In this episode, we once again return to branding, often one of the most confusing topics under the umbrella of marketing, to look at the third step of creating a breakthrough author brand.

Other Episodes in this Series:

* Step 1 – Look in the Mirror (Who am I)

* Step 2 – Look at Your Readers (Who are my readers?)

* Step 3 – Look Through Your Readers (What do my readers say about me?)

* Step 4 – Look in Your Reader’s Mirror (What does my brand allows readers to say about themselves?)

Links:

* Dove Real Beauty Sketches

026 – Author Taglines With Brandilyn Collins

Transcript

 James L. Rubart: This is the third and final episode in our series on branding. So if you haven’t had a chance to listen to the first two episodes yet, you might want to go back and hear those first. It will help make sense of what we are about to say in this episode.

 

Thomas: But there are no podcast Nazis watching you see if you do that or not.

 

James: No. We would not be tracking you. So Thomas, in the first episode, we talked about how authors and writers can discover their brand by looking in the mirror. And then in the second episode, we talked about looking at your readers, how authors can look at their readers to define their brand.

 

In this episode, we are going to talk about how you can look through your readers to define your brand. And there are probably people out there right now going, “Well, what do you mean look through your readers?” So, give us a brief rundown.

 

Thomas: Yeah. There’s a wonderful commercial that illustrates this. The Dove soap did a series where they would have women describe themselves to a sketch artist like a police sketch artist who couldn’t see them. And he would sketch a picture of the woman. And then they would have somebody who had met the woman just briefly describe the woman and they would have the sketch artist sketch based off of that encounter instead.

 

And invariably, the friend or the person who just met the woman described the woman in a much prettier way. The sketches, they would show them side by side. We’ll have a link to it in the show notes. This is a very powerful image.

 

And so instead of looking at the mirror, often, what we see when we look at ourselves in the mirror even if it’s a metaphorical mirror can be a lie where we do not see ourselves how other people see us.

 

And when it comes to branding, how you see yourself is ultimately not that valuable. It’s a good starting point. It’s a good step 1. We did a whole podcast on it. But ultimately what matters is what other people see when they see you. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about in this episode.

 

James: Now, we touched on this in a couple of the – in the first and second episode on branding. But why we’re going to park on this is because it is so important. Back to that phrase I love so much, “It’s impossible to read the label when you’re standing inside the bottle.”

 

We need to go to our readers and ask them, “What’s on the label? Please tell me what’s on the label.” And as Thomas animated, it’s 99% of the time more positive and more freeing than what you see.

 

Thomas: And more resonant. So that’s what’s more contagious. That’s how people describe you. It’s what makes more sense and is ultimately more effective. So it’s not just more positive, but it’s also better for marketing. So Jim, what’s an example of somebody who has done this well to find their brand?