It’s all about your personal brand, right?
Ask someone about the value of attracting an online audience, and they’ll tell you it’s about building a personal brand.
In fact, I recently received an email from marketing professor Scott Galloway with the subject line, “People are the new brands.”
Turns out Galloway’s 25-year-old apprentice Ed Elson was guest posting, and was revealing the sort of discovery young people often make – meaning something that’s older than they are.
I had to chuckle a bit.
That’s because the term “personal brand” dates back to a 1997 issue of Fast Company magazine that I recall vividly, as I read it just before making the leap away from the big law firm job.
The cover story was “The Brand Called You” by Tom Peters, and the gist was that in the new economy, you needed to be a brand unto yourself. When you read the article, the only meaningful piece of advice is to be distinctive.
That makes sense because Peters borrowed the idea from Chapter 23 (“Positioning Yourself and Your Career”) from the 1981 book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, by Al Ries and Jack Trout.
Yes, the 28-year-old term “personal branding” was a simple reframing of someone else’s even older idea from a marketing context. Just in case you didn’t know that thought leaders such as Tom Peters did such things. The messenger is the message.
And how does one build a personal brand? Self-promotion, naturally. That’s what good marketing is all about, right?
Nope.
The problem with “self-promotion” is right there in the two words. A focus on the “self” may be human nature, but great marketers and Leading Experts overcome our base nature to serve others as a way to achieve our goals.
And “promotion” is a small subset of the psychological discipline of marketing, even as some consider discounts and coupon codes the only marketing they need.
The truth is that a personal brand is a wonderful benefit of having an engaged audience, as long as you understand that building that personal brand is not the primary objective. Good marketing is actually focused on people other than yourself, and so is attracting an audience.
The other flaw in this line of thinking is that you can “build” a personal brand in a way that’s separate from the people you hope to influence. Whatever brand you have can only exist in relation to other people, and it will only work with some people and not others.
Regardless of objective reality, you’re “authentic” if the audience thinks you are. They also determine if you’re credible or not. And the psychological influence of authority exists only in the perception of the audience, regardless of your actual level of expertise.
That means your personal brand exists only in the minds of others, just as your reputation is what others say about you when you’re not in the room. And that means what you provide to others matters most.
It’s All About Values
A primary recurring theme of the Leading Expert Way is that connecting with your ideal prospect is about reflecting shared values, which are an aspect of identity. Understanding your own values is therefore crucial if you want to communicate in an authentic way that the prospect, in turn, perceives as genuine.
It’s helpful to think of values in two broad initial categories. Just as with motivation, these two categories are intrinsic and extrinsic:
People with a strong set of intrinsic values are inclined towards empathy, intimacy, and self-acceptance. They tend to be open to challenge and change, interested in universal rights and equality, and protective of other people and the living world.
People at the extrinsic end of the spectrum are more attracted to prestige, status, image, fame, power, and wealth. They are strongly motivated by the prospect of individual reward and praise.
So now you understand the appeal of the Kardashian family. Upon their rise to prominence over 17 years ago, they were labeled as being “famous for being famous” thanks to the notoriety and wealth of patriarch Robert Kardashian (part of O.J.’s “Dream Team”).
These days, the Kardashian women are successful businesspeople. They used their existing socioeconomic status to build an audience and then utilized that audience to launch successful products. They deserve credit for recognizing the power of appealing to the extrinsic values that citizens of the United States lead the world in embracing.
That’s why a segment of the population seems to not only tolerate self-promotion, but crave it. But it’s still about filling a need those individuals have related to admiring certain types of people based on extrinsic values, specifically socioeconomic status. At the far end of the spectrum, we have those who transcend responding to simple “authority” and seek authoritarian leadership.
Fox News, Donald Trump, Andrew Tate, and various other hustle bros understand their extrinsically-motivated audiences, and they give them what they crave in terms of macho, paternalistic attitudes. But you also have to understand that there are equally lucrative and far more accessible audiences that respond better to intrinsic values.
For this vast segment of others, conspicuous displays of status and blatant self-promotion are exactly the wrong approach to reach our desired intrinsically motivated audiences. In fact, overt self-promotion can diminish both your message and your perceived expertise, and even “humble bragging” can cause you to appear insincere, which is the antithesis of authenticity.
People who think they need to “sell out” to attract an audience often needlessly make themselves uncomfortable while failing to achieve their objectives.
That said, there are steps you can take to elevate your perceived status even as you pursue your primary aim of making a strong emotional connection with your audience.
What’s Your Status Story?
Back in 2006, there was a sudden buzz about a book called How to Get Rich: One of the World’s Greatest Entrepreneurs Shares His Secrets by Felix Dennis. The question that immediately came to mind was … who the hell is Felix Dennis?
Turns out Dennis was a publishing entrepreneur who had a string of successes in the 1970s and 80s. He went on to found Maxim in 1995, which became the world’s biggest-selling men’s lifestyle magazine.
How to Get Rich became a bestseller, helped by the fact that Dennis was a highly colorful character who told great stories. He went from being someone who built audience-based brands to having an instant audience himself because of his status story.
A status story involves your existing socioeconomic status and background as a way to establish credibility within the context of your expertise. You see similar attempts to the Felix Dennis approach with every would-be internet “guru” posing next to a leased Lamborghini.
When I started Copyblogger, I was a successful entrepreneur — but not pulling down millions at that point. So I framed my story as “I quit my job as an attorney in a big law firm, and thanks to publishing content, I built a business that paid me more than if I had become a partner in that law firm.”
That gave me some credibility without being crass. This was important because I was intentionally positioning myself against the typical “internet marketers” of the time. Copyblogger brought new ideas to bloggers and then fledgling content marketers while bucking the scammy status quo of the early “gurus.”
So, you have to tell your own status story to get started with enough credibility to get others to follow you and your content as you build higher levels of trust and connection.
The next step on the status side of enhancing yourself as a messenger is demonstrating that you know what you’re talking about. Competence relates to the expertise half of credibility, and it’s where freely publishing valuable content that demonstrates expertise gives you an unfair advantage over those with better credentials who don’t publicly share.
This can be just as powerful as arriving with a strong status story in the first place. That’s because you’re demonstrating your expertise in a way that allows the influence principle of authority to kick in, making people more likely to accept your advice and opinions unquestionably (as long as you’re their kind of expert).
It’s critical to always remember that the audience perceives your expertise – it’s not what you claim about it. And the level of credibility they discern beyond a shared identity is influenced by your confidence level. In fact, confidence can be read as competence even when you’re absolutely wrong.
Setting the Stage for Connection and Unity
Everyone has to make the most of what they have when it comes to initial status. Some have a full house, while others a mere two of a kind, but everyone has to play the hand they’re dealt and make the strategic most of it.
The good news is that connection techniques that create a bond between you and the audience are much more powerful. While some people may be naturally more likable and charming, anyone can strategically connect strongly with an audience when they know what they’re doing.
In fact, the people with the highest initial status often fail to make deeper connections. That’s because their egos won’t let them bond strongly with a select audience if it means others are going to decide the message is not for them. This leads to watered-down content that ultimately appeals to no one.
If you do attract an audience that you connect strongly with, though, something magical happens.
- Your status goes up in the eyes of others in a way you initially didn’t have.
- You and your content are now deemed more important.
- And the success people experience will be credited to you as your audience growth accelerates.
It’s the most powerful marketing flywheel you can imagine, and you just have to experience it for yourself. We’ll explore connection techniques that make you a highly attractive “messenger” with the next lesson.
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