At the outset of every flight, passengers are given the instruction, “place your own mask on before helping others.” With over a million frequent flier miles, you’d think that advice would have sunk in by now, but while, I’ve been preaching the gospel of brand and message constancy for years, I have to cop to doing a less than stellar job of applying that level of care to my own brand. That period has come to a close.
Finding your “brand” is so difficult because it involves two of everyone’s greatest insecurities: self-analysis and the fear of public failure. Don’t believe me? Take note of your actions the next time you take a fall in public. If you haven’t sustained a significant injury, the first thing you will inevitably do is look around you to see if anyone saw you in a moment of vulnerability. Now imagine exposing yourself to the world in that vulnerable position 24/7, willing to show the world your warts and shortcomings as well as those things which you believe make you unique.
Viewing it through that prism, the safe bet is to brand yourself or your organization with muted colors and passive verbs. It’s much more terrifying to fail if you’ve put your heart and soul out for a public viewing, and it goes belly up. Not taking that risk, though, leads to something much more tragic: regrets.
My business is focused on groundbreakers: people and organizations who are willing to see the world’s possibilities by thinking a little differently. People with purpose to something larger than themselves. The reason this marriage works is I’m not exactly what you would call a conventional thinker; but if you looked at my marketing materials over the last several years, none of that spirit was represented–and I knew it. Changing it, though, required the time, discipline, feedback and self-reflection that’s anathema to anyone who’s last name isn’t Freud or Jung.
I went into this process of distilling my unique value proposition as the culmination of a personal goal to continually do things that take me outside my comfort zone, and failing spectacularly is one of those things, which is odd because I spent all of those years in politics where one of the mathematical cannons is at least half the people who run for office will lose. The difference is I was always the guy behind the curtain. Unless you were a certain brand of political junkie, I existed in relative anonymity.
So here I am an extrovert with a list of thousands of people who’ve come to know me at conferences, on airplanes, at fundraisers, in school, at my kids’ schools, professionally and in casual conversations–and an inability to concisely communicate my own distinctiveness because I was afraid to step too far out on the diving board, lest it break behind me and cause a flailing belly flop. My marketing materials weren’t consistent with my, ahem, gregarious personality, nor did they possess a laser-like focus on clients who were in my wheelhouse. The irony wasn’t lost on me that people hired me professionally to solve this exact disconnect for them.
So like Dr. Frankenstein (Franc-en-schteen for you Mel Brooks fans) I became my own guinea pig, and put myself through my own process. Like any good brand, the results aren’t supposed to appeal to everybody, only a subset of people and companies who identify with my brand personality and my approach. And while no one likes rejection, there is a hidden benefit: it’s a time saver. By being so demonstrative with my brand, it will repel organizations with whom I should never be working with in the first place because they would recognize I’m not a good cultural fit–and that’s a good thing.
This is one of the fundamental mistakes most companies and organizations make when they craft a mission and a vision statement. Not everyone needs your product and not everyone shares your values. That’s why Porsche doesn’t sell minivans, and Gatorade doesn’t sponsor the symphony. Finding the symmetry between your brand and your audience is the Holy Grail of success.
To that end, I present Michael’s Marc: making my mark by helping groundbreakers like you make yours. In shorthand: Impart. Stand Apart. Tip Cart. Now that my mask is on, let me help you with yours.