CustomeRules – A Marketing Blog from BI|Digital Marketing

I’ve never really bought into the idea of being your own brand. If you happen to be a celebrity, it’s a logical business brand. But for the rest of us it seems a little pretentious, like we’re packaging ourselves and creating a more marketable image and identity; for whom, our friends and coworkers at the office?  I tend to think other folks don’t view us as brands, they view us as people.

The celebrity elite is another story, as personal branding is the key to success with those icons in sports and entertainment whose lives we follow on television, gossip magazines and Twitter. After all, inquiring minds want to know.  Many are a flash in the pan and most are not able to sustain for any length of time. Personal brands are far more perishable than product or company brands, susceptible to the short attention span of a fickle consumer public, or to self-destruction. Even major brands like Martha Stewart can be taken down by a single incident or breach of trust. We’ll see how Tiger does now that his brand has strayed off the fairway.

One of the biggest and most enduring personal brands in the past decade is Oprah Winfrey, who has clearly taken hers to an enterprise level. Now she will attempt to transcend the brand beyond the person as she trades in her show for a cable network: the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN). Her brand has grown bigger than CBS.

This will be an interesting test of brand extensibility.

The odds are not with her as this kind of play has not been successful very often. But Oprah is not just any brand, having achieved cultural icon status, largely because of The Oprah Winfrey Show over the past 24 years. It is a brand built on her personality, emotion and empathy — a real person talking to people about real-life issues. She has been successful in extending her brand to the movies (Color Purple), a Magazine (O) and a multitude of business ventures, amassing a wealth of $2.3 billion. But she’s always had the show to continually fuel the brand.

Now she is killing off the show, leaving her loyal fans hanging while she spreads herself out over an entire network, and coming to rely on the name more than the person.

Whatever the risk, it’s necessary as Oprah’s show is clearly in the mature end of its cycle, with viewership declining steadily from 14 million in 1998 to only 7 million today.  No doubt she will create a media splash, but can she deliver content that will sustain the brand once unplugged from its primary energy source in an ultra-competitive and ever-changing world of media?

We’ll see how strong the O brand really is.