Thursday, September 17, 2009

The Brand Called YOU (And what to name kittens)



This month I have done three presentations on The Brand Called YOU. The first one was in Iceland to the women entrepreneur association and the second one to NAWBO in Sedona, AZ. Yesterday I did a free teleseminar on the topic to about 70 women who signed on through www.connected-women.com.
I want to highlight two things that have happened the last two days:
1) I just adopted two rescue kittens. One is a tabby (orange) and is five weeks old. The other one is all white and is three weeks old. They are ADORABLE. My daughter is really the big cat lover and she no longer lives at home but her roommate does this rescue work and these kittens were irresistible!
So we came up with the names Tiger and Snowflake. And then I realized that these were the most typical, unimaginative names we could have come up with. I told my daughter--we have to have better names. She loves Winnie the Pooh and wanted to change Tiger to Tigger and she wanted Snowflake to become Anna Bella. I said OK to Tigger and no to Anna Bella. A few hours later, I said OK to Anna Bella because I can call her Bell.
I really didn't think this through at the time that these cat names might affect my personal branding. I hope that part of my branding is that I am a creative person and I guess that kicked in, even subconsciously, as there was NO creativity in those original names. It's only after the fact (last night in bed) that I realized this WAS a branding issue for me!
(Plus--if you don't think Anna Bella and Tigger are very creative--I can just say, "My daughter named the kittens." That solves the branding issue for me, too!)
2) As I said, I was just in Iceland. I LOVE Icelandic fashion designers so someone sent me a link to where the founder of Steinunn, Steinunn Sigurd, one of my favorite Icelandic designers, has a Small Business Makeover by Fortune.
http://money.cnn.com/video/smallbusiness/2009/08/26/sbiz_mak_steinunn.smb/ and
http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/1/smallbusiness/icelandic_fashion_business_makeover.fsb/index.htm
In the interview, Steinunn said she one of the things she learned through this process is to “Profile myself more so people can get to know who I am.”
Does this sound like “The Brand Called YOU”? I love having my messages reinforced in other places.
So--how do you profile yourself to carry out your brand?

2 comments:

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Term Paper said...

Congratulations on being a Blog of Note and seeing an event like this, stay as enthusiastic as you are now.