Brand Power! Are You Building It? Marketing Tips May 16, 2011 By Deborah Shane

There’s manpower, girl power, flower power, horsepower, higher power, nuclear power.

Now there’s. . .BRAND POWER! Are you building it?

No matter what website, blog or social media site you go to in the marketing, business, advertising and sales space, branding and personal branding are going to come up.  The topic must be important, right? It is, very.  Don’t get tired of it, sick of it or bored with it because it will make all the difference in your personal and business success in the long term.

We’ve gone from the dawning of the age of Aquarius to the dawning of the age of Brand-Poweredness!

If you don’t have a strong, defined, authentic, identifiable, relatable and active brand today, you will get gobbled up and swept away. You don’t have to be huge or national or on television every day, but you do need to be out, serving, solving and, yes, selling.

I love the reality show Shark Tank. It’s packed with inspired entrepreneurs with ideas on how to fill niches. I saw Tiffany Krumins’ Ava the Elephant talking medicine dispenser get picked up by Barbara Corcoran; then I met Tiffany at Tory Johnson’sfirst Spark and Hustle in Atlanta in July of 2010. Her products are now in thousands of stores nationwide including drugstore chain CVS. Ava the Elephant is “brand-powered.”

I love The Food Network’s Guy Fieri, host of Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. He profiles little mom and pop restaurateurs who have been in business for generations  making some of the most delicious, unique dishes in their towns. After a location is featured on his show, people will make it a destination if they are passing through. Be it burgers, meatloaf, hash browns or latkes, all these restaurants are “brand-powered” for what they serve.

Here are 12 ways to enhance and develop your “brand power.”

1. Be practical, tactical and useful


2. Be easy to find and understand


3. Be helpful and solve problems, pain or fear


4. Be authentic


5. Be caring, kind and generous


6. Be grateful


7. Be respectful and have integrity


8. Be indispensable


9. Be resilient


10. Be responsive


11. Be paying it forward and giving back


12. Be fun and have a sense of humor

How are you developing your brand power?  Stay with it–it will pay off, long term.