Industry Brand

What does your Industry Brand say about you?

Your Industry Brand is a brief phrase or statement — a distinctive, memorable point of reference –  that identifies you to Industry professionals, your peers, your readers, and the media. It is simply how you are remembered as a business professional and as an individual.

I generally consider the importance of an Industry Brand self-evident, but let’s set aside the intrinsic power of presenting a consistent, engaging persona in all of your business and interpersonal interactions, and get down to the bare bones of the matter: developing and maintaining a consistent Industry Brand just makes life easier on everyone (primarily you).

Being in public can be a tiring process. So perhaps the single biggest benefit of having an Industry Brand is that you don’t have to think about how to present yourself in public. You simply KNOW. You know what clothes to buy and what styles to wear, you know how to manage your reactions and interact with people. You know what people have come to expect of you and you work to meet those expectations. It may sound like an awful lot of consistency, but it’s truly freeing – you don’t have to be all things to all people, you have to be three (or four) things to all people (at least, people in the industry). And those three (or four) things are the elements that make up your Industry Brand.

You’ll find, too, that once you’ve created an Industry Brand, it becomes a personal expectation for yourself. And when you go against that Brand, it can be EXTREMELY bothersome. So do NOT choose a term like “Speedy” as part of your Brand if your process is slow and painstaking. This is not the time to craft a statement that recreates yourself, this is simply the time to identify your BEST self.

Which brings up the most important points of all regarding your Industry Brand:

YOU MUST BOTH LOVE YOUR INDUSTRY BRAND AND BE ABLE TO LIVE IT.

Because your Industry Brand will follow you around and jump out at you in dark alleys. It will be with you every time you step into public as your “professional” persona (and sometimes, it’ll show up even when you’re not in “professional” mode). It will wave at you from the middle of crowded rooms, and be standing next to you in the elevator when you’re dead on your feet after a long day at a conference. And when you do falter, it’ll be right there to make faces at you until you get back on track.

So as you go through your Industry Brand Development process, I urge you to ONLY go with an Industry Brand option that you absolutely love, and one that you can most likely manage even on a trying day. We all have moments (days, weeks) where we are off-kilter, of course. But your Industry Brand should represent the best “you” that you can be, on a consistent basis.

FINAL NOTE: Remember, too, that the only reason why you need a Brand in the first place, is because you are selling (or communicating) something about yourself. So as you develop yours, if you have to make a choice between a term that simply sounds awesome and another term that sounds awesome AND would be a characteristic of someone who is successful in your chosen profession, go with the latter term.