Founder's Branding: Why CXOs need to become rockstars
Founders and senior executives not only deserve the limelight. They need it.
When it comes to creating a founder’s brand, marketing functions tend to be caught unawares.
As marketers, we have all been guilty of focussing too much on metrics. We care about cost per lead, engagement rate, revenue attribution and so much more. Sometimes, these metrics become the sole reason for our existence and give meaning to our life. But we end up shortchanging the leadership.
How? By not caring about building a strong founder’s/leadership brand.
More often than not, a marketing team's purview starts at content creation and ends at a qualified lead. Unfortunately, this becomes a vicious loop and we forget to build brands for the senior leadership of the company. As a result, marketing efforts become less efficient because the audience grows tired of being lectured by the marketing department.
Turn this around and make the audience feel seen and heard - by no less than the CEO - and magic happens.
Why?
Because consumers aren't as dumb as we think. They know when they are being sold to. They know when they are being treated as an audience in a show where the marketeer is the puppeteer.
It doesn't mean we leave our day jobs and pack up for the hills. Quite the opposite. It implies that we must bring into the spotlight gasp people. People who are important and are respected. People who don't preach but teach.
And who better to carry a company's story to the living rooms and screens of your potential customers than the company's senior leadership - CEOs, CTOs, CROs, CMOs, and so on. These are the people who have weight. They carry with them a certain amount of authority due to their work, history, or job designation. And it's a crime to squander it away by doing nothing to harness it.
This is where leadership/CXO branding comes into the picture.
So what is founders/leadership branding?
Plainly speaking, leadership or CXO branding refers to the set of strategies and processes the marketing function uses to build the profile of the senior executives as thought leaders. It means turning them into your brand ambassadors. Quite literally.
If you are wondering why everyone's trying to spam and sell things to your CEO instead of buying from them - it's because their brand isn't set up.
The leadership's brand must indicate to customers, potential customers, investors, and all other stakeholders that the company is run by really smart people who know what they are doing.
This is the stamp of approval you need to boost your inbound leads as well as long-term brand awareness.
Think Elon Musk. There's a reason why he has 5x more followers than Tesla's official account. Certainly helps sell cars but that's not the aim. It helps that anything Musk or Tesla want to do/launch has a ready audience of 72 million people around the world. And cars, rockets, and tunnel-based commuting plans continue to sell.
Why do you need leadership branding?
Leadership or founder branding isn't just for the Teslas of the world. It's for every company that wants to be more than a website or a storefront. It's what separates Deepinder Goyal’s Zomato from Swiggy's founders (see what I mean?).
The only reason you need for investing in leadership branding is that it's hard. In a growth hacking culture, not many companies find within themselves the resolve or tenacity to continuously focus on building the brand for their leadership. Thus, it becomes a pretty effective signal to all stakeholders that the company is not just a bunch of executives making boring press statements but run by sentient beings who have ideas, opinions, and emotions.
Think Tim Cook presenting you the latest iPhone versus Samsung CEO.
But if you aren't yet convinced, here are some very attributable reasons why leadership branding is a must:
It gives you an unfair advantage - Nothing beats the power of accessibility. Stakeholders are more likely to be loyal to you if they know that they can reach your CEO over Twitter or send an InMail with their big idea or a complaint and know that it'll be attended to.
It lets the product sell itself - Most technology products don't need the brute force of selling as much as they need the careful hands of context and education. When you put your senior executives at the frontline and let consumers hear from their own mouth, you build immediate trust.
It adds non-linear returns to your brand - They say good marketing makes bad products fail faster but a good leadership brand will ensure that even when you stumble, there's less damage due to direct communication with the stakeholders. And if you build something amazing, the CEO's careful and contextualized messaging is stronger than all your marketing spends combined.
If you've read this till here, I am grateful. We'll quickly do some housekeeping stuff to get you started in creating a strong leadership brand.
Creating a CXO brand
Polish
This is the first and the most important thing you can do. Start with the leaders' social profiles - LinkedIn, Twitter, Substack (and everything else!) and start housekeeping. Clean up old descriptions and add new ones. Write in the first person and add details with emotion rather than dry statements of fact. (Development Economics geek vs Msc. in Economic Theory).
This is also a good time to upload new profile pictures - ideally the same one across platforms to build recall. The picture should be more Casual Friday than suit-up Wednesday.
The final step is to secure all accounts with new, separate passwords and work on removing any random/irrelevant activity/posts from the past which don't go well with the current positioning.
Post
This should be the most commonsensical of all the steps but so many people get it wrong. The secret behind a strong leadership brand is consistency with content.
Ideally, a strict calendar should be set up that covers broad themes and areas of focus, and thought-provoking/insightful posts should be shared at the decided frequency. Once a week to start and scale it up to thrice a week.
Caution: As much the lure of getting the CXO to post about your company/products and how awesome they are - AVOID THIS. Rather, speak more on the industry level and let people discover your company and products.
Connect
The idea that most marketers and leaders often preach is that if you are important enough, people will come. But what if they don't?
Set aside egos for a bit and help the leadership connect with relevant folks online. This could mean investors or bigger clients or future partners - and even potential hires.This helps create a relevant audience that's not entirely composed of their friends/classmates from college. Also, the size of the room must be big enough for the messaging to be noticed in the first place.
Engage
Unfortunately, not a lot of CEOs who have strong brands believe in engagement. They do something I like to call post and forget. While it's understandable that a company's leaders are busy, it's downright rude if the leaders' presence just involves them doing propaganda.
A more effective way is for the leader to meaningfully engage with their peers. Be it their colleagues' personal posts or an old friend's blog - it's always a good idea to appreciate, acknowledge and contribute in other people's achievements.Expand
Once you've built a rhythm around all the above and have started seeing traction as well as feedback, it's time to expand the contours of branding.
Instead of just keeping it to one platform, see if you can use various content formats for the same piece of content and post it across platforms - from Instagram to Twitter to Substack.
At the same time, a regular check-in is needed for the content plan to expand themes and scope too. There are only going to be a limited number of personal insights that the leader can write about. Beyond that, it's the job of the marketing and content teams to come up with ideas and directions that the content could take.
Maybe they can talk about an adjacent industry, their learnings, their opinions on certain news pieces, their moonshot ideas, their most unpopular opinions, or their most effective processes. There's an ocean to be explored and it'll be a shame to limit their glimmer to just the shore.
Finally, remember to make this process collaborative and one where everyone has a bit of fun. People like humans, not bots.
PS: Please let me know if you enjoyed/liked reading this piece. Also, reach out to me if I can help you with further specifics on your leadership branding strategy.
I am also considering writing a more detailed and tactical guide to build and execute a leadership brand. Let me know if you'd like to read and I shall try to stop procrastinating on that.