Marcus Buckingham’s Strong Life and Strategies for Personal Branding

In his latest book, Find Your Strongest Life, Marcus Buckingham challenges traditional thinking about what, for a woman, defines and creates a successful life. According to the author's research, the multitude of lifestyle choices available to women today has counterintuitively resulted in a less--not more--fulfilled generation that in decades past. Partially at fault, says the author, could be the myth of the woman who "has it all" and achieves the coveted state of work-life balance (to use an already frightfully overused phrase). In real life such a balance, it turns out, is not only next to humanly impossible, but undesirable. It is those women who have deliberately skewed their investment of time and energy toward their individual areas of greatest strength that consider themselves most fulfilled.

This notion of focusing on personal strengths flies in the face of all we’ve been taught in our lifetimes of report cards and performance evaluations. Rather than spin our wheels trying to fix what is “wrong” with us—roles or activities in which we don’t naturally excel or feel competent—we’d be wiser to devote more time to the few core things that just...fit.

It reads like good advice from a marketing angle, too—a reminder that the brand is diluted when it tries to be everything to too many audiences. To be strong and authentic your personal brand must have a distinct value proposition, and your “business model” must fall in line with delivering those core elements of value. Define what you honestly and naturally do best (not what you got your degree in, what you managed to force yourself to learn, what you’ve been doing diligently and unhappily for all these years, or what your family or friends expect from you). Then, quite simply, stick to that.

The book’s premise and research behind the method are certainly eye-opening, and the easy Strong Life test helps the reader pinpoint and understand the Lead Role and Supporting Role (or top two core strength areas) she was born to play in various dimensions of life. One relatively weak section of the book is the hurriedly put together chapters on practical advice. The troubleshooting how-to for career, relationships, and parenting is overly general and reads in places as if it’s been lifted from a college-prep handbook. Perhaps the author felt he had given enough advice on designing a life around your strengths in his previous books. The concept of playing only to my strengths is so enlightening that I’ll be going back to them to figure out how.

In case you want to know more, a book trailer from the publisher right here.

Bookselling Giant Adapts to Stay in the Game

It comforts me to see the book trade doing what it needs to do to stay afloat and thrive, in light of tough economy, changing consumer preferences, media consumption trends--what-have-you. Borders refuses to let itself be dragged down by the decline of brick-and-mortar music and movie sales. Instead, it adapts by reformatting its stores to replace that footage with micro shops devoted to teen cravings. Smart. Interesting.

And if my 16-year-old niece's predilection for Borders and teen fiction is any kind of barometer for what's big right now, this is big.

Borders Aims to Capitalize on Teens with New Shops

It Takes A Recession....

Who would've imagined that food out of a can would become not only practical, but popular again? Now big food companies such as Del Monte are spending big bucks to remind us that ingesting canned foods is no worse for us than ingesting "fresh" things. Most new product introductions this year will not come in the form of fancy packaging or newfangled cooking methods (steaming in a microwave bag is sooo 2008), but rather in the good old-fashioned form of humble aluminum cans, in the center of your grocery store.

Canned foods marketers, rejoice, and piggyback on being cool, again. Cans Are Hot! Brandweek Article, May 2009.

The Package Says It All

I'm enthralled by packaging---so much so that if I let myself get carried away in a store and stand there staring at the shelves I'd probably alarm the staff...after a while. Instead I sometimes peruse through packaging magazines, or websites such as the lovely TheDieline.com.

The expression of a brand you can hold in your hand. How brilliant.

Fast Food Ad Antics

Saw the new Jack in the Box ads, and like the new logo....just think Jack is awfully ripped for having been in a coma the last couple of months.

More Retro Comfort Food, Courtesy of General Mills

Some good old brands just make you...feel better.

General Mills, Target Play on Consumers' Nostalgia:
Retro Designs of Their Youth Appeal to Stressed Shoppers' Desire for Comfort

Are You Feeling Guilty...Yet?

Target is once again telling us what is cool, but the notion of "cool" has taken a sharp turn to--well, somewhere else. Nowadays it is cooler than ever to be thrifty, and not cool (in fact, it seems downright offensive) to indulge in the small luxuries of life--things like pedicures and store-bought espressos and gym memberships and trips to the hair salon. Things we used to take for granted. This is a commercial from Target's latest TV campaign.

Along the same guilt-inducing lines, in a recent ad for Sonic Drive-Ins, a tweenage son berates his mom for buying herself an expensive handbag at the mall. The son, it appears, has a much better handle on the value of a dollar, as he's treating his mother to a few items from the varied Sonic dollar menu.

And this widespread feeling of badness is affecting the super affluent as well, not just the rest of us. In this Washington Times article, we see how even those purchasing luxury goods are no longer comfortable with flaunting their favorite brands.

All this leaves me with one question about where marketing goes from here. As the economy continues to take a beating, what will the toll be on branding? As customer loyalty takes a back seat to the quest for value, which brands will become more significant, and which simply become obsolete?

New to the Endangered Brands List?

A brand that epitomizes ego and over-the-top consumption like few others. Given GM's dire straits, its survival is questionable....

Losing Your Religion

Whew...maybe not surprisingly, even Protestantism has trouble with its branding. Is it time to bring in the experts from Procter & Gamble?

U.S. Protestants more loyal to toothpaste brand than church?

I know I, for one, would rather give up indoor plumbing than Crest.

Nostalgic Food Brands

Granted, this old-fashioned version of a Cracker Jack box is "vintage" enough to pre-date my childhood, yet it conjures images of a happy time for me. When I was very small, my mother would often bring me home a box of Cracker Jack after an afternoon of running errands and shopping. Back then, it didn't take much more than some caramel popcorn and a nifty prize, torn out of its sticky wrapper at the bottom of the box, to make me smile.

Food brands from our past just seem to have an effect on us that way--one taste, one smell, and we're right back at that moment when life was oh-so-simple.

This vintage package is sold exclusively at Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores.