PERSPECTIVE
Define Your Brand:
Or Somebody Else
Will!
By Dr. Wale Akinyemi
W
e have all been told that no one
judges a book by the cover. The
reality however is that in actual
fact we do judge books by their cover.
‘The Millionaire Next Door’ and ‘The
Millionaire Mind’ by Thomas J Stanley,
‘The Millionaires Notebook’ by Steven
Scott, ‘Cracking the Millionaire Code’
and ‘The One Minute Millionaire’ by
Mark Victor Hansen and Robert Allen,
‘The Millionaire Course’ by Marc Allen.
What do all these books have in common?
They all have the word Millionaire on the
cover.
There was a time in my life when I was
so poor that the poor called me poor. All
I wanted to do was to get out of poverty.
I was ready to read anything that looked
like it could do the job and so when I
saw the word millionaire on a book title,
it caught my attention. I was buying the
cover. Don’t judge me, I just had to get out
of poverty.
‘The Tipping Point’, ‘Blink: The Power of
Thinking Without Thinking’, David and
Goliath, The Outliers, ‘What the Dog
Saw’. What do these all have in common?
They are books by Malcom Gladwell. Now
the first book of his that I read was The
Tipping Point and once I read it I was
hooked. He challenged my thinking and
made me see things in a different way
and from then on all I needed to see was
the name Malcom Gladwell on the cover
of the book and I was sold. Again, I was
buying the cover.
Now there are other authors that have had
the same impact on me and once I saw
their names on the cover, I bought the
book. In some cases, I was disappointed
because for some reason or the other, one
of the books did not live up to expectation
or match the previous works. The fact still
remains that I bought the cover.
One day way back in the early nineties I
was travelling from London to Nairobi.
It was back in the days when people -
especially people who were flying in first
class used to dress up to travel. From the
seventies to the early nineties, flying first
class was like going for a dinner and it
was not uncommon for men to fly in three
piece designer suits and women in dinner
wear.
So, on this day, I was coming from a
meeting and was wearing a three piece
suit (believe it or not I used to wear suits).
As I got to the entrance of the aircraft the
You may be a CEO but if you are not de-
liberately conscious of your personal brand
you might find yourself in a difficult posi-
tion at some point in time because if you
cannot stand alone aside from the corporate
brand which you represent, bumpy days
await you!
20 MAL34/20 ISSUE
male attendant welcomed me with a very
big smile and ushered me to the left of the
aircraft - to first class and not to the right
which was economy. He did not ask for
my boarding pass so I thought God was
performing a miracle with me and so I was
not ready to interrupt him by pointing out
to the attendant that I was in the wrong
place.
When I got to the front of the aircraft I
now had the challenge of deciding where
to sit. It was at this point that the attendant
came to me and asked for my boarding
pass (which he should have checked when
I was boarding the aircraft). My seat was
29D. I was way behind in economy class.
The attendant went red as he apologized
to me and ushered me to the back.
Imagine all those people who had seen
this guy dressed in a three piece suit
suddenly being ‘deported’ from First class
to economy. I was the most frustrated
passenger on that flight for only one
reason. The flight attendant bought the
cover. Once he saw the way I was dressed
he concluded that I was a first class
passenger.
What cover do you have on? What do
people see when they interact with you?
Personal Branding cannot be left to
chance. Those who live by chance do not
stand a chance.
At the beginning of every year the
customary thing to do is to start by wishing
each other a happy new year but like I
have mentioned in virtually every one of
my books, what will make the year happy
and new is not that the calendar changed
but rather that our thinking is going to