People often ask me how to brand when there are more than a few things they want to ‘brand’.
We are not running a mega-corporation like Procter & Gamble with hundreds of sub-brands and a billion-dollar budget. My answer to the question of multi-branding for small-scale entrepreneurs is always an emphatic ‘No, don’t do it’.
I don’t recommend multi-branding when it comes to Personal Branding.
What is possible however is to leverage your way forward.
One of the brands I’ve been noticing is Thankyou. This eco-conscious personal care brand started out with releasing ONLY the hand-wash products. Then I noticed other categories of products coming out of the brand only after they started gaining traction with their liquid hand wash.
Let’s have a look at an example closer to home. I didn’t start out thinking I’d be an author, speaker, mentor and photographer. I had to be known well enough as a photographer before the mentoring/coaching part became a mainstay. I used my photography client base and my reputation in that area as leverage to be hired as a mentor. Then came speaking opportunities. I did not have to brand myself specifically for being a speaker. Again, it was possible because mentoring and coaching were the levers that helped me with being paid to speak.
Singular focus is what we need when we start.
Let me then ask you this. What do you think you could focus on right now? Remember that the decision you make now is not ‘permanent’, and things often move rapidly. What we may feel as ‘forever’ is probably only a few years at the most. And all of us have more than a couple of things we can brand as part of our journey but we must start with one.
