Brands are prized by corporations as significant value-driving economic assets. Brands help customers enjoy more valuable experiences, raising willingness-to-pay levels and thus improving cash flows — higher cash flows as a result of higher prices, faster cash flows because branded products tend to turn faster than their non-branded counterparts, longer lasting cash flows because brands have longevity in customers’ perceptions, and less volatile cash flows because brand loyalty can smooth out the effects of economic booms and busts.
For these reasons, corporations invest in brands and brand building. Catherine Kaputa makes the case that individuals should invest in themselves as brands, and makes the tools of brand-building available to individuals for personal brand-building: the brand of you.
Knowledge Capsule
You are a brand, assessed subjectively by your customers.
Think of yourself as a brand. Think of your customers – your boss, other leaders and decision-makers in your firm, your colleagues, your clients, your suppliers. They all have a subjective perception of you and the value to which you can contribute in any business situation. Is it the perception you want? Do people see you as the problem solver and solution designer for their problems? Like any brand owner, you can work to actively shape that perception. As Catherine Kaputa puts it: If you don’t brand yourself, others will, and they may not brand you the way you want to be branded.
The first tool in the branding toolbox is positioning.
The branding community has developed the idea of brand positioning. In the perception space in which your brand operates, you seek to identify a unique, highly differentiated position. You want to be perceived as different and better. Positioning is the identification and selection of that unique space in the minds of customers and the basis of the of credibility, reputation and trust to be able to make the claim.
Importantly, positioning requires outside-in thinking. Think of your customers first, their needs, their mindset, and their perception of the other brands in the space. Your positioning must be in their minds, not yours.
Differentiation is a most important element of positioning.
Typically, perception spaces are competitive. Customers looking for solutions to problems and better experiences scan the space for alternatives and make comparisons between them. Know your competitors, assess them through the eyes of your customers, and find a positioning that is both different from and better than alternatives for your customer, using their mental model and assessment criteria. Aim to “own” that unique space – meaning that the customer identifies you as the only one or the best one of their alternatives to meet a particular need.
Attach an idea to yourself.
A way to pin down a perception in a customer’s mind is to attach an idea to a brand, in this case yourself as a brand, in a way that the connection is immediate and becomes automatic. The idea should be singular and highly focused. Catherine Kaputa recommends a process of subtraction to reach a singular idea — you’ll start with a multi-layered and possibly complicated idea, but if you keep subtracting the least relevant, least important and least differentiated elements, you’ll arrive at the pared-down singularity. You should be able to express it in a phrase or a sentence, one that you can keep repeating to embed it.
Her own example in her marketing career was to brand herself as “good with difficult clients”. Every marketing services company has clients or accounts or marketing challenges that are deemed to be difficult and not everyone wants to be exposed to that risk. Someone who steps up and enjoys performing well on such a stage is both differentiated and highly sought after.
Personal brand positioning strategy templates provide another tool for self-branding.
In her book The New Brand You, Catherine Kaputa provides 10 brand positioning templates as examples of how an individual might approach the process of self-branding and build their own brand.
Download “Ten Personal Brand Positioning Strategies” in PDF: Mises.org/E4B_198_PDF
These are complete templates for rigorous use and application, appropriate for individual interpretation, embellishment and nuance.
One example is the Innovator strategy. Let’s use this template as an example of the self-brand positioning process.
1. What’s the customer need that the Innovator addresses? Identify your target audience and the problem they want solved. Innovators are needed to create something new, when existing strategies are failing or sales are declining or new market entrants are redefining the terms of competition. New solutions are sought, and Innovators are the ones people turn to. Innovators are recognized as the creative resource that’s required.
2. What are the attributes to point to in order to claim the Innovator positioning? Catherine Kaputa lists 5:
Visionary with clear objectives: not just creative, but capable of identifying business objectives for creativity and of seizing opportunities.
Brilliant at problem-solving: full of ideas, but always directed towards solving important problems.
Bold risk-taking: when others hold back, Innovators are eager to design and run experiments from which to learn, knowing there’s no such thing as failure, just new knowledge.
Fresh thinking: not following the crowd but diverging from the norm.
Inventive: Innovators demonstrate the capacity to be first in new designs, new thinking and new ideas.
The point is to evaluate yourself against the attributes of the positioning type: is this you?
3. The next step is a positioning statement. Catherine provides examples:
Sample Positioning Statement: An innovative professional in an industry beset by mergers and dynamic change positioned herself in the following way.
Draft Sentence: For senior managers, boss, clients, industry who need new products and services I stand for innovative problem solver in industries undergoing massive change.
The format to use is: For (target audience) who needs (problem you solve) I stand for (value proposition).
4. Add reasons to believe. Pick three reasons and 3 keywords or phrases as to why customers should invest in your positioning statement by hiring you or giving you the project.
Innovator is just one of multiple possible strategies. Yours may be one of these or a combination of several. There’s a personal test you can take at Mises.org/E4B_198_Test for initial input to start your positioning process.
Positioning is a means not an end: there is more work to do.
Catherine Kaputa follows the logic of brand positioning all the way to implementation. It’s not a theory, it’s a practice. There are actions that brand marketers take to communicate and embed their positioning. She cites three major ones: visual identity, verbal identity and brand marketing.
Commercial brands spend a lot of time, effort and resources on a brand’s look: logo design, package design, website colors and typefaces, video style, and so on. The goal is to communicate a style and an engaging and brand-appropriate visual personality. The same principles apply to personal branding – choose your look, your dress-style and fashion carefully and thoughtfully.
Verbal identity comes from the words you use, the story you tell, and how you communicate in presentations, e-mails, tweets, speeches and conversations, whether in the conference room, the auditorium or on zoom. Work on it.
Marketing your brand should be guided by your goals for your personal brand. Once you have them defined, choose your media, your message, your content, your campaign tactics and your metrics.
Additional Resources
The New Brand You: How to Wow in the New World of Work by Catherine Kaputa: Mises.org/E4B_198_Book
Find your own brand positioning (Mises.org/E4B_198_Test) on SelfBrand.com
“Ten Personal Brand Positioning Strategies” (PDF): Mises.org/E4B_198_PDF

Business success goes beyond numbers and planning and finance acumen. There’s an emotional component to it, ranging from the courage to make decisions without knowing the outcomes in an uncertain future, to the resilience of weathering storms and coping with unanticipated crises. There is also, of course, the joy of achievement and goal-attainment. There’s a concept identified as emotional intelligence that individuals and teams can cultivate as an element of a mental model that’s well-aligned with business performance and positive business outcomes.
Knowledge Capsule
The entrepreneurial method is to pursue change, but people’s natural attitude is to resist change.
We have an inbuilt, biological resistance to change. It triggers fear and anxiety that get in the way of moving towards the change that we seek. In addition to this emotional resistance, we develop habits that keep us in the status quo, and present another barrier to behavioral change. We all must fight an internal battle between our old habits and desired new habits.
Entrepreneurs develop a special emotional intelligence that motivates action.
Entrepreneurs are in the business of making change. They can overcome the natural emotional and behavioral barriers because they have a highly developed emotional intelligence. They have such an emotional relationship with their vision of a successful outcome for their efforts that they can overcome fearful restraints and resistance to change. They are especially highly motivated to take action. It’s their emotion that drives action, not intellect.
Emotional intelligence is much more influential in business success than IQ.
A 40-year study at UC Berkeley found that EQ (emotional intelligence) is 400% more powerful than IQ in predicting which individuals would have success in their field. Private companies like PepsiCo and Apple have uncovered similar findings in their internal studies.
High emotional intelligence not only releases personal energy and creativity, but it also results in higher levels of interpersonal trust and shared engagement with others. With high emotional intelligence, we are driven to help others to enjoy better experiences as well as to advance out of our own comfort zones to access new areas of achievement.
The consequence of achieving high levels of emotional intelligence is higher levels of trust and engagement in business, and, thereby, better business results.
Everyone can improve their emotional intelligence and benefit from its compounding effect.
We are pretty much born with our IQ — we can’t increase it. But everyone can raise their level of emotional intelligence. Not only that, but emotional intelligence is a compounding asset — we can raise it and raise it again and keep on raising, so long as we work at it.
Part of the equation is personal energy management.
Phil Johnson identifies personal energy as the core element at the heart of the power of emotional intelligence. We “give our energy away” when we permit others to disrupt our emotional flow — make us annoyed or angry or resentful or frustrated. As a consequence, we feel the need to “steal energy from others” by getting the better of them or by exercising a command-and-control management style. The net result is strife, dissension, and misalignment — where team or corporate energy is wasted. We can avoid this waste by cultivating emotional intelligence.
There are high-ROI habits, practices and skills that help to build emotional intelligence.
Happily, we can practice some of the habits and skills that develop and demonstrate emotional intelligence.
One such habit is authentic listening: when we take criticism personally, we give away energy. So, if we eliminate all personal inner-directed emotion from our reception of comments and suggestions from others, we can utilize all the experience and knowledge that’s shared with us for betterment and improvement. Don’t resist, don’t judge. Don’t let attachment to our own preferences get in the way of receiving input. Don’t raise walls. We have no personal interest in what others think of us, only in the information they can impart, which might be useful
The other side of the coin is authentic communication: be sure that all the content of our communication is factual and positively motivating and designed to be helpful to others, strengthening trust and engagement. If we develop a consistent reputation for authentic communication, we’ll raise engagement (and Gallup reports that employee engagement is at a very low level today, which is a great cost to economic productivity).
In addition to habits and practices, Phil Johnson urges us to commit to the emotional labor of recognizing our own fears, biases, and status quo preferences, and to establish an emotional distance between our motivations to action and our ego-based fear. It’s emotional labor that pays interest — it has a high ROI.
Emotional intelligence releases the power of intuition, and creates a state of flow.
When we fear making decisions, we try to rationalize those decisions, to seek objectivity and lower uncertainty. When we distance ourselves from fear, we can unleash intuition — that decision-making capability that is beyond our understanding and comes from our unconscious brain. Intuition takes over more and more as we master emotional intelligence. We make choices that are not intellectual — we go beyond our intellectual ability.
Emotional intelligence takes us to a flow state. We get away from thinking and move towards intuitive doing, beyond our comfort zone beyond our fear and anxiety.
Additional Resources
Phil Johnson on LinkedIn: Mises.org/E4B_197_LinkedIn
Phil Johnson’s Zoom Calendar: Mises.org/E4B_197_Zoom
Videos from alumni of Phil Johnson’s MBL (Master Of Business Leadership) Program: Mises.org/E4B_197_MBL
UC Berkeley Study, EQ >IQ: Mises.org/E4B_197_Paper

A great benefit of the internet age is the capacity to accumulate, accelerate, and intensify connections between entrepreneurs, knowledge sources, investors, mentors, collaborators, and service providers. Businesses with a valid value proposition who are in the launch and early expansion phases can interconnect a network of powerful and qualified resources to support their growth. A good way to do so is to utilize a platform (another product of the internet age) designed for the purpose. Tom Malengo established a platform called Brandjectory to serve just this purpose for consumer packaged goods (CPG) startups.
Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights.
Brandjectory’s value proposition is to solve the problem of how to build an investor-ready business.
The purpose of a B2B business is to help customers achieve their own purpose. Brandjectory helps with the purpose of becoming investor-ready, the condition of qualifying for funding in the eyes of investors. The problem is multi-faceted, from having an investable value proposition, to having the systems and structure in place to qualify for investment, to overcoming the functional obstacles of expansion, to having access to investors, to having the capability to pitch effectively and persuasively. Brandjectory helps with all phases, for all stages of investable business from pre-market seed stage to post-market Series A where a proven business model and revenue stream represents the bar.
All knowledge is specialized: select and know your sector.
Brandjectory focuses on consumer packaged goods businesses, often identified by the acronym CPG. It’s a sector with open-ended innovation opportunities — e.g., how to make foods and beverages and cleaning products and pet products healthier — along with an identifiable set of obstacles to overcome, such as the cost and difficulty of securing and maintaining distribution in supermarkets and other retail channels. An investable business knows the available innovation gaps and has a practical knowledge of barriers and how to overcome them.
Define value in your sector with reachable target customers.
The Brandjectory system stresses the understanding of subjective value — that it’s an experience of the customer, and is defined by what they feel is important to them and how they feel a new brand will satisfy their need in that area of their life. Value demands an emotional connection, sustained over time. Too many founders, says Tom Malengo, CEO of Brandjectory, do not exhibit a full understanding of value. They are more focused on what’s new or different about their product, or on their recipe or ingredients. This is a functional perspective, and misses the emotional component. Tom’s technique in assessing a founder’s understanding of subjective value is a careful but intense questioning, driving towards a true focus on what’s important to consumers.
Value understanding must be translated into a value proposition.
A value proposition is a structured template for the communication of proposed value to the consumer, enabling them to recognize it. The value proposition must capture the emotional element of value — how consumers will feel better. It’s not just about good taste, for example, but the joy of consumption, the family sharing, the feeling of contributing to health rather than undermining health.
On econ4business.com, you can read about value propositions (Mises.org/E4B_195_Value), and watch the E4B value proposition design video (Mises.org/E4B_195_Video).
Potential investors will probe for the founder’s true understanding of value propositions — it’s a qualitative rather than quantitative assessment. A founder must be skilled and effective at communicating this understanding.
Investor-readiness also implies an identification of all the challenges to growth and how to overcome them.
Investor-readiness will vary by business stage. The state of readiness might encompass the capacity of the sales network, or of production processes, or the scalability, sustainability and security of the supply chain, or the strength of processes and systems, or the innovation pipeline, or the quality of the advisor group. Tom’s guidance to founders ensure that they know all the questions investors will ask, and leave nothing to chance in framing their answers.
The required knowledge-building is achieved through networking and connecting.
A major benefit of the Brandjectory platform is its network of advisors, industry experts, mentors, and investors. Founders can connect to them and meet them, and not just listen but also gather knowledge through questioning and discussion. Plugging in to a powerful knowledge network is less stressful than pitching and more conducive to learning.
The members of the network have a wide range of incentives. Investors can pick up information about trends and new ideas even if they don’t invest directly. Industry experts can sense the response to their information and knowledge sharing and get market feedback. Many mentors enjoy the sense of giving back to their industry and community after years of working. All entrepreneurs can, and should, assemble a network like this. Brandjectory is a convenient way to do it for CPG entrepreneurs.
It’s important to understand the role of knowledge in firm performance.
Tom Malengo says knowledge is power for entrepreneurs — the power to solve problems, address challenges and overcome obstacles. It can be a competitive advantage to gather more specialized knowledge than competitors and incumbents.
Professor Per Bylund sees specialized knowledge as solving the production problem (see Mises.org/E4B_195_Book) — the difficulty of initiating new economic production that no-one else has ever attempted, i.e., innovation.
Brandjectory takes the problem-solution approach to knowledge building. Entrepreneurs who confront a problem or issue or knowledge gap can ask the appropriate question of the appropriate expert or tap the experience of a more seasoned businessperson and benefit from the exchange, a kind of accelerated learning.
Brandjectory is a celebration of the all-American practice of entrepreneurship.
Tom Malengo views entrepreneurship as the fabric of civilized society, a tradition that is especially strong in America. Our first settlers and many of our founders were entrepreneurs, and the encouragement of new ideas from any and all sources, giving everyone the chance to pursue their commercial development and experience economic success is woven into our way of life.
An entrepreneur, as Tom sees it, is someone who refuse to tolerate the existing status quo and demands better and is willing to exert their own effort and expend their own resources to bring it about — a very Misesian view. Through Brandjectory, he intends to help and support all those in pursuit of betterment in CPG. His platform concept — where the business model is to invite entrepreneurs to join for a fee, with unlimited free access to the knowledge platform and expert network, no commissions, middleman dealmaker cuts, brokerage charges, retail markups, affiliate costs or any other “bite” — is pure support for aspirational growth companies.
Additional Resources
Brandjectory website: brandjectorynow.com
Tom Malengo on LinkedIn: Mises.org/E4B_195_LinkedIn