Personal Branding and the Wedding Industry

Yesterday, Olivier Blanchard posted a well-written and timely piece on the so-called "personal branding" movement that has been so popular lately. The article is full of wisdom and candor and a highly recommended read.

This past year in the wedding industry, we've seen the workshops and classes offered go beyond the general or skill-specific educational topics to sort of a self-help realm. Adding insult to injury, these are being led by people who have no background in professional counseling.

I will be the first to admit that professional therapy changed my life. As a result, I am a big believer in it.  But unless your "personal branding" group therapy workshop is being led by an actual licensed counselor, then you are treading in very dangerous territory. Therapists are licensed for a reason: it is a complex field and a bad therapist can do much more damage than good. I have little patience for people who prey on the emotions of others, especially so they can make money since their core business isn't, and that's precisely what many of these personal branding workshop leaders do.

To be fair, I also believe that you can have experiences without a licensed counselor that can change your life for the better. Certain books have left an indelible thumbprint on my life. Certain movies have left me pondering a long-held belief and after serious critical thinking, my perspective has shifted. That's what good art does. I have attended women's retreats where I've left a better person than when we began. The difference with those and with these sham personal branding workshops is that the retreats were clearly billed as to what they were. I knew what I was getting into when I signed up. I was not attending a retreat thinking I was going to learn business and marketing advice only to find out it was something else entirely.

As Olivier's article states, "we are people not brands." I really believe this. Your identity is so much more than your business. You should never have to separate who you know yourself to be and who you project yourself to be. You should never have to project anything other than who you actually are. Yes, that means some people won't like you.

Business branding is real. Personal branding is snake oil. A "business workshop" playing dress up with group therapy is dangerous, irresponsible and reprehensible and the leaders being "such nice people" doesn't change any of that. If you need or want help on specific personal issues, please take the money you would have spent and see a professional counselor instead. For the average rate of most of the wedding industry personal branding workshops currently available, you could see a licensed therapist for an hour each week for at least a month or two. If it's actual business branding advice you're after, you could spend the money on an experienced graphic designer or business consultant. These would both be much better investments of your time and money.

You can read Olivier's full article on personal branding here.

Quick Tip for Setting Better Goals

As I do every December, this past week I've been rerunning the Mental Detox series on Twitter - short thoughts meant to help us declutter our minds and prepare for the new year. One of the social media exercises I recommend to help in this process, especially at a time of year when goal setting and planning is on everyone's to-do list, is to go through your social media posts for the past month and count the number of times you complained. This can be overt complaining (the traffic this morning sucks!), complaining dressed up to make you look important (I have so many emails, I'll never get through this inbox), and any passive aggressive remarks ("industry politics are horrible!" when someone else is honored with an award and you aren't). After you've tallied the number of times you've complained in the past month, set a goal to cut that number in half for the next month.

There are several reasons for this exercise: first, complaining on social media doesn't do your brand any favors unless you are trying to claim the title of whiniest, most inflexible company to work with. Second, I believe that most of the time we don't realize how often we complain. By actively measuring it, we can nip it in the bud. When we complain we close our minds to possibilities and then nothing worthwhile gets accomplished.

The Biggest Challenge in Business

The greatest challenge when it comes to business is not cash flow, marketing or customer satisfaction. The greatest challenge is not what the latest trend is and if it suits your style, or whether or not you landed that big client, or coming up with the next killer idea. The greatest challenge in business is human nature.

If we bring the sum of our experiences to the table, then we also bring our flaws. The challenge is that you can't really plan for the flaws of others because they show up at the oddest times. You don't know how your employee's ego will react when given a few minutes in the social media spotlight if they've never experienced any type of public recognition before. You don't know what new lows a competitor will stoop to in order to get ahead because they're trying to prove to their dad, wife, ex-husband, kids, former boss that they're not actually a failure. You don't know what subtle racist views will surface when someone is suddenly in an unfamiliar situation.

Most business plans focus on market research, budget projections and goals. Very few take human nature into account. But human nature can derail the best laid plans. The best solution in dealing with the unpredictability of people is to be open-minded, patient and flexible. To achieve this, though, means that we have to take a hard look at the flaws in our own lives.

Online Communication Etiquette

One of the first guidelines of business communication I ever learned was to respond in like kind. This means that if someone contacts you via phone, you reply with a phone call. If they contact via email, you send an email and so on and so forth. In the age of social media, this rule still holds true. If someone contacts you via Twitter or Facebook, then it's fine to reply via Twitter or Facebook.

Here are a couple of thoughts I have about this rule and how it ties in with new media:

1. If managing multiple inboxes is slowing you down, it is perfectly acceptable to reply to a Facebook or Twitter business inquiry and ask them to email you instead. I do this in order to keep all of my correspondence organized and in one place.

2. If someone contacts you via a private channel (email, Twitter DM, Facebook private messaging or through a phone call), ALWAYS assume that the information provided is privileged and confidential unless they note otherwise. It is not okay to publicly reply to an email or phone call on Twitter or Facebook and reveal information from those conversations. In this day and age of such open communication, it is still important to respect another company's or client's right to privacy.




This post was originally published in March 2010.

Splendid Sundays Volume 57

A handful of splendid finds from around the worldwide web:

Charlie Rose's interview with the 29 year old CEO of Groupon, the fastest growing company in history and recently rumored to have turned down Google's $6 billion offer.

Spending in luxury retail continues to increase.

A visual of how far technology has come in just ten years.

"There’s no publicity value in me doing it for nothing . . . I sell my soul, but at the highest rates." This applies to anyone in the wedding industry. (Heads up on some colorful language.)

Quotable: "Betting that things will stay the same is a bad bet. I am sure of that." -- Fred Wilson

Do you have any splendid finds to share?

Things That Amaze Me :: Volume 6

When you sell a man a book, you don't sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.  -- Christopher Morley

The written word never fails to amaze me. A provocative book can make laugh, cry, ask better questions, and confirm things I've thought for a while. There are several authors whom I've never met who have left an indelible thumbprint on my life.

Are You Making Things Too Complicated?

Seriously, Apple?

Do you do things in your own business that make you feel important but hinder the client experience?

An Open Letter to PR Agencies Targeting Wedding Bloggers

Dear PR professionals who work with companies looking to reach the wedding industry,

I know your job is difficult and largely thankless. Your clients have specific goals and usually a gross misunderstanding of how the press and media actually work. Many think a big mention is going to catapult them to zillionaire status overnight while their phones ring off the hook from celebrities begging them to do their next wedding. Still, even with all this, you have to deliver results. As someone who receives dozens of press releases every week from people hoping to land a mention on my blog, here are some things to keep in mind:

1. Know who you are pitching. This is easy: every blog has an about page with the blogger’s name on it. We’re big believers in Dale Carnegie's theory that people like the sound of their own name. Use it. Spell it right.

2. Do not cc or bcc the entire list of wedding bloggers. Do not make threats. We’re friends. We talk to each other. Your emails get forwarded and pretty soon you have 30 women who want nothing to do with you because you treated one of us poorly.

3. We don’t think you personally are evil. However, pretty much every PR pro who has gone before you in the voyage to clutter our inboxes with irrelevant crap (bridal diet pills, special gel - I'll let you figure that one out, television shows about brides fighting for a terrible wedding with joke vendors) hasn’t done you any favors. No, it’s not fair, but it is what it is. If you want to get press on a wedding blog, it's at the point where you're going to have to do it the old fashioned way – by building actual relationships with the bloggers.

4. Your creative ideas are usually not that creative. Also, they typically display a complete ignorance for the wedding industry and what brides today are actually like. The 1950’s are gone along with the manipulative princess bride of the 1980’s. You actually want us to run a story on how brides can manipulate their "reluctant grooms-to-be" into proposing so that they can win a $15,000 ring? (Not making this up - this was a real pitch.) Seriously, you realize that women today are highly educated and have been paying their mortgages and bills with their own hard-earned money long before they met the man of their dreams, right? Also, with the divorce rate being at 50%, perhaps it's a bit irresponsible to be encouraging men who aren't ready to pop the question to just go ahead and settle down already.

Wedding bloggers need content. We're happy to hear about things that our readers would be genuinely interested in. But treating us as an impersonal checkbox on your to-do list is not the way to get your client press.

Treating Social Media as a Constraint

Do you remember having to do multiplication tests in elementary school? The teacher would set her watch and, in a race against time, you'd have to fill out the multiplication tables from memory. In high school, I had to do something similar in my English classes. Every Friday, there would be a topic on the board and we had 50 minutes to write a coherent essay about it. Not finishing was not an option. Those classes were probably the most beneficial for me out of any I've ever taken, including the very expensive ones in college, because they taught me how to think critically and express those thoughts in writing. The added constraint of time forced me to clarify my thoughts and produce quickly.

Social media is like that. The more you do it, the better you get at it. If you want to get results from blogging, you have to do it consistently and on a regular basis. What would happen if you treated social media as a constraint? This is something I have to do today; not doing it is not an option. I'd bet that you find ideas come to you much more easily than if you act as if you don't need to be disciplined about it.

Blogging is a business habit that pays off, but only if you make it a habit in the first place.

Year-End Tax Deductions

December is busy, no doubt about it. Between the holidays and getting ready for a new year, it's easy to get overwhelmed with to-do lists and one of the things that many businesses forget to take advantage of is year-end donations. Donations made by the end of the year are eligible for 2010 tax deductions, so if you need to write more off either personally or for your business, this is the perfect time to do so. Here are two of my favorite charities you can donate to in order to take advantage of deductions, but to also spread some holiday good-will:

Pink Initiative is a non-profit organization that I serve on the board for and is made up of wedding industry professionals dedicated to funding awareness, outreach, education and research for breast cancer. You can learn more about Pink Initiative here and donate here.

charity: water is an organization bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. Dirty water causes 80% of all diseases and just $20 can give one person clean water for twenty years. You can learn more about charity: water and donate here.

There are many great charitable organizations out there, and it's impossible to be involved with all of them, so choose the one with a cause you're most passionate about (for me personally those causes are ones related to cancer, AIDS or debilitating poverty, hence my suggestions above). Your donation helps the organizations, the people receiving their help and you.

Win A Free Ticket to The Special Event's Wedding Lunch

This announcement would normally be included in a Splendid Sundays post, but since the entry deadline is this Thursday, it gets its own post:

If you are planning on attending The Special Event in Phoenix in January, you can enter to win a free ticket to The Wedding Lunch (a $130 value and something that's not included with general registration). The winner will also receive free admission to the opening general session, the exhibit hall and Michael Cerbelli's Hot Event and Entertainment Ideas 2011. Click here for more details or if you'd like to enter to win.

Good luck! I will be speaking at The Special Event again this next year, so hopefully I'll see you there!

Splendid Ideas: Just About Married

In this next feature in the Splendid Ideas series, Mayra Castillo (left) and Xochitl Gonzalez (right) share about their new company, Just About Married, which offers day-of wedding coordination services to high-end couples. Although Just About Married is new, these ladies have been planning weddings in New York City for seven years under their first company, Always a Bridesmaid. While many planners build an associate model to take on day-of coordination clients, Mayra and Xochitl are trendsetters for planners worldwide with this new, and more sustainable, business model for day-of coordination. Here is my interview with them:

Can you explain the concept of Just About Married in more detail?
Just About Married is an event management and logistics planning firm. The core offering is our day-of coordination (DOC) service which is a turn-key system that begins about a month before the clients' wedding or event and concludes with one of our teams of event staff overseeing the set up, ceremony and reception flow for the couple's celebration. Some clients need additional support pulling things together or getting going when they are first engaged, so we also offer "getting started" and "panic" packages, which are still logistics based.

Your first company, Always a Bridesmaid, is very well known in New York, having been named to New York Magazine’s Top Wedding Planners' list seven times and your blog is also read internationally. With that kind of brand exposure, why did you feel it was important to create a separate company for day-of coordination services?
It was precisely because of the brand exposure that we felt it was important to separate the day-of wedding services into their own company. We have this reputation because we do very good work and have a brand attitude that people at various price points really identified with. The buyer confidence in the Always a Bridesmaid experience was so high that clients that couldn't afford the "full service" design experience that we had built our reputation on were seeking to purchase something that they could afford, and that was a DOC service.

Because the two of us are the faces of Always a Bridesmaid, it was more difficult to transition these DOC weddings to our other staff. Not impossible, but much more risky that "handing it over" would sour the clients' experience. The volume of business that we were booking was starting to overwhelm our core business, which is designing high-end weddings. We didn't want to become known as being a DOC firm and we also didn't want to cheapen the experience of our full service clients. We had a tough-love lunch with Sean Low last year and he said, "Keep doing day-of and it's going to cheapen your brand." We knew that, but we also couldn't overlook the revenue that it was bringing in. Creating Just About Married enabled us to keep control over our core brand and keep it high-end while simultaneously responding to market demand and offering a more specific, simplified service offering with a similar brand message. We saw this as akin to Donna Karen and DKNY or Crate and Barrel and CB2.

How do you ensure quality control across a large team since you and Mayra aren’t the planners running Just About Married?
When we decided to do this we realized that the most important thing was that it not be a bunch of planners running around willy nilly and that it needed to be fairly systematic. When we first started to train junior staff for Always a Bridesmaid, we began to document the process that we would take clients through during the last month, from our final meeting through the wedding day itself. That became the basis for the Just About Married process. As we did a soft launch of the service the first year, we kept our fingers in the pie enough to see where the holes or weak points in the system were so that we could tighten them up. The other part of it is our staff. We separate every event into three roles and everyone needs to train in each of the three roles. Part of this is to see where their strengths and weaknesses are and part of it is to minimize "damage" if someone has an off day. Even though we aren't the planners running this company, we and our Just About Married manager each get feedback within 24 hours from the lead planner and we try and check in with the other members of the team. Even if we hire people to join the team who have event experience, we try not to bring people on with wedding experience or a pre-conceived idea of how they think DOC should be executed. Although it's a different brand than Always a Bridesmaid, the quality level that we demand is still the same.

Many people tend to think of day-of coordination as low-end clients, since the price point for day-of coordination is obviously less than for full-service planning. Yet many of the brides who have booked Just About Married are working with high-end wedding professionals and have large budgets. Your price point for Just About Married is also not cheap. What do you make of this? Do you feel the DIY movement has had an impact on clients hiring full-time wedding planners?
What is happening is that day-of coordination used to be a service offered by wedding planners, but we think it's almost evolving into a separate job that speaks to a totally different client than the person who needs or wants full service planning. We think that for those full service "planners" who clearly offer something more than logistics, there will always be clients seeking their services.

That said, we do think that there is a shift in the profession as well as in the marketplace. We think it says something not only about the DIY movement, but about the concept of "wedding planners" in general. More than speaking to DOCs cannibalizing full-service clients, the high end nature of Just about Married's clients speaks to the fact that a DOC has become a "must have" service for brides at every budget level. It's being added to the list along with photographer and wedding cake. Since there is a proliferation of "wedding planners" offering DOC at all sorts of price points, it's possible for a "budget" bride to have a coordinator on board for the day. The same way that there are brides who choose to have luxury photo, video or stationery, this same type of bride also wants to have a luxury DOC experience.

DIY has come to not only refer to brides who want to craft, or even brides on a "budget", but it's really an attitude. We think DIY really encompasses a whole group of brides (and grooms) who see the engagement as a lifestyle phase and who really want to be a part of the nitty gritty and decision making. The couple with that attitude is simply not the same client that is looking for someone to come in and help them craft a vision for their day and execute each detail on their behalf, no matter what their budget.

Your team of planners for Just About Married all have event planning experience, but also have varying career backgrounds. How do you feel that helps what you do?
We're really fortunate to have a nice sized team of women who all have very different professional backgrounds. One woman produced rock concerts for years and now works at a high profile investment bank. Another one of our team members worked as a hostage negotiator. When we started to do staffing for Just About Married's first few weddings we realized that our staff was diverse enough that we could create teams with the clients' specific needs in mind. If a bride mentions at their initial meeting that relations between the family are a bit tense, well, the hostage negotiator might not be a bad call to be on board for that particular wedding! It's now become a bit of a sales tool and we try and highlight our event manager's bios on the company's website.

New York City is a melting pot, more so than any other place in the country. How did you set up Just About Married to appeal to such a wide variety of wedding styles and clients?
The benefit of starting a new company after seven years of experience in a particular market is that you can really set it up to respond to the clients' needs. Always a Bridesmaid has designed many intercultural weddings, so we knew that New York has a huge market of couples who are first generation or not American at all. Part of a what makes a great day-of coordinator is the ability to put people at ease and, simply put, if your family doesn't speak English, there is nothing that makes that client feel better than knowing that someone is there on the day that can communicate with everyone. While many of our staff have been a part of the Always a Bridesmaid team for several years, we make sure that new people who are brought on board can speak a foreign language or have knowledge of a religion or culture that we may not have on our team yet. Our staff speaks six languages and we are extremely proud of that.

Photo of Mayra and Xochitl by Karen Mordechai. Wedding photos (in order of appearance) by Ingalls Photo, Weddings by Two, and Keiko Niwa.

Splendid Sundays Volume 56

A handful of splendid finds from around the worldwide web:

We are not here to be bored; indifference is a curse.

Nordstrom is opening bridal salons in 14 stores nationwide.

100layercake launched their new site earlier this week. Curated, beautiful, and puts a lot of power in the brides' hands.

The attendees of the 2010 POSH Retreat, an event for women visual artists released a film this week called We Create.

Quotable: "Just because you invent a better way does not mean that someone will not come along and do what you do better. Just talk to MySpace or Ask.Com.” -- Sean Low

Do you have any splendid finds to share?

From Scratch

If you had to start over and change one thing about your business, what would it be?

For our purposes today, “I wouldn't change a thing, everything happens for a reason” doesn’t count as an answer.

Hindsight Is Never 20/20

Popular myth: hindsight is 20/20. It's not. The ability to see history with perfect vision is impossible because we still have emotional ties to whatever it is we're looking back on. Perhaps we see it from a more mature perspective or with a more open (or more closed) mind, but perfectly and with completely unbiased judgement? Never.