Apply what global corporations have confirmed: The most successful brands make an emotional connection with the people they serve.
A famous quote from author and poet Maya Angelou says a lot about executive personal branding:
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Global brands have found a great deal of value in being memorable because of the positive emotional connection they’ve made. Research shows that global brands that form strong emotional ties with the people they serve perform significantly better than brands that do not.
This lesson from big companies can help drive your success with executive personal branding as a C-suite executive, leader or manager in healthcare. Creating an emotive response with your executive personal branding using the time-proven ETA™ process and a purpose-why-how brand declaration from Revealing Genius can help you achieve your next career success more rapidly.
‘Intimacy’ and Corporate Brands
One of my favorite statistics related to emotion and branding is this: Research from Capgemini found that 81% of emotionally connected consumers will promote a particular brand to family and friends. That is significant!
The MBLM Brand Intimacy Study 2022 Report more deeply explores the connection between brand and emotions. The report shows that people are connecting with brands even more now than they did before COVID-19, with the percentage of consumers in some sort of intimate relationship with a brand up 9% since before the pandemic.
What the report says about the better performance of “intimate brands” also is significant:
“Intimate brands continue to outperform Fortune 500 and the stock market. Most recently, we have compared our Top 20 intimate brands with Fortune 500 top brands across profit growth and stock performance during 2021 versus 2020. Intimate brands delivered superior results across profit and stock. The percentage differences highlighted are significant and indicate the degree to which intimate brands generate millions more dollars in revenue and profit annually and over the long term.”
The report also found that consumers are willing to pay more for intimate brands and less willing to live without them. Furthermore, consumers are more involved with intimate brands and enjoy increased engagement with them.
“A strong emotional connection is a key requirement and the foundation of intimacy,” the report’s authors write. “We believe the greater the emotional connection between a brand and consumer, the more powerful the relationship. A strong emotional connection is determined by a series of attributes and language expressions that establish positive feelings a user has toward a brand and the extent to which a person associates the brand with key attributes.”
With all these potential benefits, global corporations are investing in their brands in ways that clarify their corporate purposes and articulate them better.
How can you apply this to your executive personal branding?
‘Intimacy’ and Executive Personal Branding
As a leader in healthcare, you can create an intimate, emotive response in your audiences by understanding on a deep level why you exist to serve—and then perfecting the way you talk about your purpose.
Here at Revealing Genius, we have lots of strategies for helping leaders clarify and better articulate their executive personal brands in ways that will evoke emotional responses from their audiences. Let’s talk about two key ones.
1. The ETA™ process. Based on the three time-proven steps of “excavate,” “tell” and “affirm,” the ETA process has helped many healthcare executives uncover what they do best in the world and more clearly define the people they most want to serve. The process helps leaders have conviction about their brands. They can feel it in their bones! And it helps them prepare to express their executive personal brands clearly in any situation.
2. The purpose-why-how brand declaration. This statement is a starting point for building your executive personal brand based on your unique brand stories. With a half hour of prep work and two calls, you can become one of only a handful of leaders to invest the time and energy to “give words” to your true north and calling. You can become one of only a handful of leaders to reap the benefits of doing so, too.
Undertaking the ETA process or creating your purpose-why-how brand declaration can help you build an emotional connection with the people for whom you most want to make a difference. The positive results can include increased confidence in your leadership role, better business results, more engagement with employees, bringing on more new clients, connecting more deeply with existing clients, attaining your dream job, being named to a board seat, giving an outstanding presentation … and so many other possibilities.
Get more strategies for excavating, telling and affirming your executive personal brand by attending our complimentary Excavate Your Brand webinar, enrolling in our 7-Day Summit or joining the RG 365 Membership Group.
Or, if you’re like many leaders and prefer one-on-one coaching, we’d love to hear from you too. Our most popular package includes 12 sessions and a confidential “executive rebrand,” including a customized brand framework and two brand assets such as a CV, LinkedIn profile, TED Talk or website content.
