accounts, podcasts, video, and so on (see Chapters 7, 12, and 13)
Service brand
A service brand is a set of unique qualities, including the service type and quality. How a service provider is marketed, sold, and delivered makes it trusted and valued in the minds of consumers. With product branding, you’re selling goods, whereas service branding is more about selling a relationship or an experience. Service branding involves being professional, likeable, and trustworthy at every touchpoint:
Marketing materials, including business cards and brochures (see Chapter 10)
Online marketing via email, website, blog, social media, podcasts, and video (see Chapters 7, 12, and 13)
Sales meetings with customers (see Chapter 3)
Service calls and other forms of service delivery (see Chapter 3)
Personal brand
A personal brand is a person’s unique combination of skills, expertise, personality, and values that defines their identity and reputation in the minds of clients, partners, and associates and is used to advance their career. A strong personal brand positions someone as an expert in a specific field or industry or as an authority on a topic of interest. Personal branding is often used to launch a person’s career as a coach, trainer, speaker, consultant, author, actor, influencer, and so on. In a way, a personal brand is a business, product, and service brand all rolled into one with a personal touch.
Effective personal branding requires the following:
Knowledge, skills, or expertise: Be good at what you do.
Value: Commit to delivering value in everything from the content you use to market yourself to the products and services you deliver or recommend.
Creativity and originality: To differentiate yourself from the competition, offer something unique.
Authenticity: Be real, not phony.
Exposure: Blog, podcast, post YouTube videos, join relevant social media communities, and make yourself available for interviews.
Consistency: Find your niche (as explained in the next section), stick with it, and make sure that all your personal branding efforts are aligned.
To create your own personal brand, follow these steps:
1 Conduct a self-assessment to get to know who you are and what you can offer of value to others.
2 Decide who and what you want to be associated with (other brands, businesses, people, products, and services).
3 Identify and get to know your target market.Who’s your audience? Who’s likely to follow you and why?
4 Follow established leaders in the field you’re focused on.Find out what they offer of value and how they differentiate themselves. How can you differentiate yourself from them?
5 Network with others in your industry.Get involved in the communities where established leaders and your future followers hang out, keeping a low profile at first to get a feel for the culture and norms. Be careful not to step on anyone’s toes as you begin to network, at least until you get a feel for the community and people get to know and accept you.
6 Start to put yourself out there via blog posts, podcasts, social media, video, and so on.
Identifying or Creating a Niche Market
One of the biggies in branding is differentiation — the process of identifying or creating and then promoting the unique characteristics of your business, product, service, or yourself. You need to figure out what’s different, special, and better about what you bring to the market.
An effective approach to differentiation is going small. Instead of trying to be everything to everybody, aim to be something special to a small segment of your market. Identify or create a niche — a narrow opening or unique opportunity in the broader market you’re pursuing. Narrowing your focus increases your impact while (counterintuitively) expanding, not limiting, your opportunities. It enables your brand to stand out in the global marketplace, which is crowded with competitors vying for consumers’ attention.
To find a niche, start by answering the following questions:
Does your brand offer a unique solution to a problem, and if so, how is it unique?
What does your brand offer that competing brands don’t?
What are your brand’s use cases (different ways that my products/services can be used)? List your products/services, and identify all possible use cases for each.
How is your brand different from and better than the competition?
Does your brand fill an unmet need in the marketplace or serve an underserved group of consumers? If so, how?
(For a personal brand) What makes you so special? Think in terms of appearance, personality, knowledge, expertise, and skill set — every ingredient that goes into making you you.
Who’s going to buy what you’re selling?
Why do people need or value what your brand offers?
Examine your answers to these questions, and look for patterns or areas of overlap, which is usually where you’ll discover your niche. For my Girl Gang brand, I knew that women empowerment was a big and growing movement and that women like to make fashion statements. In those two areas of overlap, I recognized an unmet need: Women needed a way to express and demonstrate their support for female empowerment, and they could do that through a fashion statement and by supporting women-owned businesses. I had discovered my niche.
In the following sections, I cover specific approaches to identifying or creating a niche.
Solving a difficult problem
People often ask sarcastically, “Are you looking for trouble?” as if that’s a bad thing. People who look for trouble are the visionaries and inventors of the world, and they’re often the richest and most successful as well. They spotted a problem, devised a solution for it, and created a lucrative niche.
Just think how many books, courses, and seminars have been sold to help couples solve their relationship issues. Consider all the commercial technologies that have been developed to solve problems in just one small area: data security. Entire industries have been created to solve problems ranging from not having enough time to shop for groceries or being unable to flag down a taxi to dealing with energy shortages and climate change.