Expert Rebranding
I was recently talking to a colleague about the difference between being strategic and being perceived as strategic by others.
She laughed, and shared that the advice she’d gotten was: the only thing you need to do to be perceived as strategic is to add the words strategy and strategic to everything you do.
Strategic marketing.
Strategic operational plan.
Strategic lunch order.
In my last job at Capital One, at one point, I was perceived as not being “analytical.” I was partly amused by that, since most people who interact with me would quickly come to the opposite conclusion. The perception that I wasn’t analytical started with the fact that I was a product manager in a world in which most people were business analysts. Making matters worse, my thought process and communication style meant that most of what I talked about in public forums was my strategy, rather than the analysis. We’re facing a challenge with X, so we are going to do Y to address it.
After getting feedback about the perception issue, I implemented a simple hack. I reserved 15 minutes before meetings in which I was required to update others on my part of the business. In those 15 minutes, to everything I intended to communicate, I simply added a number to the sentence. We’re facing a challenge with X, as evidenced by the metric going down by 15% last month, so we are going to do Y to address it.
Magically, my colleagues saw me as more analytical.
Wall Street executive Carla Harris shares a similar story about receiving feedback that she wasn’t tough enough.
Harris describes: “Five or six years into my career I had a very senior manager director say to me, ‘You know, you're smart, you work hard, but I don't think you're tough enough for this business.’ My first reaction is, ‘What is he smoking? You can call Carla Harris a lot of things but ‘ain’t tough’ ain’t one of them.’”
However, she then reflected on the feedback and realized that she needed to improve her branding.
As she tells it, “For 90 days, I decided I would walk tough, talk tough, eat tough, drink tough, use tough in my language. [...] I kept using this language over and over and over. Sure enough, in about 90 days, it worked. I had a team of people coming to see me. They didn’t know I was behind them [walking down a hallway]. The VP was beating up the poor Associate. ‘Do you have the back-up analysis? Do you have the synergy analysis? We’re going to see Carla Harris. You know she’s so tough.’”
It may be simple, but it works!
Of course, repeating yourself to develop a brand isn’t the end of the story. In Emotion by Design, Greg Hoffman, the former chief marketing officer of Nike, made this point: “Your brand voice should never be static. It is a constantly shifting blend of characteristics, beliefs, and passions. By expressing different traits, your relatability becomes the ultimate invitation into your brand.”
Leadership Wisdom
Greg Hoffman also made a great point about branding in a time of automation:
“‘It’s important for a brand to be human.’ To be human. Humans experience emotions. Humans create art. Humans provide and receive inspiration. Humans take risks. Humans empathize. Humans tell stories. Humans build movements. Humans work as a team. Humans make memories. And humans close the distance.”
He’s referring to company brands, but it could just as easily apply to us individually.