PERSONAL BRANDING
Your Personal Brand:
Who’s Fooling Who …
By Faith Alai
I
love this quote by “Oscar Wilde” be
yourself everyone else is already taken
…
The Market is awash with variations. In
today’s economy we are not strangers to
the fact that for almost every product or
service we purchase there is a look alike
or for lack of a better word an imitation.
Do not get me wrong, variety is always
welcome, we would be sick to our stomachs
if we walked into our usual convenient
store to find them stocking only one type
of our daily use products. It would almost
feel like someone is arm twisting us to
make a purchase out of necessity and not
out of choice.
Nobody likes to feel like they are following
a crowd, and yet that is what we do with
our precious lives all the time. We have
been wired to always believe the grass is
greener on the other side. Especially if the
dry patch in our own field is getting more
and more visible by the day.
It is not a wonder when in our line of duty
as brand strategists, we begin working
with terms like, leap frogging where an
imitator has pounced on an acknowledged
product and come up with an improved
version of the same, selling it at a lower
cost than the original, other terminologies
include knock offs or clones, creative
adaptations etc. brands, if we are to achieve our desired
goals. In our different industries we will
without a doubt be forced to eat from the
same basket, but that should not erase
our unique attributes, we should always
remember we are serving different flavors
and it is up to us to discover which niche
is skewed to us and serve it diligently.
All the above have come up as a result
of the “green grass syndrome” and in
turn many brands ha