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This month we focus on personal branding, with news of a unique new masterclass in London, plus we share our top ten tips on developing your personal brand at work.

With an eye on future trends, we look at opportunuties on the horizon for brands as the growth of cloud consumption shifts consumer behaviour.

We also welcome corporate storyteller Tracy Kenny to our team and give an update on our growing number of place branding projects.

Reinventing A Brand New You

If you’re fed up with the job you’re in, want an exciting new career, are seeking promotion, hoping for a pay rise or to get noticed at work, then it’s time to reinvent your personal branding and your self!

Simon Middleton, founder of Brand Strategy Guru, has spent years helping businesses develop brand stories that are authentic, distinctive and compelling. Now he’s using his core branding principles to help people from every background improve their careers, self-esteem and relationships.

Simon’s new book on the subject, Brand New You, is published by Hay House in January 2012. In the lead up to publication Simon is presenting an evening masterclass based on the book on the evening of Wednesday 26 October, at the superb Wallacespace St. Pancras in central London.

The event, called Reinventing A Brand New You, is an intense four hour seminar in which Simon will condense his specialist expertise and know-how so you can successfully rebrand YOU, regardless of your starting point.

Book now! Tickets are just £69 (early bird price) and only £89 full price.

The forecast for cloud consumption

The fast growing concept of cloud consumption is no longer limited to online industries. The shared virtual ownership ethos is now appealing to consumers when buying more traditional (and often high-value) products by offering more flexibility, choice and convenience along with less responsibility and risk.

This behaviour model poses new opportunities for brands - fashion, car and media sectors now have new services that free customers from physical ownership.

Fashion retail has seen the arrival of WishWantWear and Girl Meets Dress - services that rent out designer clothes that customers wear once, then return. A step beyond traditional evening wear hire, consumers can choose a virtual designer wardrobe when they want it, but without the worry of damaging the garments or wearing them again to justify the purchase cost. The benefit for the brand is in spreading the cost of providing the service among many customers.

Cars are high value purchases that have also seen a big shift in consumption patterns. There’s been a big growth in car clubs such as Streetcar, where communal vehicles are available at roadside locations for an annual subscription fee plus a pay-as-you-go rate. They cater to consumers who want to use a car occasionally, without the hassle of running costs, loan repayments or loss of resale value.

With traditional car sales, more consumers are financing with Personal Contract Purchases (PCPs). These have hallmarks of cloud consumption as you pay in monthly installments and you can hand back, upgrade or keep the car at the end of the contract. So customers can change car more frequently without the worry of depreciation. Toyota has seen a big rise in uptake of PCPs over the past two years - from 26% of its UK retail car sales in 2009 to 46% last year (and in 2011 is tracking 54% at year-to-date) .They also seem to encourage brand loyalty.

Other forms of cloud consumption have been driven by necessity rather than choice. Changing lifestyles and economic conditions have created a trend towards rental in the property market. In current conditions, renting offers more flexibility and less responsibility over buying a property, especially with less job security and big fluctuations in house prices.

In the media industry, the transition into the cloud has been driven by a need to protecting revenues and copyright from online piracy. Encouraging people to stream music, films and TV through pay-to-play services, like Spotify and Love Film, is one way to stop illegal file sharing.

Adding to this trend, Amazon, Google and Apple have all recently launched cloud storage where consumers can keep their entire media libraries, playing and syncing to their own devices from there. However, some consumers may resent the imposition of cost for what they currently enjoy for free.

If brands are looking for ways to adopt the cloud consumption trend, it’s best for it to make consumer lives easier, rather than to solve business issues.

A great introduction to marketing

Simon Middleton’s new book What You Need To Know About Marketing was published a few weeks ago by Capstone. WYNTKAM is a highly readable introduction to the ‘big ideas’ in marketing, aimed primarily at executives who are non-marketing specialists.
 
Covering everything from customers and consumers, to products, services, market segmentation, brand positioning and the new world of social media, WYNTKAM is fast, fun and highly informative.

You can order a signed copy direct from our website, buy online from stores like Amazon, or from many bookshops, including airport and station branches of WH Smith where it's being promoted with other titles in the What You Need To Know About series. You can also download a free sample chapter here.

10 tips to develop your personal brand

Simon Middleton was recently asked to provide his ‘top tips’ for personal branding at work by a newspaper. Here they are:

Be distinctive
Your personal brand isn't about your qualifications or even how smart you are: it's about making yourself of distinctive recognisable value, no matter how modest your role. Even if you have the lowliest job, if you do it with an absolute commitment to excellence then you will get noticed.

Solve Problems
The greatest skill of all in a modern business or organisation is to be able to solve problems and to create more effective strategies. So instead of trying on the one hand just to 'fit in' or on the other hand to be 'innovative' for its own sake, strive instead actually to solve real problems. And remember that doesn't mean having to be cleverer than others: sometimes it just means applying a little more attentiveness.

Communicate clearly
The second greatest skill is to be able to communicate your ideas with regard for others' understanding and position. Nobody likes a show off or stubbornness, least of all managers in organisations. So be clear and make your case with conviction, but never be arrogant or uncompromising.

Be valuable
In a small business, or in a team within a big organisation, your personal 'brand' is best expressed through a compelling narrative about how and what you contribute. It's no good claiming to be valuable. That's like a comedian claiming to be funny. You have to 'be' valuable.

Don’t let others stop you
Along the way, and especially when your contribution is being noticed, you will find others who try to stop you, trip you up, or trap you. Pay no heed to those, other than to be aware of them. Engaging in inter-staff warfare can only damage your personal brand and will never enhance your career.

Tell an authentic tale
Great brands are founded on authenticity, not on lies. Never, ever, invent a better back story for yourself. You will, ultimately, be found out. Instead tell your real story: but tell it better by engaging emotions and imagination.

Tread your own unique career path
Don't go for promotion just because you think you should. Don't follow the career path as though it was pre-determined. It isn't. Think about your career strategy. What do you really, truly want to be doing in two or five years time? If a promotion helps take you there that's great. But if it doesn't, consider other approaches. A different company? Working for yourself?

Keep balanced
Learn to balance hope and fear. Anything worth doing (new job, big presentation etc) will induce fear and anxiety. But you need to step around that fear or your personal 'brand' will never progress. But don't fall into the X-Factor trap of assuming that you will succeed just because you want something badly enough. Never try to wing it! Prepare, prepare, prepare.

Change your attitude
If you hate your job but there appears no prospect of changing it in the near future, don't despair. Change your attitude to it instead: treat everything you do as 'training' for what comes next.

Learn from your mistakes
If you've made an error of judgement, or any other kind of mistake, do not try to hide it. Own up to it and take the flak. Learn something from it, explain what you have learned, show why having been through the experience you are now more valuable than ever, and be the guy who made the famous recovery!

Corporate storyteller joins BSG team

Brand success, and the internal health of organisations, is built in part upon the power of compelling and authentic storytelling. With that in mind, we are delighted to welcome expert corporate storyteller Tracy Kenny to the Brand Strategy Guru team.

Tracy helps people and organisations to connect more effectively with their audiences. By transforming the language of business into accessible and memorable messages, she builds ‘more human’ ways of communicating, so that organisations work together to deliver their brand.

Read more about Tracy here

Destination and place branding

Brand Strategy Guru has developed substantial experience in advising UK destinations about branding strategies, from The Broads national park to the resorts of Hemsby and Felixstowe, and the Oxfordshire environmental park and organisation now re-branded as The Earth Trust. Norfolk’s county tourism organisation Visit Norfolk, and the borough of Great Yarmouth (the UK’s third most popular visitor destination) have also consulted with us.

Simon Middleton has also spoken widely on the subject of place and destination branding in recent months, including to tourism and enterprise organisations in Stockholm, Banksa Bystrica in Slovakia, Glasgow, and most recently Belgrade, Serbia (pictured).

Brand Strategy Guru now offers a full brand analysis, audit, strategy and creative service for places and destinations anywhere in the world. Read more about place branding and contact us here.

Brand news in brief

> Brand new domains

Brand names could replace the com at the end of a web address, following a landmark decision by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann).
Following years of debate, this opening up the internet's naming system hopes to provide more secure and representative web addresses. It means domain names could end with almost any word in any language, including a branded suffix. The move will create new top-level domains (TLD) extensions in keywords (like .sport and .law) and cities (like .NYC) as well as brands (like .MTV).
Canon, Hitachi, IBM and Unicef are expected to be the first brands to buy the unique domains. However, with new TLDs costing $185,000 (£114,000) to register plus $25,000 (£15,000) a year in subscription costs, only large brands are likely to participate. Along with the cost, there's also concern that the new TLDs will cause consumer confusion. Everyone recognises .com so the value of a new brand TLD remains questionable.

> Rethinking brand Japan

Japan’s reputation as a safe and efficiently-governed country has been negatively altered since the tragic natural disasters in March. A recent survey by Interbrand looked at changes in perceptions about Japan before and after the earthquake among consumers in the US, UK and China.
The findings showed that overall perceptions of “Brand Japan” fell 12% and notions of ‘safety’ and ‘reliability’, usually the pillars of strength for Japanese brands, were significantly damaged. Concerns about radiation contaminating exports were also raised.
The tragic natural disasters were outside Japan’s control but its positive brand image had already been shaken by the Toyota car recall and controversy over its continued whaling activities.
Japan already has its work cut out to rebuild the physical damage to the country, but will need to address the state of its national brand too.
Read a more detailed analysis of Japan’s brand woes on the Nation Branding website.

> Going local

Large UK retailers have been criticised for their role in homogenising the UK High Street. However, now some are recognising the value of tailoring stores to a specific locality.
Marks & Spencer chief executive Marc Bolland recently announced that M&S planned to redesign its stores to suit local preferences, looking at factors such as affluence, demographics, local competition plus regional and ethnic differences, rather than store size.
Asda already does this with some supermarkets and the new owner of Waterstone’s book chain also wants to apply more tailored approach to its 300 stores.
Changes are likely to be subtle and unnoticeable to the customer but the hope is that going local will encourage them to buy more.

> Norway’s black metal export

Cultural training for foreign diplomats in Norway has taken an interesting turn… The Norwegian government is now offering them lessons in Black Metal sub-culture, after seeing a rise in enquiries about the hard-hitting musical genre from around the world.
Black metal, a sub genre to heavy metal music, emerged primarily from Norway in the early 1990s with bands like Mayhem, Darkthrone, Burzum, Immortal and Emperor. Its hallmarks include shrieked vocals, highly distorted guitars, blast-beat drumming and very fast tempos.

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