Your Personal Trademark

by Marcia Yudkin

For novelist Tom Wolfe, it's a dazzling white suit,
regardless of the weather or season.

For comedian George Burns, it was a cigar.

For basketball bad-boy Dennis Rodman, it's crazy hair.

For software developer Jackie Grubb, it's the color purple.

"It": a personal trademark that anchors your identity in
the minds of your market.

"One day after I started my business a client introduced
me by name and 'She is our computer consultant and her
color is purple,'" says Grubb. "Soon afterwards, at
business meetings, people began to chide me if I wasn't
wearing purple.

"Since people were already associating me with the color,
I renamed my business Plum Suite Solutions and commissioned
a logo with a plum shape and color. Items in my wardrobe
that were other colors had a session with purple dye so
that my personal appearance and all my paper materials tie
together."

Becoming memorable cuts the number of times people need to
meet you before you become ensconced in their mental filing
cabinet, and it increases the vividness of their recall.

Your trademark needn't be visual. It can be a particular
combination of words that functions as a slogan. Reporter
Tim Russert has trained his NBC compatriots -- and
undoubtedly his TV audience -- to complete the trademark
sentence for his show, "Remember, if it's Sunday... it's
'Meet the Press.'"

Other auditory trademarks might involve a particular kind of
word, a tone of voice or a manner of speaking. During the
last World Cup soccer championship, I loved hearing the way
the Spanish sportscasters announced a goal, even though my
Spanish comprehension is pretty terrible.

A motivational speaker I once ran across called himself "Tom
Terrific" and told audiences that if anyone asked how he was
and he didn't say, "Terrific!" he'd hand over $100. For
someone who spoke on having a positive attitude, this verbal
trademark made perfect sense. (He claimed that he'd had to
pay up only a few times in many years.)

A kinesthetic personal trademark would stamp your identity
in memory through a behavior or a gesture. I'm told that
business guru Tom Peters is known for never standing still
while on a speaking platform. Conductor Leonard Bernstein
worked his way into the American consciousness through the
vigor of his conducting and having to keep tossing his mane
of hair out of his eyes. I understand he also carried a
sharpened baton with him that he used to spear food instead
of using a fork when eating in restaurants.

Don't take this identity-building tool to such an extreme
that it undermines your credibility or sets you off as
bizarre. For instance, in the business world and in
politics, people take handshaking seriously. Developing an
idiosyncratic physical greeting or abstaining from
handshakes, as real estate mogul turned Presidential
candidate Donald Trump did for supposed hygienic reasons,
can mark you as eccentric in a bad sense. Otherwise,
creating a personal trademark is smart, cost-effective
marketing!

Marcia Yudkin <marcia@yudkin.com> is the author of the
classic guide to comprehensive PR, "6 Steps to Free
Publicity," now for sale in an updated edition at Amazon.com
and in bookstores everywhere. She also spills the secrets
on advanced tactics for today's publicity seekers in
"Powerful, Painless Online Publicity," available from
www.yudkin.com/powerpr.htm  .