Chapter 6
Define Your Brand Community

Before you can deliver clear, consistent, and constant communication about your personal brand (discussed in Step 2: Express), you need to know who you should talk to. Those who successfully plan their careers connect regularly with the members of their brand communities. Your brand community comprises all the people who know you and should know you, as shown in Figure 6.1.

Notice that your brand community consists of a series of concentric rings: The people represented in the rings closest to you— that is, individuals who know you best—should know the most about your brand. As you move out from the center, awareness of your brand can be weaker. Your goal is to communicate a consistent and powerful brand presence to all members of your brand community. When they know and understand your brand, they can convey the brand to members of their brand communities—thereby further increasing awareness of your unique promise of value.

Figure

Figure 6.1 Your Brand Community

Your brand community consists of the following people:

If your offering is identical to your competitors’, there will be no reason for a potential new boss or employer to select you. Just as consumers make instant decisions to buy Nike over Reebok or to fly jetBlue instead of Delta, you want to ensure that your “customers” pick you over your rivals. And that means ensuring that they know what makes you unique. Often, what distinguishes you from rivals are your brand attributes.

To define what makes you different from your competitors, you may find it helpful to first consider your similarities. Two examples follow.

The Importance of Your Target Audience

Your target audience is the subset of your brand community that is most critical to your ability to reach your ultimate career goal. And you need to be in constant contact with them. You must start conversations with them—and keep the conversations going. Through these ongoing exchanges, you cultivate the strong relationships essential to achieving your objectives.

All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.

—Martin Luther King Jr., Civil Rights leader

Companies understand this rule about staying in touch with their target customers. Volvo, for example, sends its message of safety to mothers in every issue of Working Mother magazine. The Coca-Cola Company communicates its brand to the whole world a thousand times a day through product placement, billboards, TV ads, vending machines, and consumers sipping from Coke cans as they walk down the street.

As you’ll see in Step 2: Express, to reach your career goals, you must practice the “three Cs” of branding with your target audience: (1) Clarity: You express your unique promise of value, (2) Consistency: You always send the same on-brand message through the content and style of your communication, and (3) Constancy: You communicate frequently. When you practice the three Cs, you remain visible to your target audience.

William had an experience that revealed the importance of target audience visibility. He was being interviewed by a radio station in Rochester, New York, just after the announcement of major layoffs at Kodak. During the interview, he spoke about how personal branding can help people survive layoffs. A woman called in and said:

I’m an extremely hard worker. I come in every morning before everyone else in my department and rarely leave my cubicle during the day. I never leave unfinished work in the evening. I’m conscientious and work more hours than my colleagues, yet I learned yesterday that I will be laid off in the coming weeks. I don’t know what I could have done differently. I can’t think of many people who work as hard as I do.

As this caller’s story shows, hard work is not enough to secure a job in today’s business world. Of course, it is an essential first step: You won’t get anywhere without being able to produce results. But you need to do much more to remain in the driver’s seat of your career. You must ensure that what you do—and how you do it—are constantly visible to those around you. Instead of just being the hardest worker, the caller should have built a reputation for being the hardest worker—by regularly communicating her brand to those around her.

We aren’t talking about blatant personal advertising. We’re talking about constructing a reputation for the qualities that make you unique. Being visible is not shameless self-promotion. It’s communicating with members of your brand community so that they understand what distinguishes you.

William had another experience that taught him the power of communication firsthand. He was working on a TV show on personal branding for the BBC in Manchester, United Kingdom, and was the guest expert. If you’ve ever worked on a TV program, you know that there is a lot of idle time as crew members set scenes, arrange props, and so forth. During such off-camera moments, William and the producer/director, Fiona O’Sullivan, chatted about branding.

One conversation in particular stood out. William was telling Fiona that everything is a brand. He used the Eiffel Tower as an example, explaining that the tower is not only a brand in itself (with its own unique promise of value); it’s also the brand symbol for France and Paris. “Ask 10 people about the Eiffel Tower,” he said to Fiona, “and you’ll get similar responses from all of them. That’s how strong a brand it is. The Eiffel Tower is perhaps more widely recognized than the French flag.”

Years later, William received a call from Fiona. She said she had been asked to direct a new TV program for the Discovery Channel called The Secrets of the Eiffel Tower. And she asked William if he would appear at the beginning of the program to introduce it. William’s attention to communication had won him a unique opportunity to contribute in a way he greatly enjoys and at which he excels.

Identifying Members of Your Target Audience

Remember that your target audience consists of the people who are in the best position to help you reach your career goals. To identify members of your target audience, think about your career objectives. If your goal is to move up the ranks in your existing company, you may know many members of your target audience by name. For example, Pamela, a marketing executive in a small software company, wants to head up philanthropy in her current company. She has identified the following people as her target audience:

  • The current vice president of philanthropy
  • The managers in the philanthropy team
  • The vice president of human resources
  • The public relations manager (who is responsible for corporate social responsibility communications)
  • Her current manager
  • The CEO of the company

If you want to , or some combination of the three, you may be unable to identify your target audience members by name. Instead, you might have to identify them by job title as well as other demographic and psychographic data. To identify target audience members by demographic data, consider the following criteria:

  • Age range
  • Gender
  • Career/job position/title
  • Income
  • Location/geography
  • Education

To identify target audience members by psychographic data, consider these criteria:

  • What do they do in their spare time?
  • What do they like to read?
  • What websites or portals do they visit for information?
  • What magazines or newsletters do they read?
  • What are their professional activities outside of work?
  • What are their volunteer activities outside of work?

Focusing on Your Target

The key to effective branding is focus. Instead of communicating your brand to the entire world, you’ll convey it specifically to those who can help you reach your goals. Just as Volvo does not waste resources communicating about safety to 16-year-old boys (who are more interested in speed), you must be clear about who you’re going to communicate with. William always says, “Personal branding is not about being famous. It’s about being selectively famous.” The following story offers an example of how one person developed a plan for focusing his brand communication.

Nothing can add more power to your life than concentrating all your energies on a limited set of targets.

—Nido Qubein, business consultant, author, and speaker

If you are as focused as Kyle, then communicating with your target audience won’t be onerous. And that’s a good thing. After all, you do have a demanding day job. You have to ensure that enhancing your visibility to your brand community—especially your target audience—doesn’t step up your stress. In addition to narrowing down the list of people to whom you’ll communicate your brand, you also need to tell your brand story as concisely and compellingly as possible as discussed in the next chapter.