Jackie’s blog

Just been reading the latest update from www.trendwatching.com  If you are thinking of starting a business this is a great site to sign up to as it keeps you abreast of what is happening in the world - especially in the areas of consumer buying trends. The latest free e-bulletin focuses on status stories as being the next big thing. Consumers don’t just want things anymore they want experiences - and not necessarily run of the mill experiences that anyone can have when they buy a particular product or service. People now want to customise everything to themselves and have a story of their own to tell about their purchases. A couple of things that caught my eye in the bulletin - a company called Hubwear in the states produces T shirts that display a wearer’s favourite travel routes in airport codes (so when people ask them what their T shirt means they have a story to tell!) and another company called Yosimiya in Japan is selling bags of rice with a photo of your newborn baby on it, the name and date of birth and then, guess what, the bag contains the baby’s exact weight in rice. Think of the stories that will pop up when passing that around. How long will rice stay okay in a bag anyway - imagine ‘You weighed this much when you were born 20 years ago!’ Amazing. There are loads more examples in the bulletin so if you are thinking of starting your own business it is definately worth signing up with this site. 

I am about to do some more branding sessions with graduate entrepreneurs - or should I say solopreneurs or minipreneurs (there are so many lovely variations on the ‘preneur’ word nowadays according to the latest trendwatching briefing) - and I decided to do some research around freelance photographers and their online brand image. Talk about first impressions. Some are really poor, not only are they not that great to look at but also not that helpful in terms of information and examples of work. It is sad really. If you go to all the trouble of making a shop window on the web for you and your offerings then surely it makes sense to put real time and effort in that to make sure it is ‘on brand’.

Some do get it right though. Two I really like are Matt Stuart’s (some of his quirky street shots made me laugh out loud and his simple, easy to use and delightful website echos his work which relies on a small camera, patience and optimism to capture those funny moments we all experience from time to time when we smile to ourselves and wish we had a camera to hand - lovely). The other is Michael William’s (his black background, minimal, stripped down looking site echos his urban, understated and frequently black and white images and you can see why his style appeals to young, urban, streetwise looking bands). So if you are going to have a website, try and get it ‘on brand’.

Incidentally, at the Reading workshop, when looking at goals I asked the students - If you knew you couldn’t fail, what would you do with your life? They all said this question really opened up their thinking. That’s what a bit of NLP reframing does for you. The other one I like was dreamed up by my friend Les Jones, who says ‘Imagine I have here a careers blank cheque and 3 years from now you can cash it in for any job you want - what job do you want me to write on it?’ What a great question to get you started.

Last week I spent a great afternoon introducing some Reading University students to the Personal Branding process and afterwards, doing my usual self-reflective analysis of the session, I decided that the section on Values needed working on. Values are so important to the way we live our lives. They are buried deep inside our subconscious and have a lot to do with the way we feel about almost anything we do. So I wanted to tackle this part in a more thorough but challenging way. I got out my Anthony Robbins Unlimited Power book because he has a whole chapter on values, and value hierarchies, and I wanted to remind myself of what he said - he is such a powerful communicator that he makes you think again about loads of things. I have now come up with a couple of new ways to tackle this which I will try when I do my next session.

Anyway, all this digging into values again got me thinking about my own and I realised that ‘being fit’ is one of my values but it is very low down on my values hierarchy. This struck me as not really being right as I am getting older. I need to lift this value up a bit and give it more house room. So I have convinced my daughter to sign up with me for a couple of 10k races and, lo and behold, I have started jogging again. Why? Because I clearly hold the value of sticking to a goal once set or taking on a challenge and proving I can do it, much more highly than just keeping fit. I feel much more motivated to run now that I have a couple of races coming up. I have also started rallying round other people to come along and cheer us on or join us. Again, I have a very powerful value of not letting people down, so by roping other people in I will find it impossible to drop out of the challenge. Finally, I have paid out good money to enter and another of my strong values is to not waste money. Clearly, to get and stay fit I am going to have to find ways of using my other, more powerful values to drive me along. Interesting eh?

This is quite clever. The elements of Personal Branding based on the Periodic table. Click on the image to go to original.

Built by Kolbrener, a corporate branding agency

Been doing some one to one branding work with some young graduates and they have been struggling with some of the early sections on Vision, Purpose, Values and Passions. It seems that the things they immediately think of as being passionate about are all about enjoying themselves, having fun with their friends, getting hammered and having a great laugh. From listening to them talk about life at university it sounds almost like living through a ‘Big Brother’ experience with a bit of study and essay writing thrown in. When I was at uni (gosh, that sounds old and boring) I was heavily involved in student politics - taking minibuses of women to Greenham Common and circling the base by holding hands, attending Anti Nazi League Rallies and campaigning against campuses being closed and such like. When I mention this, many young graduates now look at me like I’m mad. My generation (sounds better if spoken with a deep, Yorkshire accent) were also busy in all sorts of clubs and societies but this seems to be less prevelant nowadays too.

Someone told me about a radio programme today in which some professor or other was talking about the work he has been doing, studying the current generation of young people at university. Apparently every year he asks new entrants if they consider themselves to be Adults, Young Adults, Young People, Teenagers, Children. In the past most replied Adults or Young Adults. Nowadays most answer Young People. He was saying that university students increasingly see university as an extension of their teenage years and not their entrance to adulthood; they want to put that off for a few more years. I can’t say I blame them with loans and debts looming up, astronomical mortgages to find and some employers who pay high salaries to graduates but expect them to sleep under their desks.

So, the point of all this? Well it can make Personal Branding a bit difficult. Why? Because Personal Branding is about looking at where you want to position yourself in the world and if all you want to do is not think about where you are going to position yourself in the world, well at least not until you are a bit older and have had some fun in your life, that can be hard. Though work and fun can be synonymous if you can get yourself into the right place. Interesting.

When sorting out your Personal Brand one of the things you have to give very careful consideration is your values. These are the sorts of rules that we live our lives by. Why? Because we are unlikely to be happy in a job or doing work that undermines, ignores or contradicts our basic values. So, for example, if one of your values is ‘it is important to use your head and think about things’, in other words to use your intelligence, you would need a lobotomy to be happy in a boring, repetitive job which, once mastered, requires little if any intelligent thinking.

We all have values. They can sometimes be acquired by reading and learning (we are all getting more environmentally aware and concerned thanks to the efforts of the media and the campaigning activities of people who value enormously our planet and want to protect it). Sometimes our values come from our peers - we mix with a group of people who have values that rub off on us. This often happens when people go to university, for example. Their outlook on life changes from exposure to people who hold different values. However, far and away the biggest influence is our parents. Their constant messages about what is right and wrong, what is acceptable and what isn’t, when we are growing up can do one of two things. Either we take those values on board and they become part of us, or we reject all or some of them. In order to work out your Personal Brand you have to work out what your values are (well, that is one part of doing it).

My father died a couple of years ago and at his funeral I gave a speech about the 5 important lessons he had taught me. These were:

• Love begats love and hate begats hate
• There are no rights without responsibilites
• The most important thing to learn is how to think
• Whatever you do in life, do it with conviction
• There is no such word as ‘can’t’

I realise now that these form the basis of many of my values. I then got to thinking about what values I might have instilled in my daughters, so I asked my youngest one, Helen, what she thought. After a quick think she came up with these:

• Life is about work but work brings meaning, purpose, friends, experiences and income (if you find a job you love?)
• Be financially independent - manage your money and don’t spend what you haven’t got (and, in particular, don’t ask your mum for any!)
• When you are depressed and hit rock bottom, snap out it (I often say that it is good to hit rock bottom because then at least you stop digging!)

Wow! It wasn’t what I expected at all. But there you go. Food for thought.