Talkable Soul of Your Brand?

Susan Bratton and the Dishy Mix is one of my favorite podcasts.

I listened to the following podcast during my workout and was introduced to one of my new favorite sayings-the talkable soul of your brand.

I have provided you with a partial transcript of this discussion.

Rohit Bhargava, Author of “Personality Not Included” and 360 Degree Digital Influencer at Ogilvy PR

Susan: So, there’s one thing that I wanted to quote from your book, Rohit, and its about personality, and you say that “ the talkable soul of your brand about which people can get passionate, that’s personality”. I love the talkable soul. I think that was an inspired moment of writing. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Rohit: Yeah, I think whenever you put a word like soul into, I actually struggled a lot with soul as a word, because I loved it so much in terms of defining a brand and yet common wisdom across the publishing industry when we were coming up with our sub title, was that if you put soul in a subtitle it gave the wrong impression of the book, so we went back and forth very much because I had the same sort of reaction, that you did to that word which is the soul of the brand, that’s a really powerful way of describing what the essence of a brand is, that people actually connect with.

I think that aside from putting “talkable” next to “soul”, is really interesting way of describing that. because really when you’re talking about soul is the essence of the brand, that is the sort of core element. When you’re talking about making it talkable, it brings into focus this idea of word-of-mouth marketing. And giving somebody something that is worth talking about. and its not a, I mean, in a lot of companies, you focus on a product or a feature based message, right, here’s the feature that we’ve got, here’s what we can do. Now when you think about what’s talkable its much more than that. It’s the story behind the company, its what, you know, I’ve been thinking about a fake ending in a book, these are the sorts of things that people remember.

After reading this transcript about the talkable soul, let me ask you some questions:

Is your brand in need of a personality?

How will you know when you have defined your brand?

How will reconcile how you want to be perceived and how you are actually perceived by others?

What is the method you will use to assist others in making your brand “repeatable?”