When marketing a product, brand, or organization, marketers must always consider the need to continuously improve their product offerings in order to elevate, or even just maintain, their position in the marketplace. Such a continuous improvement process starts with understanding where you currently are in the marketplace (i.e., how your product is perceived in comparison to other products) and what is desired by your target audiences. At that point you have thechallenge to choose which goals to set and how you’ll try to reach them.
If you’ve completed the assignments thus far, you’ve already evaluated Product You with your Raw Materials Assessment. You also have assessed your target audiences with theProduct/Audience Match Strategy. Now it’s time to set strategic goals and contemplate the actions to reach those goals.
Setting goals is a difficult process, mainly because there are so many options available to you. Your personal and professional branding options are not limited to a mere fork in the road with two choices (à la Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”). It’s more like hundreds (or even thousands) of choices if you reallyopenyour thinking about what your future could hold.Thus, this assignment will require some degree of self-reflection to determine where you would like to move your personal brand and/or professional brand over the next one to five years.
Self-Reflection, Objectives, and Strategies
The best way to start this goal-settingprocess is to consider the values you assessed in your Raw Materials Inventory. If your aspirations for your personal brand and professional brand are developed with your values in mind, you’ll be more likely to feel motivated to work to achieve them, and you’ll be more likely to be satisfied when those goals are reached.
The next step is to consider how you would like to be perceived by others as you develop your brand. What would you like people to think about you a year from now? Two years from now? Five or ten years from now? What type of brand would you like to develop? As you consider these questions, keep in mind the idea that you want to change not only the “perception” of your brand, but also the underlying “reality” of that brand. For example, if you want to be perceived as being an expert in mobile marketing, then develop your knowledge and skills pertaining to mobile marketing and then market that expertise.Alwaysremember that the best way to be perceived as an expert in a particular area is to truly become an expert in that area.
Once you start to have general ideas or goals of what you want for your brand, set specific objectives with those ideas in mind. Remember to use the SMART method (as explained in one of the assigned videos for this module) to set useful objectives.
Finally, list some strategies, tactics, or actions that will help you reach your objectives. The more descriptive you are when listing the strategies (as well as the objectives), the more likely you’ll be to complete them.
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