Personal Branding – So What Is The Big Deal?
The Top 100 brands have a total value of $2.04 trillion. Does that sound like a big deal to you? Yeah it sounds that way to me too. Let’s take a look at the top 4 brands in the world as ranked by total value.
1. Google
2. IBM
3. Apple
4. Microsoft
I don’t know anyone in the developed world that has not heard of every one of these Brands. Name recognition is just one aspect of Branding, but it is a very powerful one. Take just a few seconds and think about each of these Brands separately. I am willing to bet that you can tell me what their logo looks like, what the company colors are, what many of their products are, what the public perception of them is, etc.
Let me give you an example of successful branding:
Jim sneezes so he reaches for a Kleenex. The sneeze causes his ears to pop and he grabs a Q-tip to clean his ear. Wondering what makes your ears pop when you sneeze, Jim decides to grab his Mac and Google it.
That paragraph is what you call the ultimate in Branding. Let’s break it down shall we? What Jim really used was a tissue, but the branding has been so successful for Kleenex that the words are synonymous. The same is true with the cotton swab. Another marker in ultimate success when it comes to Branding is when your company name becomes a word of its own. Google was turned into a verb to describe the act of looking up information online.
Google has built such a powerful brand that they surpassed all other search engines, to become synonymous with internet search. For those of you that are not as big of a tech nerd as I am let me give you a little history. The first search engine ever is one that most people have never heard of. It was called Archie and was created in 1990 at a University in Montreal and was short for “archives”. This search engine was on a page that presented itself as “Archie Query Form.” Archie was actually created before the World Wide Web existed and lived on Gopher. Six years and several search engines later and we have Google. Did you know that the original name for Google was BackRub due to the backlink indexing it was based on? Did you know that the name Google is actually the miss-spelled word googol? Did you know that the simplistic design of the Google website is due to the fact that the creators were not technically versed in HTML code? What is my point of all of this history of Google and what does that have to do with you?
It is to prove that you do not have to be the first at something to be successful. You don’t have to have an original idea. You don’t have to be technically proficient in software, computers or technology. You don’t even have to be a good speller to be successful. You do however have to be good at Branding and selling yourself.
So how do you become good at Branding and selling yourself? That will be the subject of my next article; at least I will start in on it. Explaining how to successfully Brand yourself will take several articles and I hope to get them out soon.
