Hello beautiful people!
Let’s get into your creative storytelling brand! 🙂
First and foremost, you need to know that some folks spend YEARS getting clear on their brand. Heck, I didn’t nail my logline ’til I was 40 and I had been doing the work of Self-Management for Actors for more than a decade by then! Here I was, touring the world, teaching creatives the importance of understanding their brand in order to efficiently communicate with buyers and fans what it is they do best, all the while letting my brand be “whatever the hell they said about me out there.” Luckily, they were getting it mostly right. And that just means I was “living on brand.” Phew! Not everyone is so fortunate.
We’re *always* building our brand… either by design or by default. Get purposeful. (Tweet that!) It’s so empowering to take the reins and begin steering the buyers toward your next tier!
I find sometimes this stuff is way easier when we stop looking at ourselves for a moment and look at those who do brand best — the corporations, services, and products that make the capitalistic world go ’round. Ah… capitalism. That’s a system to deconstruct another day. For now, we’re gonna learn from what big brands do best: live their brand.
Next up, one of my very favorite vids to explain how pervasive and simple brand messaging can be. Don’t just hit play and walk away, here. Watch everything. Watch it twice. Watch the leaps your brain makes based on advertising you’ve been exposed to for years.
Now, before you began seeing overt font-to-brand matches like Applebee’s and Starbucks, you were already noticing Walmart, Macy’s, and Whole Foods, right? There are many more peppered throughout this vid and that’s one of the reasons I adore it. Such a phenomenal display of how pervasive effective branding can be! (Note: Even the non-major-brand choices that were made throughout this typographic trip are deliberate. Of course the font for the word DOG is serif! There has to be a “tail” to “wag” for cryin’ out loud!)
Thing is, you needn’t have a budget of millions to start teaching the buyers (and fans) how to feel about you. Sure, a big budget, a well-tested brand strategy, and a team of designers makes it happen quickly and universally, but that doesn’t mean we can’t kick it Self-Management for Actors style right now! That means getting deliberate with our every detail; being strategic about what others consume about us.
First thing’s first: You’ve gotta be down with your castable brand.
If you’ve not yet experienced the typing exercise that has become the standard for actors worldwide, grab Your SMFA Type and Brand Guide, (re-)visit my masterclass on how to create a castable brand survey, and get to it! If you prefer IRL, grab a clipboard, some pens, and a friend… then head out to any public place where data-collecting could safely happen. This is plain ol’ survey action and it’s something you can (and should) do every so often.
I’m not suggesting that you do data-gathering often because your brand is constantly changing (major life events like getting married, having a kid, or losing a parent will shift your brand a few degrees, but it’s rare you’ll do a full 180 and be unrecognizable from the brand that’s been a part of you since childhood) but because more data is a good thing! And getting out ahead of trends by tracking patterns *early* will help you steer buyers toward the work you need them to do (cast you) before they’re likely to come to that decision naturally.
You do this bit of homework virtually by posting your photo (or better yet, a super-short silent vid clip of you, so you’re surveying living, breathing, moving you vs. a gorgeously retouched headshot taken of you on your best day in your best light) at social media and asking for typing words just like you do with the clipboard version out in the real world. If you’re a writer, you do this by posting a sample of your work and surveying folks on how it makes ’em feel. I’ve often said I write everything as if it were the only piece someone would ever read. That’s why you can’t find anything out there that doesn’t “sound” like me and it’s why you GET me when you stumble upon an archived column at my blog before you’ve read my books, listened to my podcast, watched my vids, or met me in person. Outstanding weekly content since 1999, yes, but always with Brand Bon woven in. Deliberate. Strategic. Consistent.
Why is it relevant to get others’ opinions? Often we’re too close to “it” to see for ourselves. From Tim Kelley:
Imagine that you were born with a bright red lightbulb on top of your head, shining all the time. Since everything you have ever seen has been under a bright red light, you don’t even know what red looks like. You have no contrast by which to understand and describe RED. But other people do, because they can see the difference between when you are present and when you are not. “Wow, it just got red in here!” Essence operates just this way.
As you’re learning what others see in you, create a Google survey and provide a link so respondents will not be swayed by one anothers’ answers. If you’ve done this exercise plenty o’ times before, start segregating your responses into groups like perfect stranger, familiar friendly, colleague, friend, buyer, relative, bestie, etc., so you can see which truths hold up regardless and which words only emerge after someone has known you a while. Further, interview your bookings to see what the money is saying you’re known for.
Whenever you’re early to a CD workshop, an audition environment with a great waiting area, or standing in line at the post office forever, get typed! And type others! Even without telling them you’re doing so, start building your muscle for “playing casting director” so that you become keenly aware of how NOT personal the breakdowns are. You’ll begin to see every role in every casting notice in terms of, “My bullseye; NOT my bullseye,” very quickly. Those “Hmm… I could play that…” thoughts will no longer accompany an urge to submit but instead get filed away as, “That’ll be something I can try at my next tier, when I am perceived as low-risk by the buyers and am invited to stretch more.”
And *of course* the direction toward your true north is now always in mind!
Today’s work: If you don’t yet have a handle on your brand, do the typing exercise. Organize the results. Interview your bookings for a clue as to what they’re telling you your buyers value. Do not stress out! You have all the time in the world to warm up to your overall brand strategy and this is just the very beginning of the foundation of it. All data is of value because you’re able to toss out outliers and focus your attention on the patterns that emerge the more you do this.
Warning: Whatever you do, do not muddy the waters of your data. As any good stats junkie will tell you, once you contaminate the results, your whole experiment is garbage. So resist the urge to ask for typing words on multiple photos — ONE is all casting will see for most submissions, so you’ve gotta find out what it’s selling and whether or not that lines up with what you’re delivering in the room, on the stage, or on the screen. For my non-actor creative storytellers, don’t get feedback on more than one SUBJECT at a time (and I mean “subject of the research” here). One writing sample. One lead magnet. One sales page. One THING.
As you’re gathering data, don’t “lead the witness” by encouraging certain feedback, “yes, and…”-ing responses, or registering any amount of joy or disappointment when you’re compared to a favorite actor. Even thanking people on a Facebook thread starts steering future responses toward more *friendly* and *polite* words. Stay out of the way! Just take the data in dispassionately and analyze it (and thank people) later.
If you’re miles ahead of this initial type-survey work and you can legitimately say you do NOT need to do another round just to check for tiny shifts in responses, your job today is to do a drive-by of your marketing tools to be sure they contain the same brand words that you do. Go through your headshot (colors and pose), your resume (layout and font), your website (design and contents), your footage (every clip and transition), and anything else you’re feeling confident enough to put out there as official representatives of Brand You. Are these tools — if surveyed without you attached — gonna evoke the same brand words that you do?
If you play a cop, when I go to your website do I say, “Oh, he plays a cop!” before I even check out your resume to find a cop show credit or watch your footage to see a cop scene? If your overarching brand is caretaker, do I feel safe when I read your bio? Am I protected, cared for, nurtured… or do you have me feeling nervous because there are uncertain, timid words and careless typos woven throughout?
Don’t stress about what you may find in need of a tune-up here! We have a lot of road stretched out ahead of us and we’ll dive in on individual elements throughout the course. But for now, make an inventory list of the feelings your materials need to engender so that you’re working toward that as you continually upgrade. How should your materials be making your buyers FEEL?
Whatever your level of brand-awareness badassery, spend time today looking at fonts, colors, shapes, and emotional textures that are coming from all over the place in our world. Notice how completely humming-in-the-background brand has become for most of us. (This, by the way, is why talking about branding is considered so icky! It’s a full-on pulling back of the curtain of something that’s been secretly going on since the beginning of time. That we are so very bold to discuss this thing that only advertisers ever admitted to doing ’til a few years ago may get “pure artistes” out there turning up their noses, but you can believe that the “pure artiste” persona is a freakin’ brand too.)
Study commercials not just for the acting going on but for all the elements of branding woven into everything from the music to the typeface to the logo to the voiceover announcer’s style to of course the product or service and how it’s couched in a story about making our lives better by the having of it.
We’re going to work toward creating the story about how you make the buyers’ lives better by casting you.
This takes a lot of time and a lot of detached, dispassionate, geeky-stats-lovin’ work. So start now.
Do not get overwhelmed! This is shit that’s not going away, folks. So let’s start making it a lens through which we see the world, one layer at a time.
Think about it… there’s actually a future version of you out there who is a dang master at this stuff! Bookmark this one and come back in a few weeks, then again in a couple o’ months and see how much of this is second nature by then. Put in the work, darlin’. You’ve got this!
’til tomorrow… stay ninja!
