Executive Personal Brands Revisited

As a passionate branding strategist and communicator, I sometimes come across as a prophet of doom to some. This is because part of the prerequisite for the trade is the ability to see the end, at least to some extent, from the beginning. This helps and is indeed a great skill. In one of my previous write-ups, I did stipulate that executives need to take proper care of their personal brands. This is important because anything that happens to them has a way of affecting their corporate brand’s performance. The reason is that people will first of all buy into personal brands of the executives before they buy into the corporate brands. Some of the responses I got then, particularly through phone calls, were mostly influenced by emotions and not reasons. In less than a year of that post, we now have a case study at hand and we will continue to monitor how events unfold. On Friday, August 14, 2009, the Governor of the Central bank of Nigeria summarily dismissed the board and Managing Directors of five major banks in Nigeria for reasons bothering on mismanagement.
As a fall out of this, a close friend told me that immediately the announcement was made, the company she works for withdrew all their over 500 million naira from one of the banks. One of the reasons given was that they would not be so sure of the unfolding events.
Renaissance Capital, A Moscow-based financial industry rating firm brought out a new rating for some ofthe affected banks. As we can imagine, their rating dropped. The whole incidence is traceable to personal brands of the executives, as I want to believe that nothing has changed in the structure or system of the banks except for the removal of the Executives.
Despite all the promises made to assure Nigerian investors whose money are in those banks, many individuals used their ATM cards to withdraw money during the first few days of the announcement. If media news is anything to go by, many wanted to withdraw their monies within the first few days but could not due to the shortage of cash in those ATM machines, necessitating them to throng the banks’ branches all around Lagos Nigeria. The federal government, through the NSE also had to suspend the five banks’ shares on the stock exchange. I stand to be corrected on this. But I do think this will make it more difficult for people to continue blissful relationships with these banks. The situation further complicates all communication to this effect.
The purpose of this article is not to analyze the action of the federal government, but to buttress the fact that brand owners, managers and executives need to watch their backs while they are leading their own lives. They need to be careful of associations, management styles etc as these will definitely have an affect on their corporate success.
In another vein, most of us who monitored theaftermath of the debtors’ list can learn a great lesson in executives’ personal brands and corporate profitability. As we all noticed, the names of corporate debtors were more than the names of individual debtors. In the list of corporate debtors, certain individuals were mentioned as either major shareholders or chairmen. If the personal brands of these corporate executives associated with the companies are not that important, while would many of them pay so much to publish rejoinders?
Let us note that as corporate executives, our individual personal brands are vital. We must know how to craft, package, position and manage our personal brands so that individuals and corporate brands can share in the dividend. In conclusion, I must add that the purpose of this article is not to apportion blame on any party but to show the essence and impact of executives’ personal brand with regards to corporate profitability.