What is a personal brand?
Richard Branson no longer owns many businesses that use the Virgin brand, such as Virgin Media for example. But it’s hard to think of any of the Virgin companies without bringing a picture of Branson to mind, even if he’s had nothing to do with the company for years. This is because of the strength of his ‘personal brand’.
We’ve established that the most successful vegan businesses are built around a vision. The founders set off to create a movement as much as launch a business. Just like Virgin, these companies are also intertwined with the people who started them. You cannot separate BOSH! from Henry Firth and Ian Theasby. The Happy Pear employ over 100 people but it would be hard to continue the brand without their frontmen, Irish twin brothers, David and Stephen Flynn. Unity Diner is far more successful for having vegan activist Earthling Ed Winters as one of the founders. If you buy your clothing from Viva La Vegan then you are buying into Jay Charlton’s mission; in fact, if you buy from them at a vegan fair you may actually find yourself buying from her in person.
Unless your goal is to set a company up with the idea of selling it in a few years, then your vegan business should be no different. When you buy from a company, you are buying the vision of the owner. The more you identify with their vision then the more loyal you will be as a customer. If you like the person in charge and what they have to say then you are more likely to keep buying from that company. People buy from people, not businesses. And we buy the most from the people we like.
You can build your own ‘personal brand’ also. This might be intertwined with your company (such as The Happy Pear) or a separate identity that you lend to a number of ventures (such as Dale Vince, owner of Ecotricity and Forest Green Rovers). Veganism is growing exponentially but it is still a niche. And YOUR business will be serving a niche within that niche. That means it doesn’t take a lot to get known as the leading figure in your specialist vegan field. One of the next growth sectors is set to be vegan child and baby, but who’s the leading expert of vegan nutrition for children with a following of thousands of vegan and plant-based parents? I’ve yet to find one – could it be you? Of course it could, with a mission and some tenacity. And if your company happened to sell vegan baby food, then any work you put into building your personal brand as the expert in infant vegan nutrition will be a huge benefit to your business also – probably more than any other marketing.
A lot of vegan business owners are not comfortable with the idea of taking the spotlight, but movements need people to lead them. If you are an expert in something that other people want to learn then you will find an audience regardless of how you think you look on camera or what your current levels of confidence are. Paul Kerton is better known by his YouTube name Hench Herbivore, a vegan personal trainer and nutritionist. Some of his videos have had hundreds of thousands of views and he explained to Lisa and I how he thought his early videos were awful. He felt wooden and they didn’t have any of the characteristic charm and confidence that his videos have now, 5 years and 50,000 subscribers later. They are still there online if you dig back far enough and you will see the same from any of the experts you follow, if they have been honest enough to leave their early uploads online. Go find the first uploads of your favourite YouTuber and you might be shocked. They will probably be nothing like the confident, professionally-produced videos you are used to seeing from them now, but they still built a following with them. Do they look more like the sort of videos you might produce now?
We all have knowledge that is of huge value to others, but to be an expert you only need to be one step ahead of the person you are talking to. You only need to know something the day before they do for you to be able to teach them about it. Hench Herbivore hasn’t spent five years making fitness videos just showing the things he already knew, but because of his firm background in fitness and bodybuilding he knows how to learn about new, relevant topics in an expert way and then create content around them for his following. That’s part of being an expert, your continual learning. Every time we interview a business owner on Vegan Business Tribe I approach them with one huge question in my mind: what do you know that I don’t? What is that golden nugget that you’ve had to learn from years of hard slog that I can learn from you in 45 minutes? And once I’ve found it, I can reframe it and share it. Their expertise also becomes mine and that of everyone who watches the interview. In some industries people don’t like to share their secrets of success. When Lisa and I have worked with large food brands we’ve had to go through a huge amount of legal paperwork and non-disclosure agreements before we could talk about the products they are thinking of developing. With vegan businesses it is completely different. We all have the same goal, and the more we can help each other then the closer we get to a vegan world. If I want to know how One Planet Pizza got their idea funded so that we can share that knowledge with other vegan businesses, I only have to ask.
The more you are seen as an expert the more this will feed into your business. More customers might find out about your business through your personal YouTube channel than your company website. Building your personal brand will draw people towards you who are interested in what you have to say and a proportion of those will go on to be customers. Your vegan printing company will get more exposure by you being known as the expert in ethical and sustainable printing than it will from putting money into Pay Per Click advertising. When Lisa or I get interviewed we see a spike in sign-ups to Vegan Business Tribe for the next few days. If you successfully position yourself as an expert then you will achieve the holy grail of marketing: finding customers without having to pay for them.
