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What My New Stereo Showed Me About Brand Building

8/30/2017

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​Fourteen years ago, I bought that mini stereo system. It fit snugly in a cabinet compartment alongside my cassette-tape deck and my DVD player, which I hooked up to the receiver.
 
Over time, the stereo system came down with various flaws. First, the CD changer started acting up. Next, some of the buttons on the remote stopped working. Then, the headphone jack became shaky. Eventually—just the other week—the connection from the amplifier to the right speaker died.
 
That was the last straw. It was time for a new entertainment system.
 
My first impulse was to just replace the old mini system with a similarly sized new one. But as I shopped around, I found that each of the mini systems I was looking at had at least one critical limitation in one area or another. It soon became apparent I would need to move beyond mini-sized gizmos after all.
 
Turning necessity into a virtue, I shopped not only for a receiver and a CD player in standard size—and for a new and bigger cabinet—but also for tall, floor-standing speakers. Once my purchases were done, my big project for this past weekend was to dismantle the old system, and install the new one.
 
That project ended up lasting two days into the workweek, but it got accomplished after all. For one, it involved the tediums of assembling the new cabinet, and the elbow grease of moving objects around. For another, it involved efforts of planning and configuration to integrate new, bigger, improved solutions.
 
And that’s when it hit me: What I was doing mirrored endeavors of building and upgrading a professional brand. Here’s the way I figure how my entertainment-system project is illustrative of that.
 
When some part is no longer useful, it may be time for more than a quick fix.
 
What I considered originally—replacing the broken mini system with a similar one—would have been the path of least resistance. But my life has changed from 14 years ago, and what was optimal then is not necessarily optimal now. (And remember, “optimal” means “best under the circumstances.”)
 
Implication for brand building:
Your professional persona evolves continuously. And as an evolving professional, you are going to care about different things over time. That, in turn, may call for new avenues in line with the “tectonic shifts” in your skills, interests, and values.
 
Having a “revamped” brand in your mind doesn’t mean you are already halfway there.
 
Once I had all my new system components on board, I still had to go give it considerable time to assemble the new, bigger cabinet so the new, bigger components would have a place. In addition, I had to re-do all the connections among the various components.
 
Implication for brand building:
You should expect to put effort into broadening and deepening your competencies so the new, revamped you may become reality. You may have to seek out mentoring, perhaps even formal re-training so you can grow your professional persona.
 
Even so: stay focused on one thing at a time.
 
It may have been time for a stereo-system upgrade, but I still have the same old TV set, which I also bought 14 years ago. Ever since, it has been a reliable workhorse, and there have never been any problems with it. (I guess the workmanship was a lot better than in the case of that mini stereo system.)
 
Implication for brand building:
A healthy pursuit of improvement is a good thing, but jumping on anything and everything just because it is “hot” may be ill-advised. For example, I have adopted LinkedIn and Twitter in a timely manner. Skype, on the other hand, popular as it has come to be, is something I have been doing just fine without so far.
 
But…I am keeping Skype on my radar. (Just as I may eventually have to bite the bullet and get a cutting-edge 4K HD smart TV after all….)

​Update June 2018
I did get that 4K smart TV. Although my old TV was still working fine, the 4:3 aspect ratio was increasingly becoming a detriment, with more and more stations using 16:9 broadcasting throughout.

​Consistent with the need for “more than a quick fix,” it turns out my 15-year-old DVD player can't really perform in conjunction with the new TV. Next stop: a 4K Blu-ray player, I guess…!
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