From Personal brand to coaching brand

Erwin van Lun's Mensmerk.nl and ErwinVanLun.com's category structure has been radically revised. The most important reason for this change was the continual confusion at the term 'personal brands'. I use this term to describe a new type of brand that burrows itself into a specific area, knows all about it, then study the individual consumer and guide them in their area. This was often confused with 'presenting yourself as a brand' under the term 'personal branding'. That's why I made a call to people in the TrendUpdate that led to an interesting discussion. As a result from now on I'll use the term 'coaching brand'. At the same time I've made more changes to make my work as a futurist and trend analyst clearer at a first glance.

These are the changes:

• Category headers: The different categories are now subdivided into ‘Trends Now’, ‘Roboworld’, ‘Pamper Planet’ and ‘My Inspiration’. On Mensmerk.nl I especially get visitors through Google. People there end up with a piece I’ve written about, say, the HEMA. So, somewhere in the middle of the site. I can see that a relatively large amount of people also leaves again and I want to do something about that. An important element is that it has to be clear very quickly what kind of site people are visiting. With these headers I can immediately emphasize my job as a futurist and trend analyst. The third part (professional speaker) will come in a next stage. Further transforming a passerby into a visitor will be dealt with in the next versions. Choosing to include dates is a conscious choice. From a Google Adwords campaign it’s been shown that people search for Future + 2010 of 2015 or 2020 or 2050. I’ll have to adapt to that.
• Splitting up the category ‘technology’ into and robot technology. This is because it concerns completely different developments and also become relevant in a different time phase. Media technology is current right now and by far the most important factor in people’s changing behavior. Robot technology will only be relevant for the individual on the street a lot further down the right, giving a dominant role in society a lot later.
• Renaming ‘personal media brand’ into home entertainment coaching brand: this is just a far more accurate description of what I mean. It’s a mouthful, but I couldn’t make it shorter.
• Renaming ‘personal travel brand’ into mobility coaching brand. I think I originally made the wrong choice when I picked ‘travel’. ‘Mobility’ is a more accurate reflection.
• Renaming ‘personal sex brand’ into erotic coaching brand. Not only does it sound better, friendlier, but it’s also more accurate.
• Renaming ‘personal holiday brand’ into travel coaching brand. The term ‘travel’ more closely means ‘to go on vacation’ whereas ‘holiday’ more means ‘to have vacation’. I mean the first, so the term was originally not the best either.
• Merging ‘literature’ and ‘smart people’ into sources. This because there were only a few posts in these categories and they do take up space on the homepage.
• New category: long term figures. In this category I want to collect the figures for 2050. Oil supply, number of extinct animals, size of national debts, number of people who have to life off less than $1, that kind of figures. But long term prognoses. This is to get a better image of the situation in 2050.
• New category: consumer robots. There’s a different from the humanoid evolution where it’s truly about robots that look like humans and act like humans. Furthermore these robots need to be in stores, like in the category hardware.
• New category: 2050 technology. In this category I’ll describe what scientists deem possible in 2050. With a movie if I can add one.

Furthermore I’ve added two categories: ‘creative coaching’ and ‘leisure coaching’. Brands that help you be creative from childhood and brands that help you pass your spare time respectively. These will appear once I’ve made the first posts.

I’m pretty satisfied with this division myself. It seems like it’s becoming ever clearer to me and that means the categories are crystal clear to me too.

The only thing that still bothers me is the news coaching brand: a brand that keeps you up to date. The question is whether ‘keeping up to date’ (the area of newspapers, news sites and news programs) is a basic need or not. After some thinking the involved human, the human who lives in groups, wants to maintain themselves within that group. This human does this by tuning into the group’s conversational topics. And when you can get that from a newspaper, you’ll get it from a newspaper. But in essence it’s about the fact that humans want to belong somewhere. News is only a small aspect of that. It involves clothing (cultural symbol), but also all sorts of group rituals or knowledge of stories of people who are important in the group. How can you ground yourself in a group? A cultural coaching brand might be a better term. What do you think? Let me know (in the comments)!

Related

• Six speakerproducts
• Trends 2009 and beyond
• Leisure coaching and relationships
• New term for personal brands?
• Personal branding strategy in Emerce

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