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NO 34 – PACKAGING YOURSELF AND YOUR PRODUCTS
In today’s BST I am talking about ways of packaging yourself and your products and how appropriate that is for your products and services and your client needs and expectations.
When presenting yourself to the public you have 30 seconds in which to make an impression before your customer (target) makes a judgement about you. This is not my own opinion, it is based on tried and tested research.
Not much time, eh? For this reason it is critical that you get your personal image and style right for the occasion, for the situation, for the business you are conducting and for the customer’s expectations.
What do I mean? Well, what do you imagine when I say the word ‘teacher’? Do you visualise your old teacher, for better or for worse? How do you think about them? What are they wearing, how do they sound, what is the feeling that they conjure up in your being? What about if I say ‘creative person’? What do they tend to look like, behave like, sound like? Do you understand what I am saying. We all have a general idea about what certain people should be like, the characteristics that they should have to be ‘right’. Our value judgements affect the way we feel about people, whether they have value, whether they know what they are saying and whether they are valuable to us. This goes for what they are talking about and what they are ‘selling’ us too.
Maybe you want to present yourself as a ‘smart’ person who knows exactly what you are talking about, so you dress in a ‘smart’ style in the way a tv presenter would, with a clean and neat appearance, wearing a suit, tie, shirt, blouse and little but classy jewellery. Perhaps you are a back room techie, movie maker or behind the scenes business person who generally wears ‘laid back’ clothing. Ask yourself, how do my customers tend to think about what I should look like or sound like. Does this come across in the way I present myself, what I say to them, how I say it and how my products appear? You should take the opportunity to ask them, they are the boss of you, they are God in terms of your business success.
‘Laid back’ styling may be the trend these days, and smart clothes kept only for special occasions, so dressing for your ‘peers’, your friends and associates, requires that you keep ‘on trend’, but does this apply to your business, your products, your own appearance when presenting yourself in front of your customers or clients? Sorry, you will just have to ask them!
Thanks for listening to me today, pause for thought and have a good one.