I have been listening to enlightened professionals talk about Personal Branding for several years now.

And the discussion usually includes high ideals like being ‘authentic’ or ‘unique’. The aim of course is to communicate our talented, interesting and employable selves as succinctly and successfully as possible.

Sounds perfect. Or does it?

Call me cynical, but I believe that we are simply pandering to yet another trend to package ourselves as a homogeneous, economic thumbnail, perfect for digestion by a recruitment industry that will only muster a 6 second window of vague interest before deciding if a candidate is a good fit. We believe that by distilling ourselves into a few words for attention deficit consumption, we are better understood? Better branded?

I just don’t buy it.

Because in truth we are not branding ourselves honestly. What we are actually doing is branding ourselves in the language that most appeals to the recruitment industry at this moment in time. In keywords that scan well. Then everybody jumps on the same bandwagon and the recruitment industry finds it all a big yawn because they have seen it all before and want to see a new and different approach being used.

It is a subject close to my heart for two reasons.

1. In the last few years, I have been involved in projects and products to objectively match people with jobs. Because unfortunately, recruitment processes have become less rather than more sophisticated, creating a talent shortage that doesn’t really exist. The apparent shortage is getting worse because we do not know how to judge  a person, just their ability to market themselves. Organisations need to stop looking for a perfect candidate and start looking for talented, diverse and colourful individuals who will enjoy the challenge of working in that environment. It is well documented that the hardest and most expensive hiring mistakes are almost always sales people. Because they are very good at saying what you want to hear and presenting themselves in a shiny way that dazzles. And this is what personal branding wants us all to do.

In my experience of over 100 hires, I have made only one wrong hire and my best hires were those I interviewed precisely because their resumes were less than perfect, had gaps or different industries and HR did not want me to waste time on. Because I like to work with real people who are talented but not great at everything and often have some glaring flaws. They are always interesting, humble and willing to work at finding the right solution.

2. Secondly, I have had occasion to redo my CV recently and have plunged in to define my personal brand. It is frustrating to me, because I am driven so strongly by authenticity and I despise the smoke and mirrors that employers and candidates engage in equally. I am a very good marketing person. Great at times. But I will always be a bit poor at playing this game.

Because my real and authentic personal brand is about plain English. It is about being honest, upfront with no politics or bullshit. It is about sharing what I know, helping people if I can and letting them know when I can’t. It is about being inclusive, supportive and collaborative. It is about enjoying what I do, swearing a bit too much (I am English after all) and understanding that life is very short so if it is not fun, change it or do something else. It is about being myself and being proud of the skills and experiences I have acquired through a hard earned career.

I don’t want to dress it up to look like something else….that goes against the very essence of my personal brand.

This is a short article I wrote for The Leadership Thinktank

Stop thinking about marketing!

As a marketing professional I should give you some marketing ‘top tips’ right? However, in 25 years of working with CEOs, marketing is rarely where I step in.

When I am invited in to meet a new client, they always have an idea that they want a marketing plan, a website, a brochure, an event. For the most part they are right and I totally understand that we all like to jump into the creative side of business. However, I usually find that some necessary and focused thinking hasn’t been done.

These are the three areas I address most often with clients before I can begin any meaningful marketing activity.

1. Business objectives before marketing strategy

Setting growth targets and being very specific about the kind of business you want to generate is the best focus and advantage you can give your business.

Many years ago I went to head up Commercial Marketing in a large law firm in London. The senior partners were so excited to have a ‘brand expert’ on board to finally get new brochures, better events and nicer golfing umbrellas. They were very happy until I told them that they would get nothing from my team until we had created a business plan for each of the seven Practice areas.

‘You don’t understand LAW Diana, that’s not how it works.’

‘I don’t need to understand law’ I said ‘there are 4000 lawyers and employees in this firm to do that! I do understand business and unless we know how we want to grow and in which market areas, then a new brochure simply will not turn the business around.’

Six out of seven Practices completed a straightforward business plan with me. Their resulting marketing strategies were specific to their individual needs and they all acquired new clients and a renewed sense of purpose.

The 7th Practice did not buy into my passion for a business focus, my lack of legal experience in general or me in particular. Instead, I put a very diplomatic marketing manager onto their practice to do their bidding and together they created another brochure and of course, much better golfing umbrellas. The practice continued to lose business.

2. Know your target market and purchasing drivers

Being very clear about your precise target market and why those people are interested in your brand is key to the success of all your business and marketing strategies.

Nobody’s target market is ‘everybody’, but I do hear that a lot. You know when you send an email to many people asking for various actions, nothing gets done. But if you ask specific people for specific actions, then you get results? It’s the same thing with marketing. Your product or service should speak to a specific area of the population and be desirable to them, but not out of reach.

I worked at Sony Europe in the 90s as their Sony & Trinitron brand guardian, planning and communications manager.

Surprisingly a major problem country at this time was France where everybody loved the brand, but Sony sales were 7th in the market according to Nielsen & GfK.

Sony France had been running a long standing and very stylish advertising campaign for years, ‘If you can dream it, Sony can make it’ which finished on a shot of a very famous and expensive apartment overlooking the Seine. Speaking to shoppers at several retail outlets, I was surprised and overwhelmed by the love and regard everybody had for the Sony brand.

The problem was that the average buyer of consumer electronics in France assumed they would never be able to afford a Sony and didn’t even put it on their shopping list. Sony France had successfully positioned Sony in the same realm as Bang and Olufsen and in so doing, had alienated 70% of their potential market. Very desirable but completely out of reach for their target market.

3. People & passion will build your business

As a CEO, you create the culture in your business. Let me say that again because this point is often missed. YOU create the culture in your business.

Be bold in stating the kind of business you want, the kind of people you want to surround yourself with and the kind of behaviour you will not tolerate.

This is the culture that you create and it should be one that makes you and your employees want to come into work every day. A culture that will ultimately result in productivity and business success. And if you feel uncomfortable about making a bold stance, shaking your spear and saying ‘this is how it will be’, let me explain what will happen:

• You will leave a cultural void in your business that will become filled with other people’s ideas of what a business should be. Sad but true, most people’s experience of how a business runs includes blame, bullying, disrespect, hierarchical decision trees and poor management styles.
• When people join a new company and unless there is something else already in place, this is the culture and the frame of reference they will unwittingly instill in the void you have left. The result is a mish-mash culture with accepted poor behaviours and lack of unity.

Be brave and strive for a great culture. Hire people who are smarter or have greater experience than you in some areas. Respect their ability to challenge you and teach you something new. Let them be brilliant and trust them to deliver. Support them to succeed and then get out of their way, taking any roadblocks with you.

If you hire good people and enable them to do their job, they will happily run your business successfully and challenge you to always think bigger and better.

Be humble and know that some of the people you work with are better than you at many things, but you are the one with the vision that brings it all together and in that, you are uniquely brilliant.

A few years ago I took myself out of my comfort zone and rebuilt my website.

It was partly because I needed more flexibility than the five page Smartyhost version I had been nurturing for a few years. But my main reason was to get a sense of how the landscape for smaller business websites had changed.

Wow, it really had changed and how.

It just so happened that while I had been marinating in all things geek, I also helped one of my clients with his small business website, an all-in ‘smallbiz’ deal from Melbourne IT

It was a bit inflexible to work with, allowing very little customisation and only 5 pages, 2 being already taken up with an ‘enquiry’ form and a ‘contact me’ page. Well 3 pages is not enough even for the smallest of businesses, so I called Melbourne IT for some help. The experience was similar to calling Telstra, everybody tried to help but didn’t. It took 3 calls and over 1 hour to verify that my client had bought a small business package, with web store functionality that he didn’t need. They told me that the only way to get more pages was to buy them at $100 each, or to upgrade to the next package up at $90 a month. I found their offer uninspiring. My Smartyhost deal was much better and the people there were incredibly helpful and knowledgeable.

In tandem with this process, I set up my own website. I locked in hosting for $4 a month for the next 3 years which included access to a choice of WordPress templates which were free. The process of setting up the hosting, downloading the template and getting set up could not have been easier. So far, so good.

However, I did struggle a bit getting familiar with WordPress and the differences between templates. I have been working on websites for many years, but only on the business end and I am very far from understanding geek-speak and php / html / dns references. The numerous discussion boards set up to help make coding sound like child’s play, were nevertheless out of context for me. With no previous background in programming or coding, it led to several hours of being confused and out of my depth, but I WAS determined to create my own site if it killed me.

I am very glad I persisted and didn’t cop out and get somebody else to build it.  In the end I needed no coding, just a better understanding of how to customise WP. I will continue to improve the site as I continue to learn more. I would not hesitate to recommend this as a platform for any business; even large web store based retailers could go down this route.

WordPress started as a blogging platform but the open source community have developed the templates to such an extent that most are now responsive (can be viewed and used on any device) and can be set up to have static pages like any website, as well as blog style pages for dynamic content. WordPress developers continue to drive improvements and quality and are making these upgrades available to everybody for free. With new entrants in this market such as Wix and Squarespace, I still have a great respect for WordPress.

What I am more convinced than ever, is this. If you have a business, invest a bit in the design, content and build of your website. You can try the really cheap route and have a site designed and built for you through the numerous skills aggregating online sources – but it will get you what you have paid for. Most business owners are not sure what to say on their site, or what good user friendly design is. Get some advice. You can still have your site built into the WP platform – it will simply be a better representation of your business if you seek professional guidance.

Well done WordPress and all the developers that make it possible for so many smaller businesses to have a professional web presence.  

Really, I do. I miss them.

Working with the big agencies and sitting in an edit suite in London’s Soho at 3am, being offered whatever I want. No seriously, as the person who spends the money in a big client like Sony or Virgin, I could have ordered ANYTHING! The nice looking young man in the tight white T shirt (the uniform of the edit suite runners of that time) said so – glint in eye.

This was the 90s, when the long business lunch and excessive agency hospitality was alive and well in London. Bloody brilliant.

Recently, getting into Mad Men has been a walk down memory lane for me. My agencies have included, as they were called then, Grey, McCann Erickson, BBDO, DDB Needham, Lowe Howard Spink, Saatchi & Saatchi, Leo Burnett and many others. When you have a big brand and big budget, you are welcomed into this world of Mad Men and Ad men. Albeit there was less whisky and smoking in the agencies than in the 60’s, but the focus on creativity and liberating the copywriting and art departments to go and seek mental nirvana and banning the grey suits from the creative floor, simply produced very good advertising.

In this current world of online campaigns, direct response buy-it-now strategies, I really miss good ads that make you engage with and love a brand. And by extension, I miss London.

Occasionally in Australia, we get the kind of ads that turn you on and make you smile. Carlton Draught is a consistently impressive advertiser. And the long version of the Pure Blonde ad, where the man nurses the pigeon back to health is creative genius. And I just can’t go past the amazing Toyota Hilux Unbreakable ad.

On the other hand, the raft of ‘random strategy’ banking ads have the opposite effect on me, bum clenchingly awful by any standard.

So I do still really miss the UK’s ability to write quirky, creative and effective ads and often shift the boundaries of what has gone before. The timeless Hovis and Hamlet ads, the John West Salmon hungry bear campaign and of course all beer advertising: Stella Artois, Carling Black Label, every Heineken and Guinness ad ever made. But I don’t live there anymore and rarely get to enjoy the surprise of the new ads as they break on TV for the first time.

A few years ago though, I did catch the London 2012 Paralympics ad while I was there, which left me in awe: Meet the Superhumans

So as much as I love what I do, I remember fondly the excesses and successes of my earlier career. I believe we have become too precious and serious about business and the GFC helped us become more so.

Personally, I think we should all embrace a less formal and more joyful attitude. We know that people buy people not products, so why not make ourselves easy and enjoyable to do business with.

I say  “Soften the F*** up”

(The post Getting Naked talks more on this subject)

I am not a fan of business speakers in general.

Many on the circuit will just re-hash stuff you already know, in very uninspiring formats, passionately telling you obvious things like “good communication is the secret to good business relationships” as though they alone had just discovered this important fact.

But sometimes, somebody speaks so much sense that you are interested to hear it. Patrick Lencioni (author of Getting Naked amongst other wonderful books) spoke to me. Seriously, right to me. What a lovely fellow. I am sure the other 600 people in the room also felt he was speaking to them. That’s the kind of person he is.

He practices what he preaches and it is worthy of a ‘preach’. He believes that life is too short to work with people you don’t like, so don’t. He believes you should drop the political attitude and take your guard down. Speak honestly and openly. Be yourself. Get Naked. And when you work with people you like, be it colleagues, suppliers, clients, you help them if you can. Give them free information, cut them some slack and help them succeed. Don’t focus on what they can do for you but what you can do for them. Pay it forward, create a better way. He reckons he is not being a selfless saint. He believes this attitude gives him permission to be himself, enjoy what he does and take pleasure from sharing in the success of others. Selfish really.

I love his attitude and believe in the same. Maybe that’s why I was so impressed. My inner Florence Nightingale was silently pointing at him and saying “see, he agrees with me, you can choose to not be a business wanker and still succeed”.

You know that scene in “It’s a wonderful life” where Jimmy Stewart is trying to save the Building and Loan, explaining how each person’s savings are helping to build everybody’s houses. This is the stuff that makes me really happy.

I rather daftly run my business like this. I give away too much time, advice, creativity, support….and for what? A big fat thanks?

That’s not it. I do it because I can. I don’t need to be paid by everybody. I won’t starve because of a few freebies and too many mates-rates. And there is a bit of me that loves to know that somebody has been able to get something done because I provided some skills they couldn’t afford. And my larger clients? Well yes, they do pay for my work. But they also get more hours than I ever charge.

Maybe it is my way to balance up my karma for being an overpaid marketer in the first place, but I think it makes my small corner of the world a little bit better.