Pro branding tips (not just for influencers)
Jun 30, 2024
Find Your Superpower newsletter 063
Read time: 5 minutes
Topics covered: LinkedIn branding, LinkedIn bootcamp
At my recent EcosySTEM Summit for Leaders in STEM on Thursday, I gave a workshop on personal branding to the 100-pax science and technology professionals in the audience.
One key message I had for them was, I hoped that all of us would start to see ourselves as a personal brand.
Because the other option would be worse: we would be seen as a commodity. We would be easily replaced by 100s of people with a similar educational record and skill set.
A good personal brand is also one that is consistent.
In January 2024, I wrote a newsletter, just like this one, about why I enjoy going to Club Med resorts, having visited Club Med Sahoro for my first-ever skiing experience last Christmas.
I remarked how my Club Med brand experience had been overwhelmingly consistent across various resorts, from Bintan, Indonesia, to Sahoro, Japan.
What I did not expect was to receive a DM from the regional general manager who connected me with their marketing director, which led to my recent trip to Club Med Kani and Finolhu in the Maldives. Once again, my Club Med experience was consistent with what I had come to expect from the brand.
In today’s newsletter, I explain why strong and consistent brand associations are key to the success of your personal brand.
What is a brand association?
Entrepreneur Leila Hormozi, when asked “Do you have any tips to building a strong brand?”, had this to say:
“If I wear Chanel and Prada, then you associate me with luxury and expensive, versus if I were to wear Lululemon and Alo, you would probably associate me with somebody in fitness and health.
Oftentimes, people ask me about creating a strong brand, it’s actually just creating strong associations… And so, oftentimes, when somebody doesn’t have a strong brand, it’s because they either make no associations or they make too many associations.
If you want to create a strong brand, create a few very strong associations that are core to who you are.”
Let’s unpack this concept of a brand association further.
1/ We make many random brand associations
On random brand associations, Leila notes:
“Some people, for example, they will do collaborations with literally anybody on the internet who asks them. They’ll be on anybody’s podcast, they’ll do anything, they’ll speak on any stage. What is their brand? You don’t really know what their brand is because there are too many associations for you to understand what that person is about themselves.”
We often see people posting social proofing pictures on LinkedIn—wefies of themselves and someone they met for coffee, or with someone who spoke at a conference.
During my flagship six-week Find Your Superpower LinkedIn bootcamp, I train senior executives and business owners on the concept of social proofing, on the value of connecting and networking with industry leaders.
This is a must, because it creates a new brand association for you.
But I think some of us may take this to another level, by not being discriminating about who and what we talk about.
Today, it could be meeting an old pal and discussing about real estate, tomorrow it could be about meeting another parent and discussing hot-button parenting topics, and the next day, it could be a rant about some politician that bugged them.
Nothing wrong with the above. But must we share everything that goes on in our life or takes place in our head?
Our potential clients may write us off as unfocused and not a domain expert.
They may even forget what we want them to remember us for.
2/ We make no brand associations
By design and for survival, Homo sapiens are social creatures. We live in packs and work in teams. To make snap decisions that ensure our survival in the wild, we instinctively create associations in our mind’s eye (this is also where stereotypes, for better or worse, originate from).
What associations are you making in our mind’s eye?
One extreme I’ve seen is when someone regularly humble brags about themselves or only talks about their problems and issues. They appear very self-oriented.
Another extreme is someone who flies solo. You never see them being invited to speak on an industry panel or working in a group setting. They’re loners, basically.
According to the trust equation by David Maister et al. (academics, you’ll love this one), when someone is highly self-oriented and does not appear to work well in teams, our trust in them goes to zero.
When we cannot associate them with anything or anyone, it is hard for us to conjure them up in our mind’s eye.
Here’s what we want to achieve on LinkedIn: when our potential clients need something, a name will inevitably pop up in their mind.
We want that name to be ours.
3/ Making strong brand associations that work for us
I have been very fortunate to be associated with some great brands in my time posting on LinkedIn.
Among them, some are educational and innovative, like the work done by academic publishers Elsevier Foundation and the industrial design brand James Dyson Foundation. Some are more aspirational, like the supercars designed by McLaren. And of course, some create core memories for me and my family—my recent trip to Club Med Maldives being one of them.
Every photo we share, every post we publish, every comment we make on LinkedIn creates a new brand association for ourselves.
Think of LinkedIn as your digital storefront. How would you decorate the window of your store? By displaying a bunch of unrelated items in our storefront window, we confuse our target audience. Having an empty storefront window won’t attract any clients or headhunters either.
The key here is to be consistent and selective, by picking brand associations that create the most harmony with our personal brand.
BUILD YOUR PERSONAL BRAND ON LINKEDIN
This will be my last call for Cohort 3 of my six-week Find Your Superpower LinkedIn bootcamp, where highly curated groups of mid-career professionals level up on their LinkedIn game together.
➡️ Cohort 3 bootcamp dates: 3 August to 14 September (LAST CALL!)
➡️ Cohort 4 bootcamp dates: 5 October to 16 November (20% FULL)
Cohort 3 of the bootcamp starts after the summer holidays, which is the perfect moment for you to execute on the dreams that you made for yourself in 2024.
We have now trained more than 80 individuals in past bootcamps and you can read many of their testimonials here.
I am glad to work with my dream team, consisting of my co-facilitator Amanda Cua, as well as two LinkedIn Top Voice guest speakers: James Cheo and Chris Do.
Here's what we will learn over six weeks:
🚀 Week 1: we clean up our LinkedIn profile and fix our visibility settings
🚀 Week 2: we study the anatomy of a LinkedIn post and get it right
🚀 Week 3: we develop a strategy that takes us to top of mind in our industry
🚀 Week 4: we learn about the algorithm that controls LinkedIn
🚀 Week 5: we discuss mindset and best practices for networking, commenting and connecting on LinkedIn
🚀 Week 6: we discuss advanced features on LinkedIn such as newsletters and beyond
Thanks for reading issue 063 of my weekly Find Your Superpower newsletter.
For those of you who are new to my newsletter, Find Your Superpower is subscribed to by 38,000+ people, and discusses the following three goals: (1) Making a career transition, (2) Professional branding on LinkedIn, and (3) Reinventing ourselves for the future of work.