At some point, it is important for everyone to put themselves in the place of a brand and view themselves through this magic mirror. Which part of the life cycle does the brand ‘you’ belong to, what kind of effort needs to invent / re-invent oneself, grow and mature and make money out of the ‘brand you’.

I believe that it is possible to consider oneself as a brand and ‘build it’. By employing almost every technique that you would for a brand on yourself, it is possible to achieve great brand salience for yourselves amongst your peers, industry and the market in general.

Let’s take a few key issues that one needs to answer which would help in building a great personal brand.

Values & attributes: There has to be a bunch of values that you would stand for at a very fundamental and honest level. It is important that you identify them because those are the key elements which will bring you happiness. If you are not honest here, then you would probably land a great job or be known in the social circles, but you would never be able to experience happiness when you are by yourself. Choose your words carefully. Similarly there must be a few attributes (adjectives), which would define you as a personality. This would outline the kind of jobs you should get into for success to follow.

SWOT: Standard operating procedure in understanding and presenting oneself in front of others. By understanding the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats you are clearly defining your every move in making a good brand of yourself.

Research: Any brand requires a bit of research to understand where it stands, what position it can take and what needs to be done to reach the desired goal. You are no different. It is important to do your own research (qualitatively or quantitatively) on where you stand on various parameters. This could include not just your area of operation but also finer details like soft skills, leadership qualities etc.

TG: Every brand stands for some values to a certain set of audience. From 50000 feet, Coke is a serious soda, while Pepsi is the irreverent, yuppy, generation now kind of soda. The TG is clearly defined. Similarly, you need to clearly delineate who you are catering to. It is possible to do so at every sphere of work. You can be a Customer Service Person, but clearly delineating yourself to be a CS resource in a BPO, Telecom company or Technology company can be possible. It is just a function of understanding where you want to be and who would be your consumer. At a different level, you can provide a different message to different people without lying. And the overall brand message (what you stand for) can still be the same. If you doubt it, read an earlier post here.

Competition: Less said the better. However, by understanding your competition in a given space, you would be able to position yourself better in your consumer’s mind. If it is a job offer where you are pitted against say 2 others with a similar skill set, by positioning yourself as a better leader, it is possible to attract your TG. Many times, many brands sell for some reason totally different from what it fundamentally stands for. Just look out for the Nissan Micra advertisement and you would realize that the car is being sold on a premise that it doesn’t need a key to operate. But a car is supposed to give you ‘driving experience’, mileage, comfort, maneuverability etc. What Nissan does is not wrong at all. But is just a proof of concept that you can be a great Customer Service Resource, but the prime reason for choosing you over someone else could be ‘Leadership’.

Finally, I would like to leave with a thought.

Operate within your sphere of influence. Example: Rajnikant. If the radius of his sphere of influence is 3 kms, you will always find that he is operating at the epicenter. You would seldom find a movie where the title is not based on the character he plays, where he is not introduced with a song, where he does impossible things to win over the heroine and annihilate the felon. This is a thought germ for a complete post in itself. However, I have used Rajnikant as an example for the perfect brand manager of brand ‘Rajnikant’. If he can do it, any one of us can. I am just working on it.

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Kiruba Shankar – who was once referred by Gul Panag as a Twitter Superstar was kind enough to answer a few questions.

Kiruba Shankar

A few pointers on the questions. I think that Kiruba is a good example for personal branding. And I have tried to bring out that aspect here. If you see his Bio, you will see that this man is multi-talented. Pity Maniratnam hasn’t met him yet :p Or has he?

Why waste your time? Here goes the interview!

1. You were working in the corporate sector for a long time. What made you take this shift into launching your own company?
   You are right. I’ve been in the corporate world for over 12 years. That’s a long time to get used having the luxury of having one’s bank account get replenished at the beginning of every month. I should really thank the economy downturn for helping make my decision to become an entrepreneur.  The recession made things difficult in the last company that I worked in.I chose to opt out and instead of taking another 9 to 5 job, I chose to pick up projects on my own. I had consciously been building up my business contacts and was focused on building my own brand. This greatly helped when I branched out on my own.  I soon realized that it perfectly matched my multi-interest lifestyle.  I was my own boss and I chose my schedule.
2. With two kids it must have been a tough decision. How did you manage your initial years? (I know it is a personal question, but there are people who are unable to do this! Includes me!)
   Actually, it was not a tough decision at all. That’s the beauty of not having choices   If I had to feed my family I had to get in the projects. That kind of pressure actually helped me a lot in getting my firm up and running quickly.
   The initial years were quite adventurous. We had to keep running fast to stay in the same place. My biggest support system was my wife. She quit her job too and joined me at my startup. Having an understanding and supportive wife is a huge bonus.
   We had a very strict rule that we will not delay the salary of our employees even by a single day. There were half a dozen times I had to pawn my wife’s jewelry to pay the employees’ salaries. We always pay ourselves the last. But magically, we would bounce back every single time. We were also gifted by a very loyal associates who put their best into the job.
3. How big is your firm? What all services do you provide and how competitive is the market that you operate on?
   We are a dozen people strong. We run a very lean organization and our overheads are intentionally kept very low. We run our operations out of two double bedroom flats in Chennai.
   We are a Social Media Consultancy. We help large corporate companies leverage the power of Web 2.0. We help evaluate, strategize and execute plans on corporate blogging, podcasting, enterprise wikis, online community building, reputation management and research.  We are extremely passionate about this medium and that greatly helps us walk the talk.
   The competition isn’t very high. We are amongst very few pure-play social media focused organization in Chennai and even across India, there aren’t many.
4. On a daily basis there is some new technology or the other cropping up. How do you manage to keep in touch with all this? How inquisitive are you?
   I follow a few sites like TechMeme and Mashable that really feeds me on the latest trends in technology and social media space. It also greatly helps that we run the Social Media Research Lab and that gives us sufficient reason to keep our ears close to the ground to learn the latest stuff.
5. There was a point when you used to have blog entries on a regular basis. Lately, you don’t blog as much?
   There’s a huge difference when you did something as an hobby and when you did something for a career.  The effect is telling.  Besides, Twitter and Facebook have cannibalized my blogging. Its so much easier and quicker to say the thing I want to say.  However, blogging is my career and if I don’t blog enough, I’m not practicing what I’m preaching. Atleast for that sake, I will get back to active blogging.
6. How do you think creating an online personality has changed over years? And how has its effect on the offline world been? (Being a blogger and being known and being a tweeter and being known. How do you think things have changed)
   I don’t think creating an online personality has changed much. What has changed though has been the tools that helped you express your ideas.  Its without doubt that building one’s own brand is an extremely wise investment for the future. By building one’s brand online, you’ll soon realize that it starts to open many doors in terms of business and helps it easier to make good connections.  An online brand has a huge rub-off in the offline world.
7. Few words about your book on Personal branding that’s coming up?
   It’s a tweet book published by Happy About, a California based publishing house run by Mitchell Levy. The book contains 140 nuggets of information about personal branding. The book will be published in the later part of 2010.

So that’s that! My first interview! I hope the questions were relevant! Comments would be really appreciated!
My special thanks to Kiruba Shankar for taking time out for my blogathon.

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“The account planner is that member of the agency’s team who is the expert, through background, training, experience, and attitudes, at working with information and getting it used – not just marketing research but all the information available to help solve a client’s advertising problems.” – Stanley Pollitt

To put it simply, planners need to study the market, the product category and the consumer and translate it as insights / briefs to the creative and the media teams to arrive at solutions that will achieve the marketing and advertising objectives.

Typically, it is the account planners’ job to write the creative and the media brief documents (which will be discussed in a latter section). The brief must contain the marketing and advertising objective, the proposed media used, the key consumer insight, key pointers from any research undertaken and finally the take-away that the communication should leave the consumer with.

Account planners must have the necessary skills and attitude to organize information about the consumer and the brand. The data can be derived from primary or secondary research, discussions with the client etc. This helps in the brand arriving at a proper positioning statement. The planner must also be involved in the creative development. This helps in meeting two objectives. First, to be convinced about the message, the take-away from the creative piece arrived at. This includes analyzing the creative from a consumer’s point of view. And second, to be in a position to convince the client about the creative produced by the agency.

Most account planning departments are also responsible for tracking the advertising campaigns taken up for a brand. The tracking of a campaign’s performance is by employing follow-up research with consumers and coordinate tweaking of the creative message (if necessary).

What is the planning process? Well, have tried to make this as a small diagram to ensure that this is understood easily.

In the Indian Advertising industry, you tend to always find the planner having ‘servicing’ executives reporting into them. The concepts of marketing, branding, research and case studies learnt during the B-school days get to be used here. However, a good part of the theory and life in real may be very different. Hence, on-the-feet thinking, quick response time etc, are key requirements of a professional playing this role. Though this job may sound ‘research intensive’, one would tend to encounter a lot of thinking and finding solutions the creative way.

This same process is also applicable for decision making on the media selection. Today, with the innovations in media including Outdoor and digital media and the convergence of different media vehicles, it is important that the above process is followed for media planning as well. All media agencies have ‘planning’ divisions which help in identifying the correct vehicles and the frequency to achieve the advertising and marketing objectives.

In subsequent posts, I will try to add examples from my experiences on each of these functions.

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