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The Value of Strong Personal Brands
By Irving Rein, Philip Kotler, Michael Alan Hamlin, and Martin Stoller
August 16,2004
In High Visibility, we ask
readers the question, "Why are high visibility and strong personal
brands important?" In an increasingly competitive, increasingly
global marketplace, high visibility and strong corporate brands
explain the difference between a merely competent management consultant
and one who earns millions and appears on popular talk shows to
plug his or her latest book. It can spell the difference between
the modestly successful marketing expert and one who's paid US$25,000
and up for a keynote speech. Understanding the high visibility and
personal branding process can also explain why some business or
professional celebrities capture the spotlight and then fade almost
instantly, while others continually reappear in new and evolving
forms.
But in the two decades since Tom Peters and Robert Waterman published
In Search of Excellence, the race for recognition as a business
guru has become fiercely competitive. That's not an isolated development.
Medical professionals of all kinds have learned to develop and leverage
personal brands to exert influence in their fields of specialization,
build strong, sustainable medical practices, and create new opportunities
- such as a network of plastic surgery clinics. In fact, so great
is the value of visibility that the manufacturing and marketing
of celebrities now reach into business, sports, entertainment, religion,
the arts, politics, academics, medicine, and law.
We see this remarkable process evolving very fast in Asia. Visibility
is what makes a particular lawyer the most sought after in town,
a talk-show host or newspaper commentator the most listened to in
his market, or a surgeon suddenly capable of raising millions of
dollars to build a state-of-the-art medical facility. Increasingly,
we see the development of a global market of industrialized celebrity,
a type of manufacturing in which individuals with basic skills in
a field can be elevated to a level of visibility unimaginable at
any other time - and be compensated with unimaginable rewards.
Indeed, there are at least five reasons strong personal brands pay
off. They are the generation of opportunity, attainment of superior
rewards, public demand for celebrity, increasing competition and
the career advantages associated with distinguishing one individual
from many other similarly qualified individuals, and the need for
advocates in such areas of concern as public policy, consumer protection,
business practice and development, minority interests, preservation
and celebration of cultural heritage, and many others.
Consider first opportunity. Zhu Rongi's high profile as mayor of
Shanghai transformed the city from a stagnant, corrupt, and decaying
shell of the international financial and cultural center it once
was into a rejuvenated entrepreneurial hub that attracts billions
of dollars in foreign investment annually. His success made him
a shoo-in for the post of premier, where he extended his highly
visible profile internationally, developing the reputation of a
can-do, honest, and determinedly reform-minded administrator. He
led campaigns to root out corruption in local politics, government
agencies such as customs, and the judiciary. Foreign investors responded
with enthusiasm, eventually pumping in approximately US$45 billion
annually into China's fast-growing economy.
Malaysia's Francis Yeoh, chief executive of YTL, has in a not dissimilar
fashion distinguished himself from a pack of businessmen favored
by that country's former and long-ruling primer minister Mahathir
Mohamad in two ways: 1) Building truly viable world-class businesses;
and, 2) Making sure the world knows of his success. A devout Christian
of Chinese ancestry, Yeoh is in many ways an anomaly in his country.
First, he recognizes the importance of visibility in building a
world-class company. In a society in which Chinese businessmen almost
always shy from the limelight in favor of the majority Malays, Yeoh
is fearless in projecting his company's success in the construction,
power, and leisure sectors. Second, he has leveraged his strong,
positive reputation as a Malaysian businessman who succeeds for
the right reasons to build one of Malaysia's most international
companies. His reputation has worked for him in other important
ways, too. When his company acquired Britain's Wessex Water Limited
from scandal plagued U.S. energy broker Enron, charges that YTL
had bribed Wessex management to approve the deal were quickly dismissed,
in significant part because Yeoh's reputation undermined the allegations.
In the Philippines, actress Chin Chin Gutierrez stared out at the
world from the cover of Time magazine last year, which called her
an "Asian Hero." Like many figures in the entertainment
industry, Gutierrez is leveraging her visibility to focus attention
on another concern: the environment. The actor's quest to communicate
the obligation of Filipinos and Philippine enterprise to the environment
was aided by her visibility as a successful, serious entertainment
personality. That effort also brought her to the attention of the
international media, and one result of the Time cover was to "legitimize"
her efforts to a broader market. As a result, Gutierrez is being
asked to speak at more meetings than ever, including the heavy-weight
Management Association of the Philippines, whose members include
almost 800 top local and multinational corporations with big public
relations budgets. This example demonstrates how visibility grows
while growing opportunity.
(Michael Alan Hamlin is the managing director of consultancy
TeamAsia and the author of three books on Asian economies and companies.
His latest book is Marketing Asian Places, of which he is a co-author
(Wiley, 2001), and he is currently at work on High Visibility: The
Making and Marketing of Asian Professionals into Celebrities. Write
him at mahamlin@teamasia.com.).
Copyright © 2004 Michael Alan Hamlin. All Rights
Reserved.
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