Personal Branding
We call this technique “personal branding.” In my book One Big Thing: Discovering What You Were Born to Do, I use examples from the excellent book The Brand Called You by Peter Montoya. The examples are worth revisiting here. In his book, Montoya shares three critical insights for creating a compelling personal brand.
1. Visibility Is Just as Important as Ability
In a media-driven culture, being seen is just as important as being effective. There are hundreds of brilliant, gifted pastors who will never make an impact because people don’t know who they are. You see the concept illustrated most clearly in Hollywood, where actors of little ability and skill make millions of dollars from being in the right place at the right time. As a producer and director, I’m amazed at the incredible level of talent among unknown actors I see in casting sessions. There are men and women with incredible gifts who will never be recognized or known, simply because they don’t know how to get noticed.
In ministry, the people you see on television or listen to on radio aren’t necessarily the most gifted, anointed or skilled ministry leaders out there. But they have influence because they have visibility.
Does ability matter? No question about it. I believe in education, skill, expertise and personal growth. When the door opens, you’d better be ready to act and have the talent and calling to back it up. But unless that door opens, all the talent in the world will do little outside of entertaining your family. I don’t care how great your sermon, screenplay, movie or business idea may be. If it can’t get in front of the right people, you’ve failed.
Getting your face out there isn’t necessarily the act of an egotistical maniac. Certainly there are narcissists in the media (and plenty in religious media), but the truth is, getting on the radar of the public is the first step toward getting your message heard.
2. You Can’t Brand a Lie
Certainly, as people of faith, we should act with integrity; and every expression of your ministry should be true. But when it comes to skill and expertise, I find that a great number of ministry leaders take a shortcut. Through advertising and promotion, pastors often indicate areas of expertise they don’t really have, or experience that’s never actually happened.
Just check out the advertisements for the latest Christian conferences and look for the number of “Dr.” degrees. Everybody in ministry is a Doctor of something these days. And don’t get me started on the number of “Bishops,” “Prophets,” “Prophetesses,” “Apostles,” and more. Some denominations continue to use some of these designations in official ministry capacities, but many simply make it up to sound good.
When the truth is revealed, false branding dies hard. Montoya cites the case of television evangelist Jimmy Swaggart:
A perfect example is Jimmy Swaggart, the television minister who waged war on evil until he publicly admitted to an unspecified “sin” that later turned out to be cavorting with prostitutes. Despite his famous, tearful “I have sinned against you” speech, and his penitence, Swaggart has never rehabilitated his image because so many of his followers felt extremely and irreversibly betrayed.
I don’t use that example to criticize Jimmy Swaggart or comment on his sincerity, or his relationship with God. I use the quote as a powerfully clear example of the damage caused when brands are betrayed.
Keep in mind that perception plays a significant role in the process. In 2006, when pastor Ted Haggard resigned from his church in Colorado Springs under a cloud of alleged sexual misconduct, there were multiple issues at play, including how poorly he and his staff handled the media. I’ll never forget watching the news broadcast when they featured an interview with Ted after he stopped his car at the end of the driveway with his wife and kids in the backseat. An impromptu interview in the front yard in earshot of the kids wasn’t the most appropriate venue to answer questions about alleged sexual wrongdoing.
Who can possibly know how difficult struggling with this issue for years had been, and how humiliating the experience was for Ted and his family. We all struggle with sin in our lives, and it’s important to remind ourselves just how easy it is to stumble or fall.
This discussion is not meant to be a personal criticism of anyone. But for the Church as a whole, we need to wake up to living and sharing our witness in a media-saturated culture. The way the mass media exposes, uncovers and tells the story is vastly different from anything the Church has experienced in 2,000 years of its history. If we don’t understand how the media works, it will forever damage our witness to the world.
And it’s not about covering up, deflecting or denying. On the contrary, it’s about being truthful and confronting the media in a way that permits the real story to be told without letting denials, information scraps, inaccuracies and falsehoods color the story. The stakes are remarkably high. At the time, it didn’t take much to see the anti-religious bloggers and writers descending on the Haggard story like sharks to blood.
With any crisis in the Church today, hypocrisy, denials or botched public statements energize Christianity’s critics.
In fact, it was sobering to note an America Online poll that asked 185,364 people what they thought of Ted’s confession. In my opinion, largely because of the poor handling of the story, 65 percent of the respondents said they believed his confession was insincere, and only 35 percent felt it was sincere.
During the weeks after the story broke, “Ted Haggard” was the most searched name on multiple search engines, and Technorati.com revealed that it was the number-one topic among bloggers. That means that in spite of the war in Iraq, and on the eve of a national mid-term election, this was the number-one priority for the American people. Millions of people were asking about it, searching for information and writing about the issue. But the Sunday morning after the story broke, I attended a church here in Los Angeles and then asked my friends about their own churches, and not one pastor even mentioned it. Not once. It was the most asked question on people’s minds in the country, and these—and thousands of other—pastors chose not to engage in a conversation about sin, denial, forgiveness, restoration and salvation—or even offer to pray for Ted and his family. What a missed opportunity!
This is why so many in the culture think the church is irrelevant. The world is asking questions, but we refuse to deal with them.
When it comes to branding a lie, it’s also not simply about moral failure; it’s about gifts, talents and expertise. If you bill yourself as an expert on drug treatment, you’d better be able to back it up. If you want to become known for family ministry, you’d better have the credentials to prove it. If you write or teach on financial success, you’d better have some money in the bank.
In this age of the Internet, anyone can be investigated, any time, with a few easy keystrokes on a computer. Politicians are finding this out in the heat of campaigns, as old DUI convictions suddenly pop up, a racist remark is uncovered, or embarrassing academic records are revealed. (Can you say, “mail-order Ph.D.”?) Major corporations struggle as confidential internal memos are released on the Internet as quickly as they’re distributed to employees.
Never in history have leaders needed to be more transparent.
We live in a world of video cameras, databases and information retrieval. In fact, search engines aren’t just about “search”; they’re about “reputation management.” For a generation of young people who grew up posting the most intimate details of their lives on social media sites, they’re finding in their twenties that it’s getting tough to find a job. Once the interview is complete, the first thing a future employer often does is Google them, only to find the old drinking photos from the college dorm, a raging political rant, embarrassing personal details, explicit sexual updates, and more.
Hardly welcome news for a prospective employer.
In the old days, executives, pastors and nonprofit leaders could have a private jet, a luxury car or a mansion, and few would ever find out. But today, a few keystrokes on the computer reveal everything.
“Differentiate or die.”
—Jack Trout, marketing consultant
3. In a Media-driven Culture, Being Different Is Everything
The world isn’t looking for a copy of a major religious leader; they’re looking for someone new, innovative and original. God gave you unique DNA, so your job is to discover how your unique gifts and talents can differentiate your ministry from everyone else’s.
You have no idea the number of pastors who call our offices each week asking us to “Do the same thing for us that you did for this or that national ministry client.” They’ve got it backward. There’s already one of them. You need to emphasize your unique differences.
In working with these pastors and ministry leaders, I’m reminded of Michelangelo, who was asked about how he carved such brilliant statues of angels. He remarked that he didn’t carve statues; he just removed the excess stone so that the angel inside could come out.
It’s not so much a matter of re-creating or rebuilding a ministry; it’s more about cutting away the junk so that the real ministry that’s inside can be released.
And believe me, the junk is there. Lack of professionalism, poor media production, unqualified staff, poor taste, inept leadership, insecurity, small budgets, bad assumptions and more plague many organizations today and hamper their effectiveness.
A quick look at Christian television will prove that most ministries are pretty similar in their look, style and presentation. Few men and women in the ministry world are truly unique. God is the great creator, and yet most ministry leaders simply copy what they see on TV or hear on the radio.
Listen to Apple ads and “Think Different.” If God created you as a unique individual, what does that mean for the type of vision you’re called to accomplish?
This excerpt is taken from Unique: Telling Your Story in the Age of Brands and Social Media by Phil Cooke. © 2012 by Phil Cooke. Unique is published by Regal Books. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Order from Amazon.com: Unique: Telling Your Story in the Age of Brands and Social Media
