RESUMEN DEL CAPÍTULO Y ARGUMENTACIÓN

Profits are important but not if the cause isn’t met. Benefiting the cause is often used as an excuse for not being profitable! The com-munity company doesn’t need a building. It operates house-to-house, moving within the community, meeting the needs of the world without set hours or days of operation. Museums, the Red Cross, Girl Scouts of America, Planned Parenthood, and Campus Crusade for Christ share this look and feel.

5. The healing company emphasizes the employees’ benefits as much as the company’s success. Healing companies value the growth and improvement of individuals. They believe that one of the most important roles of the company is to mentor the employee.

The work of the company is as much about growing strong indi-viduals to send out into the world as it is to serve the outside world. Every year a variety of business magazines rank the na-tion’s best places for people to work, based on the benefits, op-portunities, and personal growth potential. Some companies simply care more about this. Some companies define themselves by how good the work experience is for the employee. A consul-tant for Boston Market once taught, “Happy employees sell more chicken.” Either way, companies that pay as much attention to the employee as they do the customer have a different type of brand. Examples are Focus on the Family and some family-owned businesses.

6. The entrepreneurial company is characterized by energy, individual-ity, and a never-give-up attitude. Such a company emphasizes the

vision of its founder. Usually privately owned, it has a brand that makes people feel both invigorated by possibilities and frustrated by constant change. Sometimes corporate organizations want to be seen as entrepreneurial to hide from their true identity. Dalma-tian Press wears this brand, but so does the conglomerate of Oprah’s Harpo Productions.

Every company is probably a mixture of brand traits.

However, when you know who you are and define your true brand, don’t disregard that which you are not.

For if you center all your thoughts on only what you are, you can be-come arrogant and unbalanced in your approach to the business you are building. If we focus only on who we are, we can begin to believe that we’re better than others. Plus we will become weaker and weaker in our undeveloped areas. If you realize that your strengths lie in one area or another, it’s only natural to put all your energy there. It is cer-tainly more comfortable to operate in that zone. But you do so at the risk of losing perspective about others and about the changes you are likely going through. Don’t stop working to discover who you are and what your authentic brand is. Change doesn’t mean that you are abandoning your brand, it means you are making use of the experi-ences you have day after day. What did you learn today?

Well-intentioned businesspeople can be heard saying, “I’d use all my talents and I would incorporate all my good qualities and gifts—but I can’t find them.” Sometimes this is just dodging the work, and some-times it is a genuine concern. But we need to talk about the word can’t.

If you want to find those qualities to better yourself and your company, you need to make it a priority.

Get serious about searching out your diverse self, as it contains the essence of your uniqueness. Do this not only because it is good for you but because it is a smart business decision. In today’s market, with increasingly diverse backgrounds of customers and customer needs, satisfaction depends on your being able to harness your di-verse characteristics to meet those needs. The more you understand yourself, the more you are likely to understand your customers.

I’m not talking about some cozy management meeting where we all hug each other and sit around talking about our grandchildren.

This is really about improving our company performance by knowing how to connect with people and instituting a feeling of inclusion.

The Journey and the Search

When we choose our map we can wholeheartedly begin the journey toward who or what we envision as the best person or place to be.

This journey or search for your brand must be consistent and flexible at the same time. How is that possible?

When I was a scientist I wore a white lab coat. I thought it was cool. Actually, I’m sure I looked like a nerd. But it made me feel smart every time I put it on. Can clothes affect who you are? Of course they can. There’s a well-known expression, however erroneous, that “The clothes make the man.” If clothes affect how you act, do they affect your brand image? Does your organization’s or corporation’s packag-ing affect your brand?

Certainly if Barney, the famous purple dinosaur on PBS, changed his color and became a red dinosaur, his brand would be noticeably changed.

Is it a contradiction to have a true brand identity and the need to reformulate yourself at the same time? A friend of mine, Pete Fisher, has one of the coolest jobs: He’s the general manager of the Grand Ole Opry. Last March he divulged that he constantly assesses the status of the Opry’s brand and the strategic plan to further de-velop it. He confessed, “We’re all just creatures of habit. We have to challenge our natural tendencies to fall into routine.”³

Pete manages the business of one of America’s best-known brands by protecting its authenticity. I had the chance to be backstage during a few fabulous performances at the Opry. The genuine excite-ment that pours out of the performers night after night is unmistak-able. To quote Pete, it is the feeling of Americana, patriotism, heritage, and legacy translated into music and lyrics that make every listener validate who they are meant to be. The Grand Ole Opry has 83 percent unaided awareness. Pete’s vision is to increase that aware-ness to 100 percent. I interviewed him in his cozy office, filled with historic memorabilia from the likes of Minnie Pearl and Johnny Cash.

His message was delivered softly, smoothly. He’s a smart man with a meaningful past of his own.

“I have to love what I do or I don’t do it well,” he said. I asked him what the word brand meant to him, and he explained, “It is dialing up the thoughts and feelings of the true essence of some-thing.” I asked him how he was managing this brand that was in a time of transition. It’s cool to be country now. How does one stay

true to one’s essence and also stay in touch with today’s audience?

“It means knowing the right ingredients and staying true to them.”

Pete smiled, “I’m not trying to make the Opry something it’s not.

We are telling the same message of Americana and family, only we package the message differently. We used to tell the story with Min-nie Pearl and Roy Acuff. Now we tell it with artists like Brad Paisley and Vince Gill.”

Pete talked a bit about his childhood and the values he devel-oped based on his experiences. His passions are his family, music, God, and the people whose lives he touches. What a perfect fit that makes him for his position at the Grand Ole Opry, which is the one that can most affect the brand. His personal passions permeate his professional life. When he looks around the place he thinks, “Let me make a difference here. Let me make a difference so that the people who have worked here for 40 years have not done so in vain.”

While growing up, he had a dog named Lucky. Maybe that name was evidence that he could believe in the impossible. He told me that, when building a brand, you simply must see the impossible. “Dream, dream, dream,” he said. “Dreams feed the vision.” Making dreams come true takes more than luck, but sometimes luck doesn’t hurt.

Pete Fisher has studied the map for building his personal and professional brand, and now he is on the journey. He is focused and yet flexible. His story illustrates how important it is to know what your audience wants and how that evolves over time. He has been successful in giving the fans what they want without changing the true identity of this national treasure. He knows exactly who he is and who the Opry is. We can depend on him to weave his experi-ences into his work so that both his personal life and professional life are enriched. He uses the key ingredient—the truth—to enrich his personal brand and the brand of the Opry. What a great example of evolving in place! The Grand Ole Opry has never been more popular and more connected to its audience than it is today. Building on truth has certainly made the journey for the Opry rewarding.

The most critical principle that a leader must embrace for suc-cess is to know the objective. Military leaders, corporate CEOs, foot-ball coaches and you must all follow this principle. “Everywhere in life, lack of clarity with regard to goals is 89 percent of failure, and clarity is 89 percent of success,” says success coach Brian Tracy in his book Victory!⁴Make sure that as you develop your brand, your goal is a crystal clear reflection of who you are, more than who you want to

be. Furthermore, your brand objective must be absolutely clear to everyone who is likely to help you achieve it.

The Grand Ole Opry’s parent company is Gaylord Entertain-ment. Its chief, Colin Reed, approaches branding from the opposite end of the equation. In a 2003 interview with a Nashville newspaper, City Limits, he was quoted as saying, “What we have to do is define what we want people to say about us, and then we have to develop a plan to market that.”⁵

This strategy needs further clarity. It’s okay to identify the results you want from your brand, such as wanting your audience to think you’re smart and to tell others that you’re sharp. But if this isn’t your true identity and you manipulate your market to feel something that is phony and bogus, than disaster is waiting. Rather than defining what you want people to say about you, define yourself and get peo-ple to tell your true story.

Focus

What is the brand’s goal? What is the company’s brand? What is the individual’s image? The clearer you are about these things, the more likely you will have success. This is the only way to continue building your brand and get incredible results. Imagine looking through a tele-scope and finding the optimal focus, but it keeps slipping. You must keep refocusing constantly, or look away from the blurry picture.

How would it be if you got new eyeglasses that gave you perfect focus, but the focus gradually slipped?

Objectives are meaningless unless you focus on them. Whatever you focus on will surely manifest. In these days of multitasking, there seems to be less emphasis on focus. This is a mistake. We laugh at how juvenile news reports, books, movies, and music are nowadays, but in fact writers must write at a low level of comprehension, not be-cause we are stupid but bebe-cause we have split our concentration into so many places at the same time that there is no one part of the brain available to summon up enough focus for an intelligent study.

Yes, we must do more and more at the same time, but it is more important than ever to focus, precisely because we have so much to do and only limited resources. Imagine how, looking through the small lens of a telescope, we can make what we’re looking at bigger!

Sometimes, only by looking at less can we see more.

We can no longer afford to scatter our efforts. We have to fall

back on our core abilities, our core products, and our core services.

And these are precisely related to our core identity, which I call our essence or unique fingerprint. Focus single-mindedly on this.

Maneuver

Charles Darwin is remembered for teaching, “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”⁶

The ability to maneuver is the result of remaining flexible. This does not mean that we are tossed to and fro in the wind with change.

It means that we can take our objective and our focus on it and think outside the box regarding how to reach that outcome. Progress comes from originality and from knowing when you have to do things dif-ferently. Sometimes a makeover accomplishes uncovering the true you that wasn’t being seen.

According to an article in USA Today Weekend in July 2003, it wasn’t age but necessity that led Betty Crocker, the grand dame of baking, to seek a superstar makeover. General Mills of Minneapolis devoted more than a year and more than a million dollars to making over its packaging to appeal to today’s bakers. Audrey Guskey, market-ing professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, said, “It’s a manu-facturer’s silent salesman and has to have a ‘wow’ effect. The average shopper spends 27 minutes in the supermarket, and the average store has 30,000 items. So consumers spend a fraction of a second looking at a package.”⁷

The package is the business’s way of telling the brand story. A package can be almost anything. For Betty Crocker, it is the cake box.

The marketing firm Lipson Alport Glass & Associates sketched 800 versions of new packaging ideas, and handwriting analysts evaluated over 100 versions of the Betty signature, to get the look and feel of the famous homemaker. The branding efforts’ target was to make consumers feel like they wanted to eat that piece of cake on the pack-age right now.

Since 1921 Betty Crocker has been turning out dessert mixes.

Since then Betty herself has had several hairstyle changes to relate to her audience. One thing that has not changed is her signature hot red-orange cookbook. Back in the 1980s her cookbook was on every-body’s must-have list. Western Publishing (later known as Golden Books) had the honor of printing this tome. Year after year, book after

book came off the press line until one year “Big Red,” as we affection-ately called the book, printed up an awful orange color. Taking care of the brand has to start at the top of a corporation, and it must be cher-ished and cared for at every touch point along the way. In this case the pressmen didn’t take very good care of the brand. They didn’t honor the trademark color that generations had come to recognize. It became a publishing nightmare, costing the company hundreds of thousands of dollars, their reputation, and a few people’s jobs. Had the orange book been allowed to get out in the market it would have opened up the floodgates for other manufacturers of Betty Crocker products to get sloppy with Betty’s brand. Every time Dalmatian Press doesn’t protect its brand by using either its spots, name, or logo, it di-lutes the long-term brand for short-term gain.

What is your signature packaging? Is it protected? Is it working?

Is it going to work tomorrow? Between focus and maneuver, you’ll find the balance for success. Insanity is doing things the same way and expecting a different result.

When at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. But don’t keep trying the same way. Keep changing your method or your model until you get results. This is how business executives and leaders succeed.

Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed, I have only found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”⁸

If you want different results, you have to do it differently. Not be different—do different. The only way to show your whole, true self is to present yourself from different angles and perspectives. This is the only way to be fully appreciated.

More specifically, this book has discussed focusing on you and your true story such that you know how to define it and then use it to define your brand. When we look at corporations or significant indi-viduals, we rarely see them as who they really are. We see them as similes, metaphors, allegories. We put them in context with compar-isons and references. When people see us, whether it’s ourself or our company, they see what they came to see. Their viewpoint is en-hanced or obstructed by so much subjectivity that they really see more of themselves than the reality.

Imagine

Imagine that you could create and transform your brand into any-thing you want it to be. Imagine this in terms of your own personal

brand identity, your corporate brand, or some combination of the two. But think about what you could do, or would do, if you had a magic wand to zap your real and your perceived image into anything you wished.

If I had been given the proverbial three wishes in the past, I might have mistakenly wished to have the following: