Transcript lightly edited for spelling and punctuation. The conversation is unabridged.
Mark Evans: Hi. It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. When did a personal brand become so important? Why does it matter? And how do you build a personal brand?
For entrepreneurs looking to break through and break out, a strong personal brand is a must-have. But building a brand requires a combination of hard work, creativity, energy, and strategy, and it can't be built overnight. Amid the sea of people talking about personal branding, DP Knudten stands out. His Nonfiction Brand philosophy helps entrepreneurs discover and communicate the completely true and completely you brand. Welcome to Marketing Spark.
DP Knudten: Oh, thank you so much for having me, Mark.
Mark Evans: So let's start with a softball question because it's an obvious question that I need to ask, and it's probably one with a multifaceted answer. What's your definition of personal branding?
DP Knudten: No. It's a really good question because so many people that are talking about personal branding are not talking about personal branding. They're talking about becoming an Instagram influencer or having brands come to me and wear their clothing and that gets my fans and all that stuff to buy the stuff. Influencers are a subset of personal brands, but personal branding is much, much bigger. And I always refer back to the very first time I ever heard that phrase, personal branding or personal brands, and that is in Tom Peters' 1997 article in Fast Company magazine, called 'The Brand Called You.'
I mean, literally, go to fastcompany.com, search for 'The Brand Called You,' and read that article because that is the Rosetta Stone of personal branding. And it's not about being an influencer. It's not about wearing a bikini and having your wind blowing in the in the air on a beach in Belize. It's not any of that stuff. It comes down to what Tom thought was the benefit of packaging yourself and using the same techniques that have been time-tested and proven of consumer packaged goods.
Meaning, you don't, for example, let's take a a consumer packaged goods, a good that everybody knows, Wheaties, the breakfast cereal.
Mark Evans: Right.
DP Knudten: It is a wheat flake of some sort. I don't know how it's made. I don't know what it is, but I do know this. Wheaties is the breakfast of champions. It comes in an orange box that I can see from across an entire supermarket.
And if I'm in the market to buy Wheaties, I look for that, I grab it, and I go because in my mind, Wheaties are gonna make me perform better. Why? Because they have created a brand that's all based on that concept, which is we're not some sweet candy like cornflake or wheat flake. We are a performance-serious, adult-oriented wheat flake. I'm talking about wheat flakes here.
We're talking commodities, and yet this commodity is an incredibly high-performing brand. So Tom Peters basically stipulated that everything Wheaties did, you need to do for yourself. You need to package yourself. And, yeah, I saw that article. I still remember where I was when I read that article in 1997, and I've been thinking about it ever since.
And finally, I've come up with my take on it and put it into a book, which you mentioned, 'Nonfiction Brand: Discover, Craft, Communicate the Completely True, Completely You Brand You Already Are,' which is kind of my marketing way of saying, 'Do you see how packaged that book title is?' That enables you, Mark, to introduce me in a way that gets people going, 'What's he got to say?' Because that's kinda interesting. And by the way, 'Nonfiction Brand,' that implies that there is such a thing as fictional branding. Is there?
Why, yes, there is. See how a conversation has started all based on the fact that I packaged my philosophy, gave it a title that's very similar to Wheaties or Froot Loops, and then made it a product that people wanna know more about, and consequently, me. So personal branding is about packaging who you are, what you do, and how you do it in a way that other people can understand it, prefer it, share it, evangelize, become your unpaid sales force because they know exactly how to introduce you based on who you are, what you do, and how you do it.
Mark Evans: Right. It sounds like a lot of the work that I do with B2B SaaS companies when it comes to positioning and messaging.
DP Knudten: Yes.
Mark Evans: Same basics. Right? We're establishing a personal brand or corporate brand in that case. So I can see, you know, the similarities and how you would approach brand building both from a personal perspective and corporately.
DP Knudten: Yeah. Well, exactly. Okay. So both of us share a deep marketing background. And I understand that you came from the journalism side of stuff and now are in the marketing space.
I came from the theatrical side, if you will, because my degree is in theater of all things. But I discovered that I could write well and that people would pay me. Well, does that make me a writer? Is that my personal brand? It influences my personal brand, but it's not at the core of who I am.
Like, if I get down to the first-principle DNA level of who I am, the first word I'm gonna throw out there is creative. I always have to be creative. Whether I'm writing songs that no one listens to in my basement studio or if I'm presenting to a client, I'm always creative, entertaining, and fun. You know, stuff like this. That creativity affects every single thing I do.
Now writing is a tool I use to express my creativity, and it also provides a handy, what I would call, 'brandle'—a brand handle for other people to understand. So if they say, 'Hey. That DP Knudten guy, what's he do?' Well, he's a writer, and he's pretty funny, or he's really touching, or he understood our difficult concept and distilled it down into nuggets of truth that make it very easy for us to go to market. So, again, you're talking about working with SaaS companies.
Right? Software as a Service. You gotta convince me because I've been buying box software for thirty years. Tell me why I should spend $15 a month for your service. And in my mind, I'm doing the, 'Well, let's see.'
If I bought that for $90, that converts to how many months and all that stuff. And if I'm doing that conversation, that calculation, you've lost me. But if you're talking about the benefits that I can get from your service as software, then we can have a conversation. Because if you're talking to me about what I want, which are the benefits, not the features, we can talk about features on our third, fourth, fifth date. But branding is about getting that first date and then beginning a conversation that creates a relationship, and that relationship creates a lifetime of transactions.
Mark Evans: Right. I guess what fascinates me about personal branding these days is that it seems to be everywhere. I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, and there is post after post about the importance of personal branding, how to do it. I do wonder why there's so much fascination in personal branding because I suspect it's been around for a long time. I mean, people have had personal brands for, you know, hundreds of years.
I mean, Beethoven had a personal brand. But I am curious about why it's become such a hot commodity. Is it a growth industry, so a lot of people have gravitated to being gurus and consultants? Is it a result of the volatile economic conditions in which we live, or is there something else?
DP Knudten: Well, I think it's a combination of all those things. You know, the idea, as I said earlier, Tom Peters kind of threw it out there in 1997. It's had a lot of time to percolate through the culture. But a big thing that has happened is, and I don't think a lot of people are consciously aware of this, but there is a fear of commoditization. Meaning, if I'm a writer, I'm one of many.
If I'm not known for anything, I'm just a writer that's easily replaced for someone who's either cheaper, younger, faster, whatever you perceive them to be, and I have less value to you. And you know this from branding. You have basically, in my world, in the way I think, there are two positions in the market: commodity or brand. Commodities are purchased for the lowest possible price, but brands command a premium. Now, all I have to do is mention one company and you'll understand what I mean: Apple.
I'm a huge Apple aficionado, and by the way, I own Apple stock, full disclosure, because I love that company. I started out on computers with a green screen with a prompt where I had to type in park.exe to park the heads on my hard drive, which I installed, and it was a whopping 10-20 megabyte hard drive. I have photos on my phone right now that are bigger than that entire hard drive capacity was. So I'm not afraid of tearing stuff apart, but I've reached the point in my life where I value the Apple 'it just works.'
I value the Apple user-experience focus. I love the design aesthetic that they create. I don't love everything they do, but they are more aligned with what I choose to align with. Meanwhile, I know people, like my brother happens to have more of an engineering mindset, and so he was all about, 'Well, why are you paying $800 for a phone that has $200 worth of components in it?' And I said, 'Because it just works.'
It just works with my computers, which are all Apple. It works with everything. It just works. I don't have to go into a config.sys file ever again in my life. Right?
So that's a value to me. And by the way, I, the consumer, get to determine what is valuable. Right? Apple has made it very easy for me to select them by being very clear in what their brand is. And they are a premium commodity.
In some cases, a super-premium commodity. My MacBook Pro, which costs $2,000, is, if you're an engineer, the same as a Dell laptop that costs $800. To which I say, 'They are not the same thing at all.' Why? For all the reasons I just listed.
No. Go ahead. What you're saying
Mark Evans: is what you're saying is that personal branding is important or even necessary if you are gonna be, if you wanna position yourself as more than just a low-cost commodity.
DP Knudten: Yeah. You have to because I look. Obviously, if you're listening to this podcast, you don't know this, but I have this nice salt-and-peppery gray beard. I've been around this earth for quite a while, and twice in my career, I was hit with the what I like to call your 'X years': You're experienced, you're expert, you're expensive, and therefore expendable.
And anyone who's reached a certain age knows that if you lose a client, you look at the spreadsheet of how many people are getting paid what, and you look for the guy at the top and say, 'We can have five of those for one of him. Let's get rid of him.' And that happened to me twice because I was in an anonymous commodity, not necessarily to the people I worked with directly, whether they were creatives in my creative group or with clients. But in general, it's easier to keep five of those lower-cost people than keep one. Right?
And the other truism is if you don't own it, it's not yours. They can let you go anytime for any reason. And again, when you reach a certain age, that's another 'X years' thing. It's like, 'You know what? Advertising and marketing is a young man's game.'
And if you have not distinguished yourself in any way, my perception is that a 28-year-old copywriter is as good or better than a 55-year-old copywriter. Why? Because they're commodities. If, however, I had personally branded myself throughout my career as an absolute expert in B2B SaaS companies and we had met and you knew who I was, what I do, and how I do it, I would have a career as long as I wanted it to go. And I can do things like I'm doing now, is speaking at conferences and stuff like that because people seek out the experts in those 'X years.'
You know, and I like to call these years also the 'Yoda years.' Yoda was a, you know, lightsaber-swinging Jedi for a lot of years until he decided, 'You know what? I'm gonna spend the rest of my life in my comfy little swamp on Dagobah.' And you all, you Luke Skywalkers out there, you come to me when you wanna learn really how to do this. I can do that now because I have been actively personally branding myself for the past, I would say seven years, seven to ten years.
Mark Evans: I guess the question, and this is a bit of a provocative question because you spend a lot of time helping clients develop their own personal brands. But is a personal brand necessary in today's modern business world? I mean, what if you're a super-smart entrepreneur? You're not a Jeff Bezos or an Adam Neumann or any of those high-flying entrepreneurs, and you wanna, and you like to operate in the shadows because you're focused on the business, you're focused on doing the best job possible, and you don't care about a personal brand. You don't care about being on stage.
You don't care about media coverage. You just wanna do the job. Are those type of entrepreneurs making a mistake? And are people in general who don't build a personal brand making a mistake?
DP Knudten: The quick answer to your question is: consider your audience. And I don't mean a wide, vast broadcast audience. Every single person on this earth has a niche audience that they want to be somebody to or within, you know, a community. So let's take the smallest kind of communities possible or the most. I like to use this example just because it's so extreme, but it really illustrates the concept. There is somebody, and I don't know who they are, so don't ask me that question.
But I am sure there is someone on the face of this earth that is the absolute 100% recognized expert on Civil War buttons. And they know what button was worn by what unit at what battle and, oh, you know, your reenactment uniform is incorrect because you've got the wrong buttons and stuff like that. And I just know that in that very small—again, picture this Venn diagram—the entire world. There's a tiny little circle in there about people who give a crap about Civil War buttons. But there is one person who is notable and owns the expert levelness of that small niche.
You don't have to be hanging with Kardashians. You don't have to be going up on Blue Origin with Jeff Bezos. You, but you do want to be known within what you do as an expert. How do you become an expert? You could say, 'This is everything about me 24/7.'
'I'm sharing what I ate, you know, I'm having a bad day today.' You can do all that stuff and you'd be falling into the influencer's trap of 'everything I say is important.' It's not. If you are a personal brand, you have to practice what I call selective authenticity, which is, if truth be told, I consider politics a blood sport and it's my favorite type of sporting event. So I follow politics very, very closely and deeply, and yet I maintain my, let's call it, you can't really know for sure.
You probably think I'm one party or one blue or red, whichever, but you never really know because I don't rub your face in it. Why? If in our culture right now, were I to go stridently one way or the other, I would lose perhaps 45% of my potential sales or engagement audience. Right? So I selectively am authentic by sharing that which I care to share that is illustrative of my core concepts, which I like to call the 'Key Three.'
My 'Key Three': three words, concepts, or phrases that sum you up. My 'Key Three' are creative (we already talked about that). Collaborative, I work with other people; even when I'm working alone, I have to work with you to get the input, to listen deeply, to then go away and do my writer stuff, and then I come back and collaborate with you again to calibrate that and make it great. And I've realized early on, I'm not a poet that exists up in a garret writing their own vision on paper.
I have to work with other people. So collaboration is deeply part of who I am and what I do. Right? The third word, and this was hard for me to understand until I talked to enough trusted individuals. And they said, 'You know what? People don't always like what you have to say, but you always make them think.'
And I went, 'That's my value.' And that's true. Mhmm. So taking that value and coming up with the word that best fits it, the word is provocative. So creative, collaborative, provocative.
I have got to provoke, you know, I I don't go out of my way to slap you in the face and call you an idiot to provoke you, but I do try to bring you concepts that make you think and say, 'Oh, we could never do that.' 'Oh, no. We could—wait a minute—we could maybe we could do that.' Because as a creative collaborator, I only bring you value when I give you something you couldn't do yourself.
Mark Evans: We'll get into your philosophy and approach when it comes to personal branding, but I did want to ask you about some of the mistakes that people make when they're trying to build a personal brand because there's no lack of advice and guidance out there, and there's this feeling that I need to build a personal brand. If I don't wanna be a commodity, I need to stand out somehow. But what do you see in terms of how people pursue building personal brands and you go, 'Man, I wish they hadn't done that?'
DP Knudten: Well, I can point to somebody that I think everybody probably is aware of, and that's Gary Vaynerchuk, you know. And I think of it as 'Gary Vee syndrome.' I love Gary Vaynerchuk for who he is. Not all the time because he's pretty spicy a lot and he's a little bit too spicy for my taste a lot of the time. But I love the fact that he is, I think, absolutely authentically Gary Vaynerchuk.
And I followed him all the way since his first 'Wine Library' video on YouTube in, I wanna say like 2006, maybe 2005, something like that. And I've watched him grow huge. You know, he drops F-bombs. He's in his forties, I think, now, but he still dresses like he's a skater boy. You know, all this stuff.
And to me, yeah, that's Gary Vee. He's being authentic. The big mistake, to answer your question, the big mistake is especially a lot of young males. They think they've got to ape Gary Vee's style, you know, or they like the fact that he can drop F-bombs. You know?
'I wanna be that kind of in-your-face F-bomb-dropping guy,' and yeah. And so what they do is they get in front of a Lamborghini that has fat stacks of cash on it, and they start posting stuff like '10
Mark Evans: ways to get
DP Knudten: to a 100 or a 6-figure income fast.' You know? And they all do the same stuff. They are parodying. They are literally a parody of what Gary Vaynerchuk does so well.
And again, I wanna stress this. I think Gary Vaynerchuk is 100% completely true to who he is as a person. And he dials it up volume-wise, but it's still the same song, you know. It's like AC/DC is still loud even if at very low levels, but the second you amplify it, it gets, you know, ear-bleedingly loud. Gary Vaynerchuk can do that, but he's also starting to show a little bit more selective authenticity because he was the insurgent leader up in the hills with guerrilla fighters.
Now with VaynerMedia and all the other stuff he's doing, he's kind of mainstream. So he's starting, and if you've ever seen him, I saw him once on the 'Steve Harvey Show' when that was on. Steve Harvey, the great comedian. And there he meets Gary Vaynerchuk for the very first time on that episode, and Gary Vaynerchuk was, let's call it, if he's normally at eleven, he was at three, you know, in terms of volume. And I'm like, 'Who is this guy? That's not Gary Vaynerchuk.'
And yet, his volume or what I would say the song he was singing was so fresh and exciting to Steve Harvey that at the end of the interview, he just turned to him very honestly and said, 'I think you and I have got to do some work together.'
Mark Evans: Right.
DP Knudten: And, you know, that here's Steve Harvey, this big, you know, he's got a universe of entertainment that's going on. And one interview with someone who is completely true to themselves, what they do and how they do it, gets the attention of this guy and gets them to the point where they say, 'Let's figure out something to collaborate on.'
Mark Evans: So I think what you're saying is be true to yourself. Yeah. Present yourself sort of what you see is what you get. Don't try to posture to position yourself in a way that you think the world should see you, but operate the way that you operate, and people will either rally around you and your brand or not. But that's okay because at least you'll be distinct in the marketplace.
DP Knudten: Well, for example, Mark, I'm looking at your website, the about page. It says 'About Marketing Leadership for B2B SaaS Companies.' You know what that doesn't say? Fast fashion. You know what it doesn't say?
Quick-serve restaurants. You know what it doesn't say? Petroleum stations, cigarettes, tobacco, you know, any of that stuff. It's very clear that you are not for 90%, maybe 95, maybe 98% of the things that are sold on this earth, you don't want to touch. Why is that?
Because I'm guessing, and I'm just meeting you for the first time, but based on the personal brand you've presented to me, here's what I'm getting from the personal brand you're presenting. You're a deeper, more thoughtful individual. You've got a background in journalism, which gives you a reporter's nose for news. And by the way, in the case of marketing, a reporter's nose for news means that you've got a nose for the most important things. Not every fact, but the most important ones.
Because, this is so much of what we do, I often refer to it as dating, so much of what we do is merely a first date, which is, 'What's the goal of our first date?' To get a second
Mark Evans: You're right.
DP Knudten: You know? And the first date is a nice smile and eye contact from across the room that gets you to cross the room and say, 'Hi. What's your name?' You've done that to just about any B2B SaaS company out there who may have looked you up on Google. Now I don't know what else you're doing when it comes to social media or how you're extending your personal brand, but let's say that you do a periodic post on LinkedIn.
Why? Facebook has no time for you and you have no time for it, I'm guessing. However, LinkedIn, where people do business, is a good place for you. Not necessarily to go hard on sales, but maybe a little bit of thought leadership. Maybe a little bit of curation of, 'Hey, did you guys see this great article?'
'Did you see this wonderful TED Talk that relates to something that's going on?' Whatever. You are demonstrating, and that's the key thing. The word demonstration. You're not just telling people, you're demonstrating who you are, what you do, and how you do it.
By what you do, how you do it, and all that stuff.
Mark Evans: But I didn't want to talk about me and personal branding, but there was a post on LinkedIn recently about consciously building a personal brand versus subconsciously. In my own case, I don't think I say to myself every single day, 'I gotta work on building my personal brand. I gotta do something that will enhance it or amplify it.' I just do what I do. I have a focus, which is marketing for B2B SaaS companies.
I'm active on LinkedIn, Twitter. I have a podcast, and I just do my thing because I'm passionate about it. I'm interested in it. I am wondering whether that's just the way that good personal branding works, is you're not thinking about it, you're just living it every day.
DP Knudten: Well, it is, but I also think that it doesn't hurt to say that, 'You know what? I'm gonna do something just to maybe fifteen minutes a day to focus on my personal brand in one way or another.' The same way that people go to the gym. Because let's face it, you don't have to go to the gym if you eat well and you walk your dog and you go on the occasional bike ride. But if you want to perform at a higher level, you're going to go to a gym and you're going to work out.
And anyone who's ever gone to the gym the first day, you know, is a very hard day. The next day gets a little better. The third day, you're doing better and you're lifting heavier weights. You're doing more cardio. You're doing whatever you do.
Right? It gets easier when you do it every day. So all I'm suggesting is that you go to the gym every day for even a little bit of time because here's the reality of it. And when I go to the gym, the hardest thing about going to the gym is just getting in the car and driving to the gym. Right.
Once I'm there and I walk in and I say, 'I'm only gonna do fifteen minutes,' I'll end up doing an hour and a half. Why? Because I'm feeling better the entire time I'm doing it. And, you know, there are some days where the best I can do is just drive the car to the gym, walk in, say 'hi' to the front desk, and then turn around and walk out. But at least I made the effort.
Mark Evans: Right.
DP Knudten: So, and Mark, you're doing all the right stuff. The, you know, the king of content when it comes to personal branding, I think, is a podcast because
Mark Evans: So we're half an hour into our conversation, and we haven't even talked about your Nonfiction Brand philosophy towards your approach or methodology towards personal branding. So let's get into that. How does it work? How did you develop it? How is it different?
Provide me with the nitty-gritty of your approach to personal branding versus all the other people who are focused on personal branding these days.
DP Knudten: Okay. Well, the first thing is anyone who's doing branding right is doing the same stuff. There is no secret sauce. There is just expert practice and disciplined practice. So, when I say Nonfiction Brand, let me tell you very quickly the story about that.
I was a young copywriter at McCann Erickson in Atlanta, Georgia, working on Coca-Cola. I would always have my butt handed to me when I would go present concepts; they'd beat me up on three words: authenticity, refreshment, and sociability. That's the key three of Coke, or it was when I worked on them. Everything had to communicate authenticity, refreshment, and sociability. What does that mean?
I could spend two hours talking about that, so I'm gonna skip that, except to go on to say, one day, I got a creative brief that said, 'Write some stuff.' And again, a creative brief is you gotta tell the writer what you're writing, like a TV spot, an outdoor board, a brochure, a webpage. What are we doing? It's a webpage. What do you wanna say?
'Two for one this week only.' Okay. 'Supplies are limited.' These are copy points. I need copy points.
Why? When I got that creative brief that said, 'Write some stuff,' I walked into the account manager's office and I said, 'Dude, what is this? I'm not a fiction writer.' And what I was trying to say to him was, 'I can't make up stuff. You at least have to tell me that it's a Fourth of July special or something.'
'Give me something, dude.' You know? 'Because I'm not writing fiction.' Well, we dealt with the situation, but I kept it in my mind; it kept going around in my head: 'I'm not a fiction writer.'
And that doesn't mean I can't write fiction that no one wants to read, because I can, believe me. But I kept thinking, 'Well, I'm not a fiction writer when it comes to advertising and marketing.' Why? I have to tell the truth. That doesn't mean I'm not afraid to buff things up to a high gloss, but there has to be some truth involved.
For example, if I worked on a Coke ad and said, 'Coke helps you lose weight,' that would be a lie. You know, a big fat lie. But if I wrote an ad that said, 'Coke will remind you of weekends with your grandpa,' I would go, 'Yeah. That's true.' Because I would always go to Grandpa's house, and he would have Coca-Cola, which was—and he would sneak it to me because my parents didn't let me drink, you know, sugary sodas and stuff like that.
And all of a sudden, I realized, 'Oh, Coke was about authenticity and refreshment and sociability.' Those three key three words because their competitor made the same product. Commodities: sweet brown bubbly water. Pepsi, Coke—are they that different? Yes.
If you're a Coke aficionado or a Pepsi aficionado. If you've ever been to a restaurant and have the server come up and say, 'Oh, I'm sorry. We don't have Coke here. We only serve Pepsi products.' You know exactly what that Coke lover feels like when they say, 'Oh, I'll just have water.'
Mark Evans: Right.
DP Knudten: If I can't have Coca-Cola, I just want water. That's when I realized the power of a brand. And so the Nonfiction part of it was that, 'Oh, this is not about making something up.' It's about taking the truth and enhancing it. Authenticity. Coca-Cola, 1886, it went nationwide.
A year later, Pepsi did. Guess what? Coke's 'the real thing' because they were the first. They were always the real thing. And we could go into a long discussion about New Coke and that mistake.
But what that was was the marketplace telling Coke, 'No, you can't mess with Grandma.' Grandma is spicy. She's a little bit acidic, but we love Grandma, and you don't mess with Grandma. And if you were old enough to remember the New Coke debacle, you know that Coke messed with Grandma, and the marketplace forced Coca-Cola to be true to who they are, what they do, and how they do it. They literally—and that's a key thing for people to understand.
When you're doing branding right, you own your brand, and they do too. And by 'they,' I mean the people who work for you, the people who buy from you, the people who recommend you, the people who constantly look to you to be exactly who you are. The Nonfiction part goes into what I would call the deep consideration of who you are, what you do, and how you do it. Mhm. Like I said earlier, I'm a writer, but that's a tool.
I can also design, maybe not that well, but I could be a designer. I'm a bad video editor. I edit my own podcast, so I do all these things. And the common denominator of all of them is creativity. You know, I don't follow recipes.
I create, literally. Show me a basket full of fruits and vegetables and protein, and I'll make a dinner. And it may not be great, but it's creative. I guarantee that much.
Mark Evans: So when you work with clients, it's all about finding their true selves, their authentic selves, then packaging that in a way that's believable and authentic.
DP Knudten: Yes. And making sure that they adhere to it, because—and I don't mean to pick on people, but I try to give examples that people can relate to. Okay. You went to high school. You had a friend who's a female, and you were close friends, but you were always in the friend zone.
It never crossed over into romantic or whatever. You don't see each other for ten years, fifteen years. You go to a high school reunion, and then you see that friend who now has a totally different hair color, totally different body shape that has been surgically enhanced. And invariably—and this happens, it doesn't matter what gender you are or anything like that.
But literally, in your mind, if you don't say it to them directly, you'd be going, 'That's not the Jenny I know. That's not Jenny.' I have a friend who's male who I, you know, grew up with—ends up he's had some legal problems and stuff like that. And my response to that is, 'That's not the guy I know. That's not the truth of who he is.'
He's tried to be someone else. He's putting on a brand. I like to put it this way: A brand is not a pair of shoes you tie on your feet. It's who you are. And when I show a presentation, I'll show a Nike ad of Nike shoes on the runner, and then I show the runner.
Nike shoes don't make the runner a runner. Nike shoes make the runner get out there and 'Just Do It,' whatever that is. In the case of elite athletes, it's 'Just Do It' and win or 'Just Do It' and perform. The goal is to identify yourself as a runner, not as a pair of shoes that you just tie on your feet. And ideally, that runner is actually going, 'You know what?
I'm not just a runner, I am an athlete.' And what does that mean? An athlete has an entire sensibility that is different than that of a salesperson, that is different than that of a musician. An athlete understands that things are constantly an opportunity to win. So the question is, are you performing at the highest possible level to be that type of winner?
You know, and again, this is just kind of what I would call hack psychology. If all of a sudden you say, 'You know what? I'm an athlete even though I am a salesperson.' What does that mean? Oh, maybe as an athletics-oriented salesperson, I need to be more prepared so I can perform at a higher level.
That I need to practice as much as I actually perform. You know, the old Vince Lombardi line about 'Practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.' If you're someone like that, that quote will resonate with you. And once you understand that, you're not trying to be Gary Vaynerchuk.
You're not trying to be Kim Kardashian. You're not trying to be, whatever, Brené Brown. I mean, think about that. Brené Brown works at the University of Houston, which I like to a little bit snidely call the great place to be if you're in the witness protection program as an academic. And yet, her personal brand has enhanced the value of the entire university, and that's the goal.
That personal brand is now to be treasured by the university. She's no longer a cog. She is irreplaceable. She's one of one. That's the goal.
Not to be one of many, but one of one. And the only one of one you can truly be is yourself. So have you done the work to figure out the first-principle key three ideas of who you are, what you do, and how you do it?
Mark Evans: That, I think, is a great way to wrap up this conversation, and thank you for all the great insight on personal branding, which is a complex and fascinating topic. One final question. Where can people learn more about you and what you do?
DP Knudten: Well, there are a couple places, but the easiest one to get to, because you don't have to spell my last name, is NonfictionBrand.com. And if you go to NonfictionBrand.com/gift, you can download those three PDFs. You don't even have to give me your email address. I'm really bad at click-funnel marketing and stuff like that. So if you wanna sign up on my emailing list, please do.
I won't send you anything probably, but it's nice to make that connection. And the other thing is I've got a podcast, the Nonfiction Brand Podcast, new episodes every single Monday. Check that out wherever you find podcasts for free. And, also, the book's available on Amazon.com. Just look for Nonfiction Brand and K N U D T E N, which is my last name.
But you should be able to find it, Nonfiction Brand, in the book section.
Mark Evans: Well, thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, give it a five-star review, of course, and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. To learn more about how I help B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic adviser, or coach, send an email to mark@marketingspark.co or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you next time.
