HOW TO DIFFERENTIATE
Now we are going to look at how you differentiate yourself from others. That might also be called branding.
A lot of people think a brand is a product, but it isn’t. Branding means neither awareness nor is it a concrete ‘thing’. It is more of a metaphor for complex phenomena, a story, a meaning, an identity. Remember what I mentioned about the ‘essence’ of personality? Exactly.
It is about your assets, a complex set of qualities and attributes — behavioural, temperamental, emotional and mental – that characterise you as an individual and make you unique and distinct from others.
This is what defines a brand: its personality.
It is also what differentiates a brand from a non-brand. Isn’t it interesting how close those two concepts are? Brand personality and the personality of an individual?
Think of Barack Obama, one of the world’s most high-profile personal brands. ‘Yes, we can’ was a great slogan — simple, straightforward, easy to understand. It meant motivation and action, a point of view which confirmed the possibility that we can change an existing situation. It had a similar power to Nike’s ‘Just do it’, a slogan which turned millions of couch potatoes into runners. Obama also understood the high impact of new technology, the art of communication and the power of perception. Pictures of him using his Blackberry made him the role model of an updated, technologically driven and more sophisticated generation of politicians. It made him somehow ‘accessible’, even though only five people have his phone number. With the help of his electoral e-campaign he connected with the masses, especially people from the younger generation, via social networks and platforms. He offered to collaborate, was proactive and used interactive media to transmit his message. This way he gained twice as much in donations as his electoral rival John McCain in 2008. He had 20 million viewers watching his speeches on YouTube compared to the two million of his competitors. And he made 3.5 million friends in social networks compared to the 850,000 of McCain. You could say Obama managed to leave a sustainable interactive brand footprint. His twenty-something advisors found a way to deliver the right branding message to the right people in the most effective way and in 2012 they followed on through leverage of social networks. Demographics suggest he carried voters in the 18–34 age range by taking his message to those discussing issues. When it came to Twitter and RSS feeds his team came up with twice the content of Mitt Romney’s team.
