Mark Jacot

As promised last week, some thoughts from a really interesting half day run by Penny Sloane.  It was a great session, well worth contacting her if you are interested in this. I’m conscious I’m not a brand expert, the marketing folks reading this will know far more and I’d appreciate any other ideas. Here are the key points I took away.

Penny stressed the need for a brand to be authentic and also consistent across all our interactions – paper (CV, Blogs, Twitter, Linkedin….) telephone (voice) and in person. It’s about the how and emotions as much as the what – compare BA and Virgin – the product is the same, the brand feels very different.

To form a brand, knowing your audience is key. For example my audience now (people who might employ me) is very different to when I was working in Co-op. Focus on how you might add value to your potential consumers of your product.  What makes you unique? And remember – keep it authentic and real – how would you describe yourself to your best friends?

One great tip – take a look at www.profiled.com. This great tool crawls and searches for all the web coverage on you and what sites are saying, and where you appear. And you get regular updates and can publish an excellent overview of yourself that’s a bit different from Linkedin. I’m still experimenting with that one.

We then spent time working on our own personal brand and unique points, and you can see some of this in my updated About Mark page. Hopefully its a bit less sales focused and more reflective of what I am really like.

Lastly brand is, to quote Jeff Bezos the founder of Amazon, “What people say about you when you are not in the room”. What do you think?