The last time someone built a multi-million dollar personal brand that lasted for 30+ years, it was comedian and talk-show host Conan O’Brien.
Till date, the most elite institutes across the USA teach their students about his organic worldwide brand building, which was much ahead of his time and is still relevant as we speak. Let’s gather our learning from this eccentric comedian, and his brand ‘Team Coco’.
How did a writer from Boston rise to that level of an international brand to reckon with? The highly planned and strategised career of the comedian can be divided into the following tactical patterns.
Table: Learnings from Conan O’Brien’s on how to build and protect a brand
| Brand Attributes | Core Activities for Brand Building |
| 1. Turning yourself into the Product |
|
| 2. Critical Bond with the Consumers |
|
| 3. Adaptability as Visibility |
|
| 4. Character as a Product Offering |
|
| 5. Team Building as Sustainability |
|
| Outcome- | Over time, the interaction between these core activities became Conan O’Brien’s personal brand, which he called, ‘Team Coco’, after his nickname. |
There is a lot to learn from this case study- A single person has been instrumental in growing and nurturing his talents into a worldwide brand that is still relevant, profitable and exceptionally sustainable.
This is the type of brand that we wish our partners to build for themselves. In the following section, we decode how each core activity contributes to making a personal brand.
The first step of making a brand is to identify a domain, which aligns with your aptitude, interests and abilities.
Say you are interested in Tech, Edtech and Finance. So, you can add value to Banking and Education.
If you are interested in History, Language and Writing, you can add value to Storytelling.
If you like Tech, Painting and Mathematics, you can represent graphical communication.
If you are good at History, Fashion and Travel, you can represent cross-cultural design communication.
While branding building requires extensive learning on the part of the leader and his/ her team, we suggested that you choose a field in which you are already interested.
This is because developing interest in a new domain is highly difficult. But if you choose a domain of interest, then learning new skills can be done on the go, instead of joining academic programs or formal degrees. In short, play to your strengths and go from there.
Choosing a product also includes deciding whether you wish to represent a good or a service. That is, for example, whether you will be selling cupcakes out of your dorm or whether you will be a food influencer reviewing the cupcakes. The decision is simple- whether you wish to wish to be the one sourcing, producing and distributing your product or whether you wish to be a ‘brand representative’ or an ‘influencer’. The former is highly risky and requires dedicated effort in so much as making your presence felt. The latter is highly competitive, making it easy to get lost in the crowd.
You can also choose a middle path and represent the marketplace or aggregators. Who are they?
Marketplaces or aggregators are people who gather a particular type of services under a single platform and let customers select one or more services. They can be like the ‘Try Guys’, who ‘eat the menu’ across restaurants so people can pick their favourite. Or they can be like the ‘Master’s Union’ that curates and puts together the most hands-on MBA courses for students to become hands-on entrepreneurs.
Most individuals hire brand consultants to market and sell the products responsible only for the tech part of the aggregation. Ohh My Brand is one such brand consultant helping brand entrepreneurs realise their potential.
But whether you are a product, service or marketplace, it is essential that you pick out a core domain and 3- 4 auxiliary domains within which you will expand your brand. For example, if you choose EdTech as your core domain, your auxiliary domains will be Overseas Education, Student Accommodation, Academic Consultation, and Exam Training. Your brand can start from the core domain and expand in any of the auxiliary domains. Or it can shift completely into an auxiliary domain over time.
The following figure is an example of the same.
Now that you have picked a domain aligned with your skill set and aptitudes, you need people to know that you are ready to tell them a story. The story is an essential part of a brand. In fact, the brand leader grows up in the process of telling his brand’s story. Why is that so?
The story of a brand is preceded by selecting the values followed by the brand. Your brand will have two types of values: The hard values, which are open to adaptation and experimentation and the soft values, which do not change at all.
The hard values depend upon the domain of your preference and the skills you have and wish to explore within your domain. The soft values comprise the principles of production and the moral values you will adhere to in the process.
Say, from Fig 1, you are a food influencer and writer. Your hard values will be-
Your soft values will be-
Combining the hard values and soft values, you will get the script of your story, which will change as your brand grows. Knowledge about your product will help you be agile enough to adapt to the hard values. Skills in your domain will help you live up to the standards and norms set by your soft values.
This is a sensitive stage of your storytelling. Make sure that you set your hard and soft values accurately and after a good amount of market research, so you will not have to deviate from the plan and lose earning opportunities in the process. While emergent adaptation is highly recommended, deliberate strategising is indispensable. In fact, the stronger your strategies, the more prepared you will be to evolve and adapt and read the market proactively.
The following figure clarifies the process of developing a brand story after product identification.
Identifying your brand’s story and storyline is getting to know your brand internally. However, your external communication of the brand has to be equally inspiring and impactful. Overexposure and under-exposure can both affect your brand adversely. Delay in responsivity can lead to a lack of visibility and lost opportunities, while repetitive messaging can feel like an imposition.
Newer brands shave this habit of flooding the virtual space with a plethora of content, which may top the charts due to their SEO maneuvres, but have a low conversion rate because the website is not interactive, the content is ineffective and most importantly, the viewer does not know where to look.
The first point to remember is that content-search is like wish-fulfilment. You imagine it in your head before you click on a link. This gap between what you want to say and what your customers want to hear makes all the difference. Keep the website neat and direct the customers towards the content and the products very clearly.
The content part involves story-telling. Remember, your customers must be more excited than you if you want them to read about your product. So, do not hesitate to be sophisticated and create aspiration. After all, we can all enter a kiosk, but we dress up for a Michelin-star restaurant and even pay a premium for comparable food. That is to say, you have to discipline your content and communication-driven story-telling with set schedules aligned with communication channels.
See, each communication channel has its strengths and capacity to make certain content bring your sales. Always think about- Frequency, Format and Volume.
Long-form content is informative and can serve navigation purposes, only if you can make a customer look for more. Study the blogs of ‘Wall Street Prep’, and how they inform about separate domains by linking the concepts. This is called ‘synergy’. Your audience should want to navigate from one blog, report and long article to another, considering themselves better off with the knowledge. Yes, not reading your long content should create FOMO, or else, it is not serving its purpose.
Your short-form content will have mainly navigation purposes, keeping your audience hooked to your communication for longer than they realise. But, when your short-form content leads your audience successfully to your long-form content, know that you have completed the loop. This inter-format synergy will lead to ‘transactions’, that is, the glorious ‘sales’. This is when you become a part of the lives of your audience.
Finally, we come to Frequency. This is a part of channel-based communication. Every channel generates a successful response to a different frequency of publication. At Ohh My Brand, we test out divergent frequencies of differently formatted content to generate the optimal response at a sustained rate. For example, for every LinkedIn post, you should have 7 interconnected blogs ready to be viewed, out of which, 5 should be about relevant topics and 2 about light-hearted lifestyle conversations.
The following table describes the weekly social calendar of a newly launched brand.
Table: Weekly Social Calendar for a New Good/ Service-based Brand
| Weekly Social Calendar | LinkedIn Post (Expert/ Personal Story-telling) | Collaboration, Announcement on Insta | Blogs (B2B/ B2C) | Newsletters |
| Monday | 1 Expert posts, 1 Creative post | 1 Internal Team dynamics | 2 B2B niche | Quirky, funny, Trivia |
| Tuesday | – | 1 Product-based post | – | – |
| Wednesday | 2 Personal Stories | – | 2 B2C casual | News Bulletins |
| Thursday | – | 1 small team activity-based post | – | – |
| Friday | 1 Expert post, 1 Creative post | 1 Collaboration with partners | 1 B2B casual, 1 B2C informative | Call to Action |
This may be the trickiest and the most essential of all the stages. How do you know that you are going in the wrong direction before it is too late or before you trap yourself trapped in an inescapable silo? This has happened to the best brand leaders, like the Masterchef franchise, the US-based Late Night Talk-Shows or even ‘SNL’. The solution is simple. Just ask yourself- “Is my brand still interesting?”
In the initial days, you will struggle. It happens to everybody. You sink before you swim. But you will still register an upward curve. You will have ‘views’, before you have ‘likes’, before you have ‘comments’, before you have a ‘purchase order’. But, if you don’t feel like showing up and producing something new, know that something is wrong. The connection between your voice and your audience is lost and needs to be re-established.
In terms of quantifiable output metrics, consistency is key. An increasing number of people should be looking forward to hearing from you in the gaps between consecutive publications. The rate of increase may be small, but people will be leaving you feedback and pointed comments on what they liked and what they did or what they wished you had done. All feedback is good feedback because they are not skipping you. Incorporate that and respond fast, and you have got yourself a conversation.
Keep your communication classy, your product relevant and your story authentic. In this case, the ‘colour theory’ comes into use. You can make any colour out of the primary colours- Red, Blue and Yellow. In terms of content strategy, you can make any variation if you are addressing the basic psychological needs of the consumers. They include the need for comfort, safety, belongingness, beauty, validation, recognition and variety. These are also known as ‘Maslow’s hierarchy of needs’. As long as your product and story meet a combination of these ‘needs’, you are relevant and thriving.
So, the answer to “Is my brand still interesting?” will be positive if you address people’s need for comfort, safety, belongingness, beauty, validation, recognition and variety. When these needs are met, your audience will be looking for something far more precious from you- ‘Familiarity’. That is when they will search actively for you, want to live your experiences and give you the feedback that you need to sustain. These needs are all the performance metrics you need. The following figure summarises the same.
It takes a village to raise a brand and a self-made individual is a brand worth nurturing.
At Ohh My Brand, we find a strong establishment for every aspiring brand leader through our rigorous market research, active professional guidance, expert storytelling and step-by-step hand-holding. If you have a product capable of moving consumer parameters, we will help you build your brand narrative, reach your target audience and explore further segments to serve.
Our services are based on the principles of expertise, empathy, and ethicality.
Our clients are a part of our shared community of stakeholders. We have known them starting from the drawing board through their break-even right into their thriving stability. And at each stage, we have written and ensured their growth with our stories. We have moderated the relationship between the brand and its consumer demographics by exploring and expanding into profitable distribution channels, creating affirmative associations, recall and curiosity.
We make nascent brands aware of their distinct voice and stand differentiated in their power to thrive.
Website conversion rates are critical to achieving online success in 2024. In a fast-paced digital world, simply driving traffic is not enough; it’s about converting those visitors into paying customers or leads. The key lies in optimizing every element of the user experience, from page load speed to personalized content. In this guide, you’ll discover […]
Creating a memorable personal brand is more important than ever. With the perfect personal branding strategy, you can distinguish yourself in a crowded market and build a loyal following. This blog highlights some of the top personal branding experts who are setting the bar high with their innovative approaches to personal branding. Why Personal Branding Matters Personal branding […]
