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Brand Insights Detroit Workshop: Re-Branding Detroit Businesses and People

Register: www.brandinsights.eventbrite.com

It is time to start working on your branding goals for 2011! Time to re-think your personal and corporate brand strategy for the new decade. We have created an experiential event in the Detroit Eastern Market on Thursday, January 20, 2011 to help you reach your goals.

Brand Insights Detroit: Personal and Corporate Branding Workshop was birthed out of my desire to provide personalized attention to entrepreneurs, business leaders, and business owners about branding. This event is designed for the business and interactive communities in the metro Detroit region.

One of the big questions I get is that people love Brand Camp but want a one-on-one experience so creating Brand Insights is a way to create that small group environment. This workshop is limited to 15 like-minded entrepreneurs, business leaders and business owners. The workshop is designed to provide personalized attention in developing and re-thinking your personal and business brands and how to integrate their missions seamlessly.

The Detroit Experience
I also wanted to do a project in Detroit and I couldn’t think of a better place than in the Detroit Eastern Market. You can experience the flavor of Detroit Eastern Market as we host our event in one of the premier Lofts in Detroit, FD Lofts on Russell Street and eat lunch catered by the famous Russell Street Deli.

Russell Street Deli

FD Lofts in Detroit Eastern Market

Learn in-depth insights on how to brand yourself and your business in an energetic 8-hour day. The workshop will be led by two branding and marketing minds (Hajj E. Flemings and Matthew Kruchko) in a unique hands on facilitated environment.

A large portion of the day will be dedicated to addressing specific personal and corporate branding challenges. The afternoon will be spent in full consulting mode we will review brand problems or ideas in front of the group so everyone can connect and collaborate in the learning process. The attendance has been limited to provide great opportunities for quality networking and building valuable relationships.

Schedule

Morning: 8:30am-12pm Personal & Corporate Branding Workshops

Lunch: 12pm-1pm Catered Lunch

Afternoon: 1pm-4:30pm Consulting on Brand Problems/Ideas

Expectations

• Each attendee will walk away with a brand brief that they have completed with the framework for their personal and corporate brands.
• Learn best practices on using social media to build brand awareness and market you and your business.
• Learn how to develop an online personal brand.
• Brand-Building 101: Basic Tools and Principles of Building a Powerful and Memorable Brand
• Understand what brands really are and how brand-building works.
• Introduces key elements of the basic brand communications toolbox and how they work together to enable you to tell your brand story with clarity, consistency and impact.
• Discussion (Q + A) and collaboration on brand challenges of attendees.

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Re-Brand Yourself. Stay Relevant.

I came across an old work ID that inspired this blog post. I looked at the picture and thought how much I had changed over the past 14-years since the picture was taken. I interned with New Balance Athletic Shoe in Lawrence, MA, which is just outside of Boston. I enjoyed my days at New Balance I was the first out of state intern they had in their intern program. I owe a lot to Edith Harmon-Wiess who was the person that took a chance on me. She still works at New Balance as the VP of Advanced Products. Enough reminiscing. It is time to learn something.

Re-Brand yourself. Every brand has a life cycle and goes through the following phases: development, introduction, growth, maturity and decline. Over time every brand hits a plateau where the brand matures and faces the reality of decline. This forces every brand to make some hard decisions to re-think strategies, channels of communication and their end game. If a corporate brands need to create a personality and take online human characteristics to be relevant to the connected customer, then how much more do we as human brands have to evolve? (For example: Corporate brands go through re-branding phases like Dunkin’ Donuts did in 2006.)

Have you Changed?

As a personal brand you continue to change: your worldview, the online channels you use to communicate, your career goals change, your work style (the way your dress) and the way you look. Anyone who is growing is changing. Over time we are developing, learning, and growing into the person we want to be and working in the career that we have a passion for.

• How do people experience you? Is it different today than it was 3-5 years ago? When I started online about 4-years ago I connected with people via MySpace. Over time that has evolved and people experience my brand through different channels.
• Online Presence – Your online content should be updated frequently. For example your Linkedin profile should evolve as your career goals, work experience, and the content you curate changes.
• WorkStyle – Does your dress style reflect your brand? I have moved from being a company man to an entrepreneur and my work style reflects that. As you evolve as a person your style should reflect the stage you are at in life.
• Visuals – Your profile Photos should be updated every 3+ years at the latest. Think about how much you have changed over the past 3-5 years.

If you are doing the same things you did five years ago you are probably not relevant. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

Food for Thought: We are constantly in a re-tweaking phase.

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How You Spend Your Time in 2010: 22% in Social Networks

As the year is coming to an end it is a great time to review goals, financials and the value of our time. Which leads me to one of the most important questions how did you spend your time online in 2010.

A large portion of our lives are shared online: So between messaging, commenting, sending emails, blogging and conducting online searches, etc., as a society we spent approximately 25% of our lives online (this translates into 5.5 hours a day.) What did this mean to your personal brand? Did the time you spent online help to grow business, your career opportunities, or help you position that side project that you were working on. In the area of personal branding one of the key components is the value of your minute. According to Nielsen report in 2010 here is how we spent our time online.

The Breakdown

  • 5.5 Hours Online per day
  • 22.7% Spent on Social Networks (Facebook #1 destination)
  • 10.3% Online Games
  • 8.3% Email
  • 3.9% Videos
  • 3.9% Online Search

As we embark on a new year how will you plan your time management goals for 2011? Remember success is a planned activity it doesn’t happen by default. There is less than a week left in the 2010 and many people have packed it up for the year? Well the year isn’t over yet. It is the perfect time to prepare for 2011. Below are a few ways to start preparing for 2011

  • Brand Insights – An experiential personal and corporate branding workshop for 15-people in FD Lofts in Detroit Eastern Market – 01/20/11 with Hajj Flemings (Founder of Brand Camp) and Matthew Kruchko (Managing Director of Applied Storytelling). http://bit.ly/brandinsights
  • Mind Mapping – iThoughtsHD is a mindmapping iPad app that will import and export mindmaps to and from many of the most popular desktop mindmap applications such as Freemind, XMind, Novamind, MindManager, MindView, iMindmap and PDFs.
  • Goal Setting – Establish measurable goals for 2011.
  • Finalize Pending Projects – Many of us have projects that have been started and not completed.
  • Side Project - Start working on a New Project to launch the beginning of next year.
  • Re-Evaluate Resources – To increase your productivity in 2011 look to add a virtual secretary or outsource some functions to be more productive.

What did your time translate into in 2010? How does it affect your bottom line?

Let me know what you are doing to plan for 2011!!

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How to Brand a Christmas Card

As the Brand Man I thought it would be interesting to discuss the Branding of a Christmas card. This is the first Christmas card from the Flemings family so I went through the mental gymnastics for the first time and wanted to share my findings.

Remember your Christmas card is a great opportunity to communicate your values, style and build brand awareness so it shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Here are some details to think about

  • Brand Language – The language on your Christmas card should be true to your values.
  • Brand Imagery – Color scheme should be consist with your brand or your theme. Background, setting and apparel should flow. You have to think about font selection as well.
  • Professional Photo – You can use a professional photographer or use a low cost studio (Sears, JC Penney, etc.). Always have your photo shot with a white background so that the background can be changed out if you desire.
  • Style – Think about the style of your family or company that you want to communicate. The style should be consistent with who you are authentically.
  • Theme – Our theme idea was a magazine layout. You want to keep the idea simple and clean. Create an idea that is memorable that people can easily understand and grasp.
  • Message – Every Christmas card needs a message. Our message was three-fold: 1. Focus for the Year: Year of Increase (Our Desire/Focus for the Year), 2. Family Focus: Building the Family Dynasty and 3. Sharepoint: We wanted to share a significant part of our life. The birth of our daughter, Kennedy Nicole Flemings. This allows your community to feel apart of your life.
  • Values – We have strong Christian and moral values where family is very important to us. So we incorporated those values to communicate and reinforce to our community what we stand for and believe in.
  • Tradition – Christmas cards are about tradition so when developing your Christmas cards think about the tradition or legacy of your cards.

Other Cool Christmas Cards

The Obama Card and the Kardasian Card

I hope this helps you in branding your Christmas card in the future.

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Are you Living Life in Default Mode?

Are you living life in Default mode?

Wikipedia defines Default: “Default Values are generally intended to make a device (or control) usable “out of the box”. A common setting, or at least a usable setting, is typically assigned.”

The more time I spend in the branding space helping people and businesses transform themselves, the more I see default settings controlling the operating systems of people and businesses. Living life by Default versus design is the path of least resistance as well as least reward.

Why should someone hire you? Why should someone buy your product? Why should someone listen to you? Why should someone read your blog? Why do you matter? Do you matter? Does your work create conversation? Are you living an undervalued life?

I thought the concept of living in Default would be an interesting topic as 2010 is coming to an end and 2011 is quickly approaching.

Remember, “Success is a journey and a planned activity.” Without goals we are living life by Default. For many people 2010 was a year of change and as technology, the economy, and the world changes you can’t depend on ‘What Was’ to be ‘What Is.’

It is time to establish your goals for 2011 personally and professionally.

Food for Thought: There is a difference between ‘Out of the Box’ and ‘Thinking Outside the Box’.

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