Let's face it, marketing is about relationships. If you strip away the channel, the creative, the format, the demographics and all else, marketing can be simply defined by how an individual consumer feels about you and your brand.
That feeling, and the relationship that ties you together, is the foundation of your brand. It influences purchase intent, repeat visits, loyalty, pass-along and virtually every other meaningful measure we have for our businesses.
The fundamentals of relationship-building for our business brands are really no different when it comes to our personal brands. Whether you're an independent consultant, an active job seeker or simply a smart marketer in a large organization, how you build and manage your brand -- and hence the relationships with those around you -- is the foundation of your success.
The skills we develop as marketers with customers and their influencers can have a dramatic effect on not only how we build and manage our personal brands at work, but also among friends and family.
So, if relationships are the foundation of our professional and personal success, why as a whole are we getting lazier and more uniform in how we approach our relationship-building and networking? Why do we put so much focus on commoditized tools that fail to differentiate us as individuals, and fail to create the deep, personal ties with those around us that have for generations been the building blocks of the most successful people in the world?
We rely intensely on tools such as Facebook, Plaxo and LinkedIn to build and foster our extended professional relationships. It's far easier and faster to work via email and through our online social networks to stay in touch with each other.
But these tools, by their nature, are shallow. By their ubiquity, they leave us largely undifferentiated. Sure, a sample of your personality and unique personal brand can be portrayed in a Facebook account or in your email copy, but that impression pales in comparison to how we used to build relationships.
As these tools become more and more ubiquitous, they fail to differentiate us and create the powerful business relationships we need to do our jobs and further our careers. They clearly have value, but if used exclusively, their impact on our jobs and careers will continue to be marginalized.
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