Читать книгу Master the Brand Called YOU: The Proven Leadership Personal Branding System to Help You Earn More, Do More and Be More At Work - Brenda Bence - Страница 12

A brand is a living entity—and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures.

— Michael Eisner, former CEO of Disney

No book about leadership personal branding would be complete without an understanding of the powerful and influential role that brands play in our modern-day lives. Time magazine once reported that the average American citizen living in a large urban area runs across an estimated 3,000 brands every single day. When I first read that statistic, I couldn’t believe it. But then, the proof was right in front of me when I would walk down Michigan Avenue in Chicago and look at all of the signs, or I would stand in Times Square in New York City and see brand after brand after brand.

In fact, I suspect that seeing 3,000 brands—which is almost certainly an even larger number today—holds true for anyone living and working in a large urban environment anywhere in the world. Ride in a taxi from downtown Bangkok out to the airport with hundreds of billboards lining the way, or walk down a supermarket aisle in London with the myriad of brands peering down at you.

Think about it. How many brands have you seen today on product labels, the side of a bus, the top of a taxi, or on the Internet? Everywhere you look, brand names are screaming for your attention. Brands are everywhere, and they are such a part of our day-to-day lives that we may not even think about them.

But out of those thousands of brands you encounter every day, if you’re like most people, you will probably stay faithful to a handful of brands throughout most of your life. After all, great brands build intense loyalty. How about you? What brands are you loyal to? Would you consider it out of the question, for example, to buy anything but a Canon camera or to switch from using your Gillette shaving cream? Why? What is the allure of that favorite brand of yours? What does it offer you that no other brand can?

Brands can be extremely big and influential, too. Take Coca-Cola as an example. That one brand alone brings in an estimated $16 billion in sales every year, more than $1 billion every single month. As of this writing, that represents more than the Gross Domestic Product of 86 different countries. How’s that for powerful?