A company’s brand is often built around its vision, mission and goal statements, but it’s more than that. It’s the behaviors. It isn’t what we say our brand is, it’s what people experience. A company’s employees demonstrate the brand, individually and collectively, creating a culture. Your brand’s culture either has positive, negative, or neutral impact. When a culture is in alignment, the brand will have positive impact. When it is without integrity, it will have negative impact. And when it’s left unattended, its impact will be neutral, meaning not even thought about by your desired stakeholders one way or the other. It is incumbent upon an organization to develop its people and develop their brand’s culture in order to create demand for their brand!
The Brand Classics. . . Plus One: Purpose
Brand classically has been defined by the 3 P’s – the Promise, the Positioning, and the Personality. Michele recognized in today’s world, with transparency accessible and authenticity demanded, we must go deeper and look at what she identifies as the Brand’s fourth and most meaningful ‘P’ – Purpose!
Michele guides companies and their individuals to reach unimaginable outcomes by aligning their Purpose, Passion, and Profit. She helps leadership align internal philosophies, behaviors, and choices to create strength in the brand via congruency. As a result, she positively influences corporate cultures.
Her consulting methodology is unique. As a Brandologist, she helps companies, departments, and their individuals, to examine purpose from the inside out; using science, tools, and wisdom to guide each client. With genuine purpose revealed, what you stand for (promise), how to differentiate yourself (positioning) and how to authentically express it (personality) aligns to organically architect a sustainable, congruent, and relatable brand.
Five Steps, One Team
Having shaped corporate brands for over two decades, Michele observes that the brand is not a marketing department’s role but an overarching operational role. The brand needs to build an employee brand that attracts the right-fit talent to help design, drive, nurture, and ‘be the brand’!
This shift in perspective is why Michele’s talk, Create Demand for Your Brand, continues to receive rave reviews. When consulting, Michele and her team help navigate the brand building process which has she had distilled into 5 steps. This process is a journey to be navigated whether for an organization, a department/division, or across the employee population.
The first step is the most challenging and requires genuine introspection. An outside perspective to guide this exploration is often very valuable as it can be much like trying to operate on oneself. The rewards are plentiful; when this work is embraced both top down and bottom up an organization (and all of their people) can live their purpose, thrive with passion and reap the profits.
Create Demand For Your Brand
How to Align Your Purpose, Passion and Profit
Twenty-five years of brand consulting and hundreds of keynotes and workshops later, Michele finally sat down to fulfill the innumerable requests to write a book that followed the same 5 steps she had been teaching to so many.
She is honored to say that it became a number one best seller on Amazon in pre-launch. This is thanks to the many who really meant it when they said they wanted the book!
Whether you are a leader in a Fortune 500, a new manager, an entrepreneur, or a recent grad – this book is for you! Why? Because we all want to have influence, to make an impact, to be heard, respected and valued.
To do this, we need to identify what makes us special. What makes us who we uniquely are. Only when we have arrived at this can we aspire to build our brand by design. When people are not self-aware, and not seen as congruent and authentic, they are not compelling and it inhibits their brand from creating demand.
A brand that is authentic, that is built from the inside out, is both powerful and meaningful. A brand that is built from the outside in, is synthetic; it is manufactured and is simply not sustainable. The 5 steps inside this book map out not just what to do, but how to do it in a way that is in complete alignment with who you actually are!
Listen here while Michele reads an excerpt for you from her book. Have you ever wondered why it is so difficult to ‘package’ yourself at a networking event, or write your bio, or your summary on LinkedIn, or on your resume? Within Michele’s 5 steps on designing your brand, Step 3: Your Unique Message, addresses this issue.
If you want a magnetic brand, one that will create demand for you then you want a brand that aligns you with who you genuinely are and with the right-fit organization and stakeholders. This book is written for each of a company’s brand stewards – both their leadership and their employees.
Michele’s ability to navigate between leadership and support teams, combined with her deep understanding of our company, made her an invaluable team member/partner in re-building our brand infrastructure. She and her team helped us transition to a new distribution model with internal communications guidance and with customized sales training programs over a period of two years. I would gladly partner with Michele again and confidently recommend her brand strategy, sales strategy and speaking services to anyone wanting a true partnership to move the dial for their company!
J.B., MullinTBG, A Prudential Financial company, Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing