You Are Your Own Brand Manager. The Hard Part Isn’t the Work.

Two of my great passions are film and food, so a movie about a chef was always going to find me.

Chef came out in 2014. It's a father-and-son road trip movie in a food truck, and one of the best business lessons I have ever seen on film.

A Chef Lost and Not Managing Anything

Carl Casper is the chef at a well-known Los Angeles restaurant, and he is miserable. The owner won't let him change the menu, so Carl cooks food he doesn't believe in.

A critic comes in. The review is brutal. And Carl realizes he's lost his way.

Here is the uncomfortable part. The review was fair. Carl was serving the evidence, and the critic simply read it.

You don't get to write your reputation.
But you're not a bystander either.

You supply the evidence. Others render the verdict.

One Sandwich, One Idea, Again and Again

Carl takes on a beat-up old food truck and drives it home from Miami with his son Percy and his sous chef Martin.

They make Cubano sandwiches. Two kinds of pork, Swiss cheese, pressed until the bread cracks. Utterly delicious. (Vegans, you'll have to move along — there is nothing here for you.)

Same sandwich, every stop, all the way across the country.

By the back half of the trip, the lines are forming before they arrive.

Say the same true thing. Prove it in what you do. Repeat it until the market says it back to you.

Repetition doesn't create clarity. It multiplies whatever you already have.

And you don't need a marketing department to do this. Percy ran all of it from his phone in the back of the truck. He was ten.

You are your own brand manager.

What you say about yourself has to match what you do, so that both represent who you actually are. It's not performance. It's alignment.

Carl says it better than I can.

Fifteen Years of the Same Sentence Built Their Business

One of the best examples of deliberate brand management I know is a small retirement plan firm I worked with about fifteen years ago.

They were small. No room for a marketing team, or much of a budget either.

Their promise and purpose was simple and clear.

Small companies deserve the same retirement plan options as large companies, with a higher level of personalized service and support.

Here is what most firms never manage to do. They are still saying it today. And they prove it by delivering on that promise every day, with every client.

That sentence is their reputation in their market. Repetition made it stronger.

They think and act like brand managers as well as business owners.

Fifteen years later they are still independent, still small by choice, and still winning the business.

The Hard Part Isn't the Work. It's Deliberate Consistency.

This is simple in concept and hard in practice.

Nobody fails at this because they weren't willing to work. They fail because month fourteen of saying the same thing gets dull, and something newer shows up.

And boredom doesn't make you go quiet. It makes you change or add. That is how clarity dies.

Carl made thousands of Cubanos. That isn't boredom. That's mastery.

That's what it takes to master your brand. A clear message, consistently told, with actions backing it up.

One Last Thing

That is how you become The Obvious Choice™.

So remember this.

You get bored with your message long before your market does.