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Branded!

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Herman Cain’s decision over the weekend to suspend his presidential campaign has been described as a savvy move for a number of reasons – primarily that suspending but not ending the effort means he can continue to raise money. But another line of reasoning says Cain has already had received the second biggest payoff possible in a presidential bid – he has solidified his “brand“.

So what if Cain quits now? He has succeeded in stepping on to the larger public stage, and people are not going to forget him. We can’t. We know too much about him now, thanks to the media’s relentless fascination with his peccadilloes. I asked marketing guru Spin Williams for his take on all this Cain Scrutiny. Here’s his response.

Here at The Meeting That Never Ends we’re in total agreement with Herman Cain’s handlers – now is the time to get out! Mr. Cain has received as much attention as a person is likely to get out of a presidential run short of actually BEING the NOMINEE. And if you’ve ever been an actual nominee, you know that you’ll get lots more press but it feels like less fun.

A number of my clients have asked for help “solidifying” their personal brand and a few have even wondered if they should try this “running for president” idea as a technique to nail down who they think they are.

I tell them that engaging in some Electoral Marketing certainly does force you to focus on your own agenda, especially when you have 20 debates in 10 weeks and dozens of TV cameras following you around to just to see where you go, who you meet and what you say. If you’re an attention hog, it’s great. But if you don’t take criticism well, there will be trouble. And if there’s anything you’re keeping from your family, things can get a bit awkward.

Still, if your “brand” includes specific negative qualities like “adulterer”, “bad memorizer” or “raw nonsense spouter”, a well-financed bid for the Oval Office will do more to publicize your glaring weaknesses than you could manage if you spent the same amount of money advertising them.

But there’s no need to worry. Within a few years of your startling public collapse people will tend to forget all the things you did wrong and they will only remember that they remember you somehow.

And that’s all you really need. Don’t forget – these days you don’t have to be good as long as you can stay known.

I told Spin that from now on I will see all presidential candidates as personal brand managers who are simply looking to hike their market share. I know if I ever attempted such a run, I would surely boost my main intellectual brands – Someone Who Takes A Long Time To Answer and That Guy Who Is Always Changing His Mind.

What’s your personal brand?

88 thoughts on “Branded!”

  1. Good morning to all. I guess I more or less understand branding. If it is what I think it is, I don’t care for this concept. I think my brand is the person who tries to avoid having a brand. Is that possible?

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      3. who is the central american/south american president with no political experience who came in and said the changes needed are so obvious that they should simply be implemented and he turned the countries ecomomy around miaculously? i think his term is just about over and he will not be allowed to run again according to the rules of the country but he is a fun guy who just speaks common sense and is not pretentious. just happy to be able to help out. i suggest you model your camapign around his jim. similar approaches

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      4. No, I’m not planing to run or at least I want to keep you guessing. I hope the press will leave be alone for now.

        Evo Morales from Bolivia might be the one you are thinking of, tim. He didn’t expect to be elected and he has moved forward with a good program, but the economy of his country still needs a great deal of work.

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      5. maybe you could have a presidential campaign like Pat Paulsen did–I believe he started it by announcing that he was NOT running for president, then he came down from the podium and starting shaking hands.

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  2. my personal brand s that of an ever changing whirling dervish. i was out to lunch with an old buddy form high school and we were laughing about how many people were trying to find themselves when we were going to school, trying to decide where they fit in the world and how they would present themselves and we were laughing because that is something i have never had to deal with. ilike popeye i yam what i yam upon researching this further i find this quote to be attributed to popeye and also one of the most famous lines in the torah when translated from hebrew. so both popeye and i get gods mesage that being what you are is the best you can be. my style is to care but not to the point where i would use a spell checker, to engage but not to a point where you are counting on me to be there tor you, and the enjoy life along the waywhile i am it hopefully stirring up some worthwhile dust along the way. birkies, a sportscoat, (hawaiin shirtif over 80) facial hair and bad teeth have been a constant brand recognition tools for those paying attention and a love of thought inspiring conversation and anything heaeded in the right direction are what i seek and aspire to work towards. brain farts are what i am relating to herman cain on. gotta feel for the guy and those poor koch brothers to invest all that money in a guy only to discover he forgot that he forgot… poor guysm i wouldnt with that on my worst enemy so it worked out just right, gotta lve those republicans, get up set with ciain for doing exactly what newt has been doing for his entire adultress related life. cain never left a wife in the cnacer ward to go shack up with the babe of the week did he? newt doesnt change his mind, he learnd new stuff and reevaluates hs position, bill clinton did it best, i do it daily and now newt is telling us its ok too but that morman, he is a waffler don’t vote for him.

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  3. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    Like Jim, I don’t think I have a brand. But then I always thought I would be a poor politician. A catch line such as 9-9-9 is just too simplistic. This is where VS’ Blog-identity, Verily Sherilee, looks really attractive because it is just such a great “Brand.” However, I took a few minutes to mull this over and thought of a few tag lines that might brand me as something?:

    I slept with Herman Cain, no wait, I’m the one who DIDN’T sleep with HC.
    Grew up in Iowa, happy in the City
    Raised to be a Farm Wife: I can sew a dress, fry a chicken, bake an apple pie, and cook from the garden which I grew myself.
    JMS–saved the economy last Friday!

    Well, these are just lousy brands.

    Nondescript in Eden Prairie?

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    1. Your list of abilities speaks of self-reliance – not a bad thing to have as a personal brand.

      It’s good to enrich your life by surrounding yourself with other people, but in the end, you have to be able to rely on yourself. You’re the only one you’re sure you’ll always have.

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  4. I guess I’m not cynical enough to think that any brand beats no brand, and I’m old fashioned enough to believe that when you’ve brought shame to your good name (not to mention your family), no amount of money or name recognition makes that alright. My personal brand? She who doesn’t believe in easy solutions to complex problems.

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    1. Complex problems cannot have simple answers? Oh, shoot! Here I was thinking the other way around on that. Eating too much has been a complex problem for me, and I thought I had found a simple answer: “eat less.” That’s surely too simple. My new motto: “eat less on every day whose name includes the word ‘day’.” And if that does not work, I bet I can fuzz it up more.

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      1. What’s so complex about eating too much? Seems pretty straight forward to me. Now fixing the economy, that’s complex.

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      2. I once lost a fair amount of weight just by following this: Eat Less, Move More. I suppose the reasons why I was Eating More and Moving Less were complicated, but following that simple rule of Eat Less, Move More worked for me!

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      4. Edith – I once had my doctor write “Eat less & excercise more.” on a page of her prescription pad. I meant to frame it and hang it up in the kitchen. That was 10 years ago. I still have the prescription but have never managed to do anything with it!

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      5. Well, I have just started it again after a very long hiatus. I have a simple plan and I hope I can stick with it…for the rest of my life!

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      6. What’s not easy about “Eat Less” is that you can fool yourself with all kinds of caveats – “Eat less except for __________” (wisdom of the day)…

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    2. ot
      hey pj re hans and the shelving. my first thursday card game (moved to the second thursday this month) will be held in the man cave that is my garage on thrusday night at 8pm. if hans would like to come we would like to take his money at cards and get his thoughts on shelving. 12/12 game board night would work to but then he misses guys night out. no biggy but fun group of 4 or 5 guys smoking cigars and listening to lps form the good old days 50 cent max bid 20 bucks is more than enought o cover the loser

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  5. I think of branding as an approach used to try to put yourself at the top. I supose it could be thought of as trying to establish your own place in society. However, it seems like a kind of a self centered approach with not much time left for others. Well, I guess you could promote your brand and still not be too self centered. It seems to me that branding tends to be a promtional technique favored by free enterprize and not an approach that encourages much concern for others.

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    1. the guy i mentioned i had lunch with is a big dog at target corporate office and we go to twins day games together. he was much clearer on branding than i was prior to talking to him. jim you are the slow talking seed saver who thinks befroe he speaks has his basenball cap pulled down just so and walks with a slow gait. world travel to help third world nations and fitting in to other cultures come naturally and that sets you apart form the average schmoe. it is your brand. not good or bad just how others see you as you go about your business in the world. nothing you would think about but a truth just the same.

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  6. Morning!

    I have been branded a couple times in my life. First as a dairy farmer (and I smiled politely at all the cow references and cow trinkets people gave me) and now as a theater guy. But there’s less theater trinkets. 🙂

    Road trip today; headed to Minneapolis for snow machines and LED moving lights.

    Later!

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    2. Sometime when you are making a trip to the cities again, can you hook me up with another Friendship Bread starter? (Unless someone else in town has some…). I killed my starter and it seems like those I passed starter on to have mostly given up on it. I could start my own, but that would require…work (shudder).

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      2. I kill bread starter and house plants…both through neglect. Good thing the dog and Daughter remind me when they need food, water, or stirring…

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      4. Anna, I got my starter out of the fridge over the weekend knowing you wanted some… but it doesn’t smell right yet so I may have inadvertently killed mine too. Will let you know in another day or so…

        For some reason all this reminded me of a favorite line from ‘Toy Story’: “Great! Now I have guilt!”

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      5. Mine smelled decidedly fermented when I pulled it out – more like it would have been good for brewing “adult beverages” than baking anything. :S

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      8. Anna– it’s supposed to smell fermented; That’s when it’s best! Seriously!!

        Love the band name, Dale! “Assassins of Friendship”… have to be punk though wouldn’t it?

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      9. “Assassins of Friendship” would definitely have to be a punk band (or post-punk). Can I play my pink ukulele in the band?…
        And Ben – my starter was stinky passed the “this smells like fermenting bread” stinky – not moldy, but it was a darker brown and more watery than usual and just seemed stinkier than it ought to be.

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      10. Ah. Well then.

        I, too, have ‘Jumped on the ukulele bandwagon’ to quote the salesman… but mine’s not pink. I suppose I could paint it black to fit the post punk band theme?

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      11. Would “Assassins of Friendship” have to be a punk band?
        I believe there are string quartets that live up to the name quite nicely.

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  7. I’ve thought about my brand. It comes down to one word: Sharing. My campaign slogan would have to be something like, “Steve wants to share with you, whether that suits you or not!”

    Yesterday my grandson Liam (who is 2 in February) was on the floor with his favorite animal book. Chloe the black Lab was nearby. “Look Chloe!” said Liam. He held his book open in Chloe’s face, the page turned to a photo of a black wolf. “Wolf, Chloe! That’s a wolf.” Chloe rolled her eyes to Molly, nervously tapping her tail. Liam wouldn’t give up, “That’s a WOLF Chloe!” Molly thought Liam was sure Chloe would be interested because the wolf was, like Chloe, black.

    When I head that story I knew that the evidence was all there: the love of books, the love of animals, the compulsion to share that delight with others. We don’t need DNA to be sure that Liam is my daughter’s son and my grandson.

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    1. That’s great, Steve. Isn’t it cool how you can tell that there are little bits of you in your kids and grandkids?

      The story reminds me of what my youngest daughter did when she was quite young…i’m fuzzy on the age, but probably 2 or so.

      We were “guinea pig sitting” for some neighbors and the guinea pig’s cage was on our living room floor. Now a guinea pig is just about the most boring pet around – it just sat there 99% of the time. Daughter, however, was entranced and would spend a fair amount of time talking to it. And when it was bedtime, she would prop a few picture books in front of the cage so the guinea pig would have a book to read and not get lonely! She still has that love of books and love of animals, but as far as I know she doesn’t try to share the books she loves with the animals in our house anymore.

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    2. Liam will have to show Chloe wolves on TV sometime. I had a dog that nearly sprained his neck tilting his head to listen to the wolves howl on a “Nature” episode about the Arctic. My friend had a huge white cat who was mad for programs on sled dogs. He’d come running to hear the dogs howl, stared at them on the TV and even went behind it to find the dogs when they went offscreen (even though he was scared of them, like most things, in real life). We decided he’d been a sled dog in his previous life or was gearing up to be one in his next, but it was odd because this was also a cat who hated being white (it meant the birds could see him) and would roll in dirt any chance he had to turn himself gray. His companion, Little Nell the Cat from Hell, was quite disgusted with him.

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      1. Great stories! I had a marvelous English setter, Spook. As a puppy, he watched a show about puppy training. The trainer rolled a ball toward the camera. Spook ran to the TV and snapped his jaws right where the ball would be . . . but there was no ball. I have a photo of this. Spook turned to me with a look of horror or disgust that said, “This thing is BS! It isn’t real at all!” And he refused to look at TV after that.

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  8. Branding implies that you want to sell something, and I was thinking there wasn’t anything I wanted to sell. But, of course, I want to sell myself to employers and agencies, so my brand would be something like “Reliable, Conscientious and Always On Time.” Not the most exciting qualities in the world, but I hear employers are having a harder and harder time with people who don’t understand that turning up *regularly and on time* is actually pretty important in keeping a job. Thanks, Mom and Dad, for the Protestant Work Ethic/Guilt Complex! Maybe I should add “Perfect Grammar and Spelling on Demand”; those are likewise skills in short supply.

    Totally OT, but I made real (whole wheat) bread yesterday! Edible first try! Whoot! Take that, Pepperidge Farm!

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    1. I’ve been meaning to tell you, CG, for months that you have the most perfect posts on the Trail. I hope you aren’t insulted. Do you spend an hour proofing each post to make sure it is error-free? Whatever. You are our gold standard.

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      1. I’m a geek, Steve, you can’t insult me with something like that! 🙂 I actually do proof my posts, emails, whatever (though it doesn’t quite take an hour, my employers are probably happy to note), and the single frustration I have with this blog is the inability to edit when I notice I used the same word twice in one post. Grrrrr!

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  9. Hell, Clyde, isn’t that what we are ALL put on earth to do? Make copies of ourselves. Everybody does this. And there is this huge Quality Inspector (according to Darwin) that examines our output with a curious, discerning eye. He rejects most of us with distinctive differences, but sometimes a novelty in our output appeals to him and he lets it live. Me, I just feel lucky I was allowed to live long enough to breed once.

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  10. my daughter 10 is wanting guinea pig and when i said no she switched over to a bunny. i asked her if she thought it would get aong ok with the dogs and cats we currently have runnigna round or if we should leave it ina cage out in the back yard. oh no sha said i want to have it loose in the house. well i think the dogs would harass it to death. so i have escaped the interaction with midget furry creatures other than my girls shivery little rescue thing that is starting to come around after a couple years of patience. but the wonders of wee munchkin and a critter is a wonderful thing. bet you ar waiting on february with baited breath steve. glad the hands are working well enough to get that out to us. do you have to abrieviate your morning journal entries/thoughts for the day to your corespondant or do you have another vehicle for getting that done? that sounds like lifes blood

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    1. Christmas comes in February this year, tim, as you seem to understand. Yesterday I had a long talk with Molly while Liam was running about chatting with her, and I almost broke into tears at times because the kid is so wonderful. Sure, I’m a biased grandpa. Molly was approached three times yesterday by strangers in public who inquired about Liam’s age. Told he was almost two they said, “MY GOD that kid can talk!” My letters to Marilynn are kinda short these days. You are so good, tim, at appraising other people’s lives.

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  11. I was advised by a trusted friend who is about the most un-marketing guy I know (and who, ironically, works for a small marketing agency), that I should find a tagline for myself when I was looking for new employment a couple years ago. The tricky part was encapsulating “web content, technical writing, theater, non-profit program management” and the rest of the mess that is my resume into one line. But by gum, it did help me focus on what I was good at and what I wanted to do. “Gathering pieces and fitting them together” is what I came up with. Closest I’ve come to actually branding myself. It was, however, a nice way to explain myself and how I was different than the other hordes who were also recently laid off and looking for work along with me. And it did manage to summarize all the disparate stuff succinctly. Still works, I guess.

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    1. I really like “gathering pieces and fitting them together” as a slogan, though (or perhaps because?) it brings up visions of Anna the Lego Technician!

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    3. Anna, this reminds me of a tagline I had on my resume that got me hired at Birchbark Books:
      “Love to make order our of chaos.” 🙂

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  12. well, cool, Dale – i am not a marketer or a lover of meetings. but when you are the only goatherd on the farm, you can just do things. so this summer i designed our logo and set our farm motto (i guess this could be a brand). i’m sure i stole our motto from the California Dairy assoc. but i don’t think they’ll come get me any time soon.
    i just googled “happy goats make the best milk” and our webpage came up first!! pretty cool.
    gotta go now, i just called a farm meeting of the goatherds – time to feed T and fluff up the Girls’ hay.
    i’m enjoying the grandkids stories – i often think of heritage and genes when i’m breeding the Girls. humans don’t look at pedigrees much, i suppose. and it’s probably a good thing.
    good day!

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  13. Afternoon all. I didn’t think of VS as a brand — like Jim I’m not sure whether I want to be branded or not. Certainly I don’t need to be branded. But I do like having my monikor — especially because it was bestowed on me by this community!

    Today’s topic reminds me of one of my “life theories”. Anyone who wants to be president is automatically disqualified by that desire. You won’t find me running for any office – I like my privacy too much!

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  14. Greetings! Interesting question; whether it’s from a marketing perspective about oneself and selling one’s skills to the marketplace, jobs, etc. — or just a matter of how you are perceived by others. Many individuals have a “branding identity” whether they realize it or not; whether they created it consciously or not. For instance, comparing “Charlie Sheen brand identity” to “Mohandas Gandhi brand identity” are polar opposites in terms of what characteristics, values, ideas and emotions they each represent or bring to your mind.

    Each contributor on this blog has a distinct identity and voice for me; that I can sum up for each person in a few phrases. It may not encompass all of who they are, but those are the aspects I’m familiar with and are remembered by me. Does that make “Barb in Blackhoof the Goatherd” a brand identity or just an easy moniker to remember and identify her? I’m not sure — I’m neither a marketing wonk nor a sociologist. I don’t know what my brand is — the question really is, “what is your brand perception of me?”

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      3. Thanks for asking, Beth-Ann – I’m on the road to recovery. Disappointed in our pharmaceutical industry though. I was expecting something charming and agreeable in a painkiller; haven’t found anything I can endorse so far.

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  16. I think that Dale has brought together a very friendly, accepting group of people on this blog. There are a lot of different “types” and everyone seems to do their best to be nice to each other. That’s my brand preception of all of you.

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    1. Yep. Everyone on here is so friendly and positive. To hear all of your various stories everyday is such an uplifting experience for me.
      Thanks everyone.

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  19. My neighbor Elizabeth once observed that everyone’s life story eventually gets reduced to one or two salient facts. She said this at a neighborhood gathering, where when we were standing together, people kept coming up to me and saying, “Oh, you’re the one who walks the cat,” when introduced. Perhaps that’s my brand, at least within a four-block radius of my house. Elizabeth does championship ballroom dancing, so that’s her brand.

    “Aiming For Bohemian.” 🙂 My whole neighborhood is a little like that.

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      1. Sammy. He was an outdoor cat before he came to live with me. I’d like him to be an indoor cat. We have an understanding – I take him out for a walk a few times a week so he can get his outdoors fix.

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