I read somewhere

that the brand Kellogs in the USA run an ad one season that said, “Taste them again for the first time”.  Whether that worked or not is not the point. The point is that they were refreshing their brand and keeping it on the map.

Conquering is Just a Start

A personal brand once acquired has to be consolidated and maintained. A soldier will tell you that perhaps the difficult part of a war is to consolidate a territory that has been conquered. The difficult part is not to win it, but to keep the win. The same thing is true about a personal brand.

With branding, creating is not the only thing that you can do and think that you have finished the game of forming a personal brand. One has to keep a brand presence and brand perception relevant at all times. This is done by giving your brand a refreshing.

Front End and Back End Of A Brand

You can either refresh your brand from the back-end, something that will eventually be seen by your customers or you can refresh it from the front end, something that will be immediately noticed by your audience. Whatever the case, it is always going to be up to you to determine what part of your brand needs refreshing.

In the previous article, we introduced this subject. We did not have enough time to cover it all and so let’s do some recap before we can finish up these points. To refresh your personal brand:

1. Advertise
2. Create a New Design

Those two are done so that the audience can notice immediately that you care, and you are still fresh, strong, and raring to continue offering value through that brand. “Love your neighbor as you love yourself” is perhaps a great brand anecdote that we need to be aware of. If people notice that you do not love yourself (i.e you are not refreshing), they will not be open to receive your love (however much you mean it).

3. New Focus, Same Niche and Value

When Steve Jobs went to Apple for the second stint as the iCEO, he culled very many products from their production chain and focused on a handful. Apple as a brand has never recovered from that. A personal brand can suffer when you have so much to do, and you are actually gifted in all these!

I have a friend who is multi-talented. They can sing, write songs, play guitar, speak, coach people, write books and so on. For as long as this friend will keep wanting to balance all those facets of their talents, their personal brand will suffer.

Focus

To refresh that brand, all they need to do is to narrow down on a specific thing and run with it. I tend to do the same. I can speak, I can write. For the most part, I have been ghostwriting and churning out at least three books per year for other people.

Do I want to be known as a ghostwriter? No. I don’t. So to refresh my brand, I have to focus on the two things that matter to me the most: Keynote speaking (and podcasting) as well as writing my own books and content.

4. Create A New Solution

Technological companies know how to do this a lot. Google is perhaps the brand that has innovated and created a host of new solutions over and over again, and thus they keep their brand fresh. They then reach out to their existing clientele and offer these new solutions to them.

From Gmail to Google Drive to Google Maps and ultimately to Android technology, Google has kept their brand fresh over the years. Their ubiquitous search engine also keeps fresh with their graphics on their landing pages, but that has already been covered in the previous article.

Innovation and Newness

I can tell you that a brand is a living organism. Every living organism has the power to grow and keep maturing. That means that there will be innovation as you are using your brand to serve your customers. Without growing with new innovation, your brand risks becoming obsolete.

It costs you something

I know that creating something new for the same customers can be involving and probably it might not be paying as much as you would have loved it to. But that innovation keeps the brand fresh. If you are always writing articles, you can start converting those into infographics for example. That small tweak of innovation will keep the brand fresh.

5. Growth

Facebook keeps acquiring social media channels and thus they keep their brand fresh. From Instagram to Whatsapp, Facebook has kept growing through these acquisitions. Perhaps the most potent way of keeping your brand fresh is to keep your brand growing.

There are several ways that you can grow. When you get new partnerships for example, the brand gets refreshed and also gets attention. When you win a major contract or have a major victory in the market in some awards of sorts, your brand gets refreshed.

CSR?

Perhaps Corporate Social Responsibility has been used in a selfish way, but if done properly it has the ability to refresh a personal brand. Maya Angelou said that people will always remember how you made them feel. When you go out of your way and use your brand to make people feel special, you are refreshing that brand.

All in all, a personal brand is something worth refreshing every so often, otherwise, we risk being obsolete.

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