The Art of Branding

One thing you need to keep in mind in visibility seeking is whether there is room in the channel as they say in the business.

PR isn’t a limitless thing. There is only so much room or coverage that can be absorbed in any one topic (with some notable exceptions like a juicy scandal).

As a rule, only a certain number of people can dominate each arena. Only a certain number of new faces can be highlighted every year.

Look at a major American event like the Academy Awards, an event that is filled with high visibility celebrities. The media has to focus on the winners in the big categories, but after that, visibility reaches just those celebrities who stand out with a fabulous (or awful) dress or say something especially provocative (or incoherent) on stage. The channel simply doesn’t have enough room to give visibility to everyone who is “important” at the event.

Likewise, it’s harder to find room in the channel in a geographic market like New York City. It’s already crowded with top talent in every field. It will be much more difficult to break out. You have to come up with something special, much more so than in a less competitive market.

High Visibility

Expert on Television
Media Interviews
Book
National Media Articles
Charitable Boards
Corporate Boards
Keynote Speeches
Industry Panels
Website/Blog
High Society Events
Celebrity Pal

Low Visibility Tactics

Project Leader
High-level Presentations
Company Projects
Company Newsletter
Charitable Activities
Letters to Editor
Trade Articles
Industry Association Activities
Proprietary Reports
White Papers
Company Website

Look for ways to make your talks special, or set up a dramatic introduction to someone else. Think about how you enter a meeting. Don’t ever rush in. Enter slowly, and if you are in a company where you can pull it off, you can even enter grandly. I’ll never forget my college experience of Margaret Mead entering the auditorium from the back of the room and walking down the aisle with an enormous walking stick. I don’t remember what she said after all these years, but I will never forget her grand entrance.
When you talk about your ideas and proposals, use the branding techniques discussed earlier like “naming” your ideas to make them big ideas and coining words and expressions. Write an article for the company newsletter, or suggest a story idea about your department’s new initiative for the company intranet site. Don’t make the story about you. Make it about the project or the idea or the accomplishment. Glory will flow back to you, and you won’t appear self promoting.
Look at the comparison chart in the box below to see a list of high visibility and low visibility tactics used by business people. It’s not only a good review of what we’ve just discussed but may spawn additional suggestions of your own.

For most people in a company, you won’t be able to talk about the company or your job to the outside media unless you are a senior executive and have been authorized to do so. You probably can’t use high visibility tactics unless you are involved in something outside your job, such as chairing a fundraising drive for a non-profit or are active in a cause of personal interest to you.
But you can use a lot of low visibility tactics to get more visibility within your company and your industry.
Start by taking a more active role in volunteering for cross-functional projects at work. Ask to participate in or lead corporate initiatives where you can make a contribution. Besides learning some thing new, you will come into contact with executives outside your area in the company. Even something low key like setting up a monthly brown bag lunch and inviting senior executives and outside vendors to speak will help you get noticed outside your department.
Brush up your presentation skills so that you are an effective speaker and communicator internally at meetings and externally at industry and other groups. The better you are at speaking and communicating, the more opportunities will come your way.

With the expansion of media outlets and the internet, business people have lots of avenues are available for visibility.
You can enhance you visibility through interviews on network and cable television or consumer and business publications. You can give speeches at industry or outside events. You can provide expert testimony. You can seek board seats at other companies. You can become involved with charities or causes.
Like entertainment and sports celebrities before them, business people are pursuing line extensions outside their area of expertise to expand their visibility. Buying a sports team, running for political office or writing a book all pack a high visibility quotient.
Some business people are even trespassing on celebrity turf by launching television shows fueled by the success of Trump and his reality show, The Apprentice. And there are publicity-driven CEOs like Trump, Richard Branson and Martha Stewart who have turned PR into an art form. All are in a class by themselves, so adept are they at creating visibility and manipulating PR.
No one is immune these days to the draw of visibility. In the past, academics were not known outside a small circle unless they published a best-selling book. Now, academics appear regularly on talk shows, speak around the country and are quoted in the news, not to mention being profiled in the alumni magazine.

Gage your visibility measure by googling your name and seeing what comes up. Does your name come up? Are there many people with the same name diminishing your visibility? Is there an area where you could work on building your “Q score”? Write it down in cursive.

It used to be that business people shunned visibility, but that was before the celebrity CEO. The selection of a brand CEO can drive up a company’s stock.
Likewise, the troubles of a celebrity CEO can drive down a company stock as we saw with Martha Stewart and many others. When the ImClone scandal broke, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia lost hundreds of millions of dollars in value, and the stock price dipped even more after her conviction.
The damage was extreme because the company is in essence her self brand. However, the company’s stock price regained positive momentum after Martha and her company took charge of her self brand again. Indeed, the celebrity and reputation of a chief executive may be worth more than what the company’s material assets are worth.
Now, along with the rise of the celebrity CEO, there is the celebrity chef, celebrity entrepreneur, celebrity doctor, celebrity lawyer, celebrity hairdresser, you name it. People running businesses of all sorts realize that visibility can help their businesses flourish.

The Hollywood Model
Talent + Packaging + PR = Star

With celebrities, it’s easy to tell who the stars are and who is at the red hot center. You can look up each person’s Q score, a ranking of celebrities in terms of their fame and popularity quotient (www.qscores.com).
A high Q score translates into getting tens of millions of dollars for the star role in a hot new movie. Advertisers want you for product endorsements. Publishers are eager to snag your new book. And the opportunity list that fame opens up is long and growing as the line extensions keep breaking new ground.
Celebrities (or their agents) are constantly on the lookout for opportunities for visibility that would be good for their brand. You should always be on the lookout for ways to increase your visibility that are compatible with your self brand and your profession. Here’s an exercise to gage your version of a Q score, the G Score.

High visibility is often the strategy of choice for celebrities, television personalities and sports stars where the worth of their personal brand depends on mega visibility. Sometimes visibility is the only strategy for a celebrity (eg. Paris Hilton).

A celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
Daniel J. Boorstein

Celebrity-making involves positioning, image development, packaging, storyline, marketing messages and PR to build and extend a person’s “shelf life,” just like brand development. A great book to read on how the entertainment and sports world uses visibility to create stars is High Visibility, The Making and Marketing of Professionals into Celebrities by Irving Rein, et. al.

The list below summarizes the benefits that visibility gives you:

● Credibility
● Awareness
● Differentiation
● Higher Pay
● More Visibility
● Awards of Distinction
● Career Opportunities