1. Successful and Powerful Brands are not built in a day or overnight.
2. Successful and Powerful Personal Brands are not built by chance or luck but rather by consistent and deliberate hard work.
3. It is not enough to just build a successful and powerful brand, it’s absolutely imperative that you maintain and keep the brand still successful and powerful.
Usually people walk under the illusion that, you can just wake up one morning and suddenly you have become a very successful and powerful brand. People event stretch this illusion further to believe that you can just serendipitously stumble into becoming a successful and powerful personal brand. It gets even more ludicrous when people think that once you attain the status of a successful and powerful personal brand then the battle is over. They walk with the erroneous impression that ‘once a successful and powerful personal brand, forever shall it be so’.
On the contrary, it does not just take a day to build a successful and powerful brand. It takes several days and months and years for one to authoritatively establish him/herself as a successful and powerful brand. The interesting thing is that, people think that the fact that he/she has never heard of someone’s name and to just wake up one day to find someone’s name trending on Twitter or Facebook or even the newswires implies that it took just a night for the said person to have attained such heights of success. For example, Bozoma Saint John, Apple Music exec ‘Saint O James’ powerful presentation at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2016 that took place from June 13-17 in San Francisco. Apples’s 2016 annual tech fair resulted in Saint trending on Twitter and Facebook for several days. Her speech was on 13th June and by the morning of 14th June 2016; she was a celebrity in her own right, basking in her ‘successful and powerful personal brand’. For most of us who just woke up to see or hear Bozoma Saint John trending on the 14th of June 2016, shouldn’t mistakenly assume she ‘suddenly arrived’ on the world stage on the 13th June and built a successful and powerful brand by 14th June 2016.
Let me let you in on the highlights of Bozoma Saint John career as captured on www.wired.com. Bozoma Saint John path to success wasn’t a smooth one. She was born in Ghana, and she was 14 when her family immigrated to Colorado Springs, Colorado. She ran for the student council in 10th grade under the slogan “Nuthin but a Boz thang,” according to The Hollywood Reporter and went on to Wesleyan University. She earned a degree in African American studies and English. Before going to Pepsi, Saint John worked at the fashion brand Ashley Stewart and the advertising agencies Arnold Worldwide and Spike DDB. Through it all, Saint John has remained fiercely devoted to helping others excel. She’s been deeply involved in Adcolor, which celebrates and promotes people of color in the ad industry. Two years ago, the organization made her the first recipient of its Rockstar Award. She was inducted into the American Advertising Federation’s Advertising Hall of Achievement later that year. The list of accolades goes on. Billboard named her one of the top women in music and one of its top 40 executives under 40. Fast Company included her on its list of 100 most creative people and Ebony listed her among 100 powerful executives.
Saint John ended up at Apple thanks to its acquisition of Beats Music – a move that she hadn’t originally seen coming. She joined only three months before Beats was sold to Apple, but has taken the reins as the head of global consumer marketing for Apple Music and iTunes. Pepsi, though, was where Saint John made a name for herself in music circles. She ran its music and entertainment marketing group, a division that she practically invented herself, after she suggested that Pepsi start sponsoring music festivals and award shows.
Her passion for music led her to move across the country from New York to Los Angeles to oversee marketing for Beats Music. Now that Beats Music is an Apple-owned company, Saint John splits her time between Cupertino and Los Angeles, flying back and forth multiple times a week. Apple Music launched in June 2015, but Saint John’s time onstage at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2016 was to highlight how the company has now rebuilt it from the ground up. That includes extra effects like lyrics, which she wanted to get the crowd to sing along to. She closed it out by playing Ghanaian music, in a nod to her family background
So there you have it, clearly illustrated John Appiah’s 1st Golden Law of ‘Successful and Powerful Personal Brand’.You can surely build that dream successful and powerful brand, just appreciate that it will take some time to get there. Whatever it is, don’t give up and keep working hard at that dream. It will surely come to reality.
Author: John Affaidzi Appiah || Director, Corporate Communications and External Relations at Various
Follow John’s blog (http://inspired4impact.over-blog.com) to get regular updates of all the write ups I do. Next week, I will write on my 2nd Golden Law of ‘Successful and Powerful Personal Brand’. #Inspired4Impact #Graced4Greatness
