Here’s a question: which would you buy, a product with a well-known label of inferior quality, or a product with an inferior label of better quality?
What did you say? High quality?
Yes?
Sorry, wrong answer. You’re delusional.
In an ideal world, quality brands = quality products, and we’d all think rationally about making a quality/affordability trade-off, but this world ain’t ideal. The way branding is taught, the way personal branding is being promoted today, and the way we like to think of how we interact with brands has no bearing on what actually happens on planet earth as we know it.
Quick story: A few years ago, I was given a pair of Ferragamo shoes as a gift. They fell apart within a year. When I brought them back to the store, the clerk looked at me as if I had two heads: “Those can’t be less than a year old. Ferragamos don’t fall apart like that.” Yet they had. This led to a particularly frustrating conversation, me vowing never to wear that particular brand again, and the realization that when a store clerk can’t wrap her head around the concept of “defective product” because the ideal of the product’s “brand” prevents her from thinking critically, there’s a bigger problem.
Branding has become a thing unto itself, disconnected from the underlying source of product quality. And that’s a problem for everyone.
It’s dangerous when the quality of the most expensive product becomes rationalized to be “the best,” even when it objectively isn’t. When that happens, branding becomes an excuse to covet—to rub the fact that you “paid more for a product because you can” in other people’s faces.
Done right, branding takes a long time to develop. This is important and you need to think about this, because as branding becomes applied to people (as opposed to products), the possibility opens for people to get hurt.
On the surface, personal branding is fine. The world’s a crowded place, and brands are good ways to identify quality peeps. But the practical reality is, few people in the world have the patience to develop a real brand. We look for shortcuts, point to the overnight successes, and chase rainbows. And we soak up “personal branding” messages as if all we need to do is self-promote.
We don’t think of what happens to discarded brands, or how long it takes to resurrect a tarnished brand. We don’t think: “Gee, what if that tarnished brand were ME?!”
Yes, we need personal brands… but not in the way we currently think about them. Authentic is not just a buzzword! Authentic implies deep self awareness, and not only is that rare, but for someone without it, it takes a long, time to develop.
I’m going to guess, like 7 years.
And that’s after you’ve spent 7 years honing your craft and developing your expertise.
Which means, according to my math, you won’t have a viable personal brand until sometime in your mid-thirties (assuming you start your journey after college).
So, let me ask you again, only this time, about yourself: are you really about quality? Or has the whole idea of “branding” blinded you to the possibility of flaws in your product?
Be careful when you answer this time—we’re talking about you.
There are so many companies treating their employees like crap these days (even more than usual?) that a better question would be for the company, what if that tarnished brand were me? Where I live a company had built a stellar reputation as a great place to work. My students used to be very proud of the fact they landed jobs there. Now that the company has gone through two rounds of brutal and poorly handled layoffs, their true colors show. They burned all their reputation capital. I tell folks they would be nuts to think of working for this company unless they are just need a job as they look for something better.
So funny (but not surprising) to hear someone from HR calling others delusional. There is no other corporate function so out of touch with reality than HR. And quality in HR? Please, give me a break.
Bulls**t
@Bret—Thanks for your perspective. You can paint me funny all day long, I stand by my assertion that most of us look to personal branding as the next short-cut in a process that actually takes years to do right.
And as for companies needing to clean up their act, amen to that to. Because when a company shows its “true colors,” by which I think we mean the company is clearly “motivated to make money” as opposed to “actually interested in people,” it’s no one department that’s out of touch, it’s the leadership team on the whole that’s failed its employees.
Branding is critical to a company’s success. There are many companies out there with HUGE brands that produce inferior products & services, yet they are tremendously profitable. Look at the 3 major job boards (wink, wink) that ONLY accounted for about 6% of total hires in 2008 – http://www.careerxroads.com/news/SourcesOfHire09.pdf. Look around at some of the companies sponsoring CPM & PPC ad space on blogs. They spend money to brand because it makes financial sense. Branding isn’t BS for the company but you are right that is often BS for the consumer (sorry guys) that buys off the perception of strong branding just to find out later that the product/service did not meet their expectation (e.g. in your case Ferragamo). Companies need to do a better job to ensure that their marketing builds up their brand so that it meets or exceeds consumers’ expectations.
The rapid flow of information on the internet, that is propelled by bloggers, crowd sourcing, referral recruitment platforms, and online rating systems (such Amazon.com and Netflix.com), is doing a great job of identifying high quality products/services/candidates with weak or non-existent brands in this crowded market while eventually pushing the HUGE brands (cough, archaic Job Boards and ATS offerings) with low quality offerings to the wayside. You gotta love evolution!
I clearly hear what you are saying, Jason, and appreciate your perspective. But quality is about meeting and exceeding expectations, and I think anyone, anytime, anywhere can benefit from the process of identifying what others expect, directing their behavior and efforts to meet and exceed those expectations, and then clearly communicating your efforts.
The key to quality is expectations. Companies will have different expectations of a 21 year old just getting started than they do someone my age. If the young person meets or exceeds those expectations, that is quality, even though we would probably not compare that quality to the quality of someone 15 years into their career.
Your post would leave my young students thinking they have no business claiming quality until they more years under their belt. Please forgive me, but that’s just bad advice.
Still a fan or yours, Jason! Bret
I think calling it a ‘brand’ is a bit off. A brand can be bought and sold. It’s something you possess, a perceptual object.
People can have brands, they can sell it as a product, they can make money doing so. If it’s a quality brand (perceptions backed up by experience) then it may grow.
But I think most people aren’t working with a ‘brand’ they’re working on their reputation. How do others think of you?
I don’t need a logo and a catchphrase, I need people to think of me when they want solutions to their problems.
In your immediate surroundings I think that can happen fairly quickly. To spread your reputation so that people you’ve never even hear of trust you to solve problems usually takes longer.
Ferragamo shoes? In Chicago? In the winter? You’re crazy.