. And I don't mean to pick on people.
00:35:12
Speaker
But I try to give examples that people can relate to. Okay, you went to high school. You had a friend who's a female.
00:35:22
Speaker
and you were close friends, but you were always in the friend zone and never crossed over into romantic or whatever. You don't see each other for 10 years, 15 years. You go to a high school reunion and then you see that friend who now has a totally different hair color, totally different body shape that has been surgically enhanced and
00:35:46
Speaker
invariably, and this happens, it doesn't matter what gender you are or anything like that. But literally, in your mind, if you don't say it to them directly, you'd be going, that's not the Jenny I know.
00:36:00
Speaker
That's not Jenny. I have a friend who's male, who I grew up with, ends up he's had some legal problems and stuff like that. And my response to that is, that's not the guy I know. That's not the truth of who he is. He's tried to be someone else. He's putting on a brand. I like to say, put it this way. A brand is not a pair of shoes you tie on your feet.
00:36:23
Speaker
It's who you are. And when I show a presentation, I'll show a Nike ad of the Nike shoes on the runner. And then I show the runner. The Nike shoes don't make the runner a runner. The Nike shoes make the runner get out there and just do it, whatever that is. And in the case of elite athletes, it's just do it and win or just do it and perform. The goal is to identify yourself as a runner.
00:36:50
Speaker
not as a pair of shoes that you just tie on your feet. And ideally, that runner is actually going, you know what? I'm not just a runner, I am an athlete. And what does that mean? An athlete has an entire sensibility that is different than that of a salesperson, that is different than that of a musician. An athlete understands that things are constantly a opportunity to win.
00:37:19
Speaker
So the question is are you performing at the highest possible level to be that type of winner you know and again this is just kind of what i would call hack psychology. If all of a sudden you say you know what.
00:37:33
Speaker
I'm an athlete, even though I am a salesperson. What does that mean? Oh, maybe as an athletics-oriented salesperson, I need to be more prepared so I can perform at a higher level, that I need to practice as much as I actually perform. The old Vince Lombardi line about, there's no practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect. If you're someone like that, that quote will resonate with you.
00:38:01
Speaker
And once you understand that, you're not trying to be Gary Vaynerchuk. You're not trying to be Kim Kardashian. You're not trying to be whatever Brene Brown. I mean, think about that. Brene Brown works at the University of Houston, which I like to a little bit snidely call the great place to be if you're in the witness protection program as an academic. And yet she's that personal brand.
00:38:29
Speaker
has enhanced the value of the entire university. And that's the goal. That personal brand is now
00:38:39
Speaker
to be treasured by the university. She's no longer a cog. She is irreplaceable. She's one of one. That's the goal. Not to be one of many, but one of one. And the only one of one you can truly be is yourself. So have you done the work to figure out the first principle, key three ideas of who you are, what you do, and how you do it?
00:39:03
Speaker
That I think is a great way to wrap up this conversation. And thank you for all the great insight on personal branding, which is a complex and fascinating topic. One final question, where can people learn more about you and what you do?
00:39:18
Speaker
Well, there are a couple places, but the easiest one to get to because you don't have to spell my last name is nonfictionbrand.com. And if you go to nonfictionbrand.com slash gift, you can download those three PDFs. You don't even have to give me your email address. I'm really bad at click funnel marketing and stuff like that. So if you want to sign up on my emailing list.
00:39:38
Speaker
Please do. I won't send you anything probably, but it's nice to make that connection. And the other thing is I've got a podcast, the Nonfiction Brand podcast, new episodes every single Monday. Check that out wherever you get fine podcasts for free. And also the book's available on Amazon.com. Just look for Nonfiction Brand and K-N-U-D-T-E-N, which is my last name, but you should be able to find it Nonfiction Brand in the book section.
00:40:04
Speaker
Well, thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, give it a five-star review, of course, and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. To learn more about how I help B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor and coach, send an email to mark at marketingspark.co or connect with me on LinkedIn.