Robin Fisher Roffer - Make a Name for Yourself: Eight Steps Every Woman Needs to Create a Personal Brand Strategy for Success

Make a
Name for
Yourself

Robin Fisher Roffer

BROADWAY BOOKS
NEW YORK

Contents

STEP 1:
Dig Deep to Unearth
Who You Are

STEP 2:
Define Your Dreams and
Put Them into Action

STEP 3:
Go After Your Target Audience
with a Vengeance

STEP 4:
Dont Crash and Burn
Figure Out Whats Stopping You

STEP 5:
Recruit a Squad of
Brand Cheerleaders

STEP 6:
Learn the Secrets to
Packaging Your Brand

STEP 7:
Get Comfortable in
Your Own Skin

STEP 8:
Devise a Plan and
Get on with It

CONCLUSION:
The Next Step

Introduction

The idea of using branding techniques as a way to identify and establish yourself in the business world hit me like a ton of bricks at a trade show cocktail party. It was one of those evenings where everyone in your field is there trying to impress everybody else and networking like crazy.

Suddenly a television bigwig appeared at my elbow with an important client in tow. Robin! said the host, enthusiastically. I want you to meet George! Then he turned to George. George! he exclaimed. This is Robin Fisher, the Sweepstakes Queen of Cable! Huge smile on his face.

I nearly dropped my drink. Id never thought of myself as a Sweepstakes Queen, not even when I worked sweepstakes exclusively. Wasnt I a whole lot more than that? Was Sweepstakes Queen how everybody thought of me?

Without knowing it had happened, I had been branded, and branded as someone I didnt want to be. After I got over the initial shock, it taught me an important lesson:

If you dont brand yourself, someone else will.

This book gives you the tools to brand yourself before someone else does it to youor to change your brand if it doesnt reflect your true self. Whether youre an artist or an accountantwhatever your field; whether you work for a company or for yourself; whether youre out looking for a job, or looking to advance yourself in your career, or looking to change careersthis book gives you control over how youre perceived. After all, positive differentiation in a sea of sameness is the key to career success.

This book shares many of the branding strategies that work successfully for big corporate entities in establishing or promoting their particular brand, whether its Coca-Cola, Nike, or MTV. But in these pages you are the brand.

Your goal will be to let your brand become a vehicle for your most authentic self. In this way youll distinguish yourself from others who do similar work, affirm your true identity, highlight your talents, and establish your reputation in business. Reinforcing your brand, practicing brand consistency, will cause people to respond to you just as youd like them to, so that when they hear your name mentioned they make positive associations. Eventually a trusted brand earns customer loyalty. You can expect the same.

If anyone knows this truth, I do. Ive been a brand strategist for some of the best and brightest cable networks: TNT, CNN, Discovery Channel, Lifetime Television, ESPN, A&E, and MTV, as well as digital giants like IBM and America Online. My company, Big Fish Marketing, has launched nine national and global television brands, and numerous Web sites; but in the beginning, in the early 1990s, I sold sweepstakes ideas to television networks. Watch the Discovery Channel and win a Safari adventure! That sort of thing. It was fun work, even if it wasnt the most glamorous job, and it put me where I wanted to bein a world where just about everybody loved TV as much as I did.

I made branding my specialty just as it was beginning to be applied to television as a way to differentiate the ever-increasing number of cable channels. Today branding has become so valuable in product success that brand strategists like myself now exist in almost every type of industry and work with almost every type of product, from soft drinks to large appliances, from electronic services to resort hotels. Even countries qualify for branding. In the summer of 1999, Prime Minister Tony Blair kicked off a national campaign to brand England. Casting off its Elizabethan image, England was going to enter the twenty-first century as Cool Brittania, land of the Spice Girls and Austin Powers.

Of course weve had brands of marketable items for a long time. But only recently has a brand become more than just a mark, or a word, or a logo that manufacturers put on their appliances, packaged goods, or services to identify them.

Today the manufacturer itself may be the brand, the whole supermarket is a brand, and so are TV stations and networks, movies, and Web sites. For a company, the brand represents its word, its message, even its reason for being, as well as its badge of honorand branding has become the process of endowing the company and the product with all of that. When people recognize a brand name they actually have an emotional response to the name. They know immediately what the product is. They may have confidence in its quality, or at least an opinion about its value. They may become loyal (or at least dependable) customers or they may prefer another brand entirely. We identify a product by and with its brand.

The day after that fateful cocktail party, I set out to change my brand.

I wanted my identity in my career to be a better representation of me than Sweepstakes Queen. I wanted my name to be identified with my core values, and my passions, and the person I am inside. I intuitively understood that this was going to be a big commitment. If I wanted to become the person I would be proud to be I would have to begin to reflect my values and passions and my authentic self in everything I didin my word, message, action, and stylefrom then on. I had ambition and energy, I was thirty-two and relatively established in my career, and I had some very big dreams. So I created a brand strategy for myselfone designed to reveal the genuine Robin Fisher.

First I focused on who I am. If not a Sweepstakes Queen, then what concise descriptive phrase could I come up with that would sum me up? I asked myself: What is unique about me? What are my talents? What do I do that distinguishes me from the crowd? Then I looked at my dreams. What kind of success am I looking for? What precisely do I want for myself and my future? And then, who is my target audiencethat is, who do I want to impress and do business with? Who will help me fulfill my dreams? And finally, how could I package and promote myself to achieve these goals?

Ill give you an example of how branding, mostly thought of as an application processsomething put on externallyis actually a process that opens a window to the soul of the product being branded.

In the winter of 1991 I was a marketing executive at Turner Broadcasting. We were trying to work up an advertising campaign for CNN to capitalize on its coverage of Desert Storm. It was the networks first big promotional drive. It was also the first time live war footage had ever been available to anyone who wanted to watch. I was in New York for a conference and ended up glued to my TV set. Bombs were falling in Baghdad, and I was following it, live on CNN, from my hotel room. I couldnt turn it off. It was amazing to me that I could watch the war as it happened, twenty-four hours a day. I felt as if the whole world must be watching, too.

Back in Atlanta we talked about that feeling of global awe. All of us felt it. We went to our ad agency and asked if they could do something with the concept of the whole world watching.