Building your personal brand. Element No. 6: Sustaining your brand:

Right performance, the way to build personal brand

[Continued from last week]

Over the past six weeks we talked about the principles of personal branding and under which the first five elements, Product 'You', Packaging, Communication, Positioning and Performance were discussed. Today it’s about Sustaining your brand.

It takes years to build a successful personal brand, but only an instant to destroy it. All the famous personal brands have risen to their current status after a lot of painstaking effort. Failure is common for people but have we ever wondered how some famous personal brands falter? Don’t you have local examples? You do, right?

Performance, the right way is the only way to build a sustainable personal brand. Trying short-term tactics and resorting to unethical practices may make you famous for good or bad reasons but will not make you popular or respected.

Compliance and conformance with the rules of the game is the bare minimum if one is serious about building a sustainable brand.

Maintain the brand promise

Delivery of brand promise is critical to gain loyalty and respect. And if that promise breaks, you don’t have a brand. Over marketing or communication causes the brand to become too common and thereby the brand might lose value because of brand fatigue.

Too much exposure, especially irrelevant exposure or association makes the brand become undesirable. Actions are stronger than words, and this is personified by the respected personal brand. Respected brands are those which consistently prove through their work ethic that they are reliable and trustworthy on the inside and out.

Personal brands need to earn respect through differentiated and improved performance. If and when Brands fail to perform, as in any product, your customers will reject you. Continuous self-improvement for improved product quality is a must for progressive results to stay ahead of your competition.

When people start believing in a particular brand, they have certain expectations and satisfaction levels attached to it as well. If the brand fails to meet these intrinsic expectations and fall short of what the customers believe of them, they are bound to fail.

Those who were too slow to adapt to the changing environment lost the race in the long run. To stay ahead of competition, regular alignment of your value mix to be distinctive and sustainable is a must.

To sustain your brand equity, maintain your share of voice with frequent engagements.You go out of sight – you will be out of sight.

Maintaining visibility hence is so critical via your regular appearance. It’s no different to product and service brands you buy day in day out.

Learn to be authentically and politically correct. You should always do the right thing and know when to have trade-offs so you could have greater influence and better opportunities later. Exercise good judgment at all times, give support to your associates and maintain harmony, particularly if egos come into play.

Remember that your customer’s perception of how good a brand you are is of utmost importance – mind you in brand management it’s not what you think you are but what others think you are.

Continuous product development, communication of your value contributions, re-positioning versus changing competition, improved performance in the right way help sustain your brand image.

You have heard the premise that ‘staying on top is more difficult than reaching the top’. Personal branding is no different.

Overall there are many reasons of why brands fail. However, it comes down to the fact that you cannot blame a product failure to branding efforts. The product needs to have an inherent value for the branding to work.

We are living in a world where water is sold with a name, clothes are being marketed with signature signs and basic food items are being promoted with trademarks.

The concept of personal branding has completely shaped the way people respond to people. Be a brand and be admired for more a fulfilling life – it's value for your customers and satisfaction for you.