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O P I N I O N
Authentic values
In the AEC industry, both individuals and firms need to brand and present themselves as ‘core brands for core viewers.’
C hristina Zweig Niehues and I are conducting a Building your Personal Brand workshop at the 2018 Zweig Group Hot Firm + A/E Industry Awards Conference in Dallas and we hope you’ll attend. This will be a roll-up-your-sleeves, “git ‘er done” (it is Dallas after all) kind of session, and you’ll come out of it with a much clearer understanding of how to build, renovate, and evolve your brand. So, in preparation for the conference, I thought I’d give you a little background from personal experience, on brand creation and brand destruction in the media.
Steve Thomas GUEST SPEAKER
Personal brand, as we think about it, also includes your firm’s brand. Personal brands are “core brands” distinguished from the mass market brands like Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson. The Steve Thomas or Zweig Group brand is a different animal than Band- Aid or Bengay. Back in the day you didn’t have to worry about building a brand because that’s what your resume, curriculum vitae, or company’s reputation did. Plus, there were no channels by which to project your brand, other than the mainstream media – three networks and PBS – and newspapers and radio. Now everyone has a “channel” in the form of a website, Facebook page, Twitter feed, Instagram account, and so on, and everyone has a “receiver” in the form of a smartphone, tablet, or laptop. Generally, your receiver is always in your pocket, briefcase or purse, so you can always project your brand, and tune in to other brands. If you think of your personal brand as a media offering which competes for eyeballs with all the other media offerings out there – everything on
the web and social media that tries to grab your attention from the London Economist to ads about burning belly fat – then your brand will obey the laws pertaining to building and maintaining brands in the media. I started thinking about branding years ago on This Old House as our ratings climbed and we became the most-watched regular series on PBS. I continued to think about it as we built the whole Renovation Nation brand on Discovery’s Planet Green. The two shows were quite different from each other – TOH was PBS, Renovation Nation was Discovery, TOH was 30 minutes, Renovation Nation was a commercial hour, TOH was of the “Ken Burns pace,” kind of slow, and Renovation Nation was on steroids. Yet both programs stuck to the “core PBS values” of “Inform, Entertain, and Inspire.” Inspiration sounds like an outdated value, but really it belongs to the cluster of values known as “authenticity.” Think of the success of Patagonia as a brand. The clothing is produced by the world
See STEVE THOMAS, page 4
THE ZWEIG LETTER July 30, 2018, ISSUE 1258
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