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Branding for the Jack of All Trades: A Guide
We examine the special case of branding for the Jack of all Trades.
In a previous article, we provided a comprehensive guide to creating a strong brand identity. In it, we discussed that a visual brand identity consists of multiple elements that need to complement each other and adhere to a unifying vision. These elements include the brand’s logo, typography, color palette, imagery, tone of voice, etc.
To be successful, all these aspects need to be designed with the brand’s core audience, mission, values, and competitive landscape in mind. When done right, a brand will acquire its own personality, a unifying feeling of what it is and what it stands for.
But what if you’re a multi-talented, multi-passionate, serial entrepreneur who loves to help people in multiple ways through diverse projects? In this article, we will examine the special case of branding for the Jack of all Trades.We will discuss the unique challenges multi-passionate people face when building businesses, potential options for branding strategies, and share our own experiences.
In recent years, we have seen a notable increase in the number of people who fit the Jack of All Trades profile — people with diverse skills and interests involved in multiple fields. A modern example might be a person who is simultaneously a blogger, an influencer, a fitness instructor and a freelance photographer.
We attribute the shift to a variety of social, technological, and economic factors. They include the rise of the gig economy, the democratization of software, the strong desire for flexibility and freedom, and others. It is now easier than ever to acquire different skills, to practice them concurrently and monetize them. This allows people to experiment with their careers, to explore different roles and industries, to find what works for them.
With the advent of online learning platforms like Udemy, a formal education is no longer needed to learn to code, design, or start a business — everything is just a click away. Last but not least, working from home has created opportunities for people to turn hobbies into businesses, engage in side projects, and look for alternatives to the classic 9-to-5 job.
Being a Jack of All Trades can allow you to meet people from diverse walks of life, to teach you skills you never thought possible, to help you gain valuable on-hands experience in many fields, and a broad view of life and business.
As with most things, however, being a multi-passionate entrepreneur comes with its own set of unique challenges. The main one is that it can be overwhelming. The need to rethink your projects and to refocus your efforts can lead to a near-constant state of uncertainty, anxiety, and doubt.
Are you moving in the right direction?
As a Jack of All Trades, you can never know in advance which of your projects will become successful and where you should invest your limited time and energy. That is why you must continually reinvent yourself and revisit the fundamentals of your brand or brands, who you are and what you stand for.
The main challenge you will probably face as a multi-passionate entrepreneur is the danger of losing focus. This can take many forms.
Say you have just started your first business. Most likely, it is the one you see the most value in and think it will have the highest chance of success. It probably involves an activity you enjoy doing the most and feel you have enough experience to start. You make the leap. You get in touch with a designer or agency to create your brand and website.
The thrill of seeing your idea come to life, given weight in a beautiful logo, bespoke business cards, and a slick designer website overwhelms you. You think of all the ideas you’ve always wanted to realize, all the businesses you’ve wanted to start. You envision them in their own beautiful websites, with their own social media accounts, logos, and branded materials.Perhaps you feel the rush to realize them all at once, to start working on them immediately.
Perhaps you’re already looking to reserve domain names for future sites, coming up with names and logo ideas, and even considering trademarking them. You may wish to add new pages to your site dedicated to your new ideas. You may want to add additional services to your offering, unrelated to those you started with. You may want to create additional social media accounts, create product listings on various platforms, write articles on diverse and unrelated subjects in your blog.
Soon you begin to feel that the business name, logo, brand colors and fonts are only loosely related to what your business is about today. Your brand has drifted. Your clients seem confused about your business, unsure exactly what you do. Friends and relatives point out the discrepancy.
Instead of having many meanings, your brand seems to have lost all meaning. This is a sure sign that you’re losing focus. It’s a common problem for the Jack of All Trades, and it doesn’t have an easy solution. We will discuss strategies to address it further in the article.
Having lost focus, you find yourself doing many things at once. Likely, each of them requires a different mindset, exerts its unique type of stress on you and has its own pros and cons.
For example, one line of work drains you creatively, while another does so physically. One expects you to perform in a social setting, another one is pensive and reclusive. Soon you begin to feel that you can never be any of these things, at least not concurrently and not to the required degree.
Your competitors who only need to perform in a single field soon outpace you because they hammer on the fundamentals of their business every day. Soon you find that a field that gave you joy as a hobby frustrates you as a business. There are skills you need to master to which you are not suited.
Clients and business partners notice the frustration. They begin to doubt if they can trust you. Worse yet, you begin alienating happy clients because one of your service lines is not on par with the others.
When a customer is disappointed from any of your offerings, it’s likely you will lose them entirely, regardless of how well you performed in another area. Diluting your expertise is a fundamental risk to your personal brand. In our experience, it is better to offer only services and products whose quality you can guarantee.
In conclusion, since no one can excel in all things, our recommendation is to niche down to your core strengths.
As we have shown, being a Jack of all Trades can be uniquely challenging, but it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try.
There are examples of highly successful multi-passionate entrepreneurs. Look no further than Elon Musk, one of the richest people in the world. There are a number of business and branding strategies the Jack of all Trades can follow to achieve success. We will now discuss what they entail and when to consider following them.
If you choose to work with us on your next branding or web project, as an experienced brand agency, we will examine your particular case in detail and advise accordingly.
On one extreme, you can create separate brands for all of your businesses and projects.
A great example is the above-mentioned Elon Musk, whose businesses are organized as separate entities with their own unique and unrelated brands. These include Tesla, Space X, Solar City, The Boring Company, and others.
This strategy is particularly appropriate when the products and services you offer are fundamentally different, non-complementary, and cater to different audiences.
Using this approach will mean that each of your businesses will have their own logo, typography, color palette, website, etc. This will allow them to have their own unique message, ensuring clarity for the customer.
For instance, if you are a photographer and a fitness coach, these are very different services and separating them can avoid confusion. In addition, the businesses are likely to require different marketing strategies.
For example, one of the audiences may prefer an informal, conversational tone in your messaging, while the other may be more conservative. Keeping them separate will allow you to effectively communicate with both without risking alienating them.
However, this strategy will require a high degree of effort and financial commitment to manage the two separate businesses. You will need to create separate content for your websites, maintain multiple social media profiles, and handle the workload of several businesses.
One way to make good use of this strategy is to only start a new business when the existing ones are sufficiently developed and can be delegated to competent managers. Otherwise, the danger exists that a successful business can be dragged down financially by a string of less successful side projects.
A middle option is to create an umbrella brand that encapsulates your core message with sub-brands for each individual business. This approach is best suited when your areas of expertise are somewhat related, but still distinct enough to warrant their own focus.
A great example of a successful umbrella brand is Richard Branson’s Virgin group. It comprises brands that operate individually but are united by the overarching Virgin identity.
In essence, this is an attempt to make the audience associate a diverse set of brands with the same positive traits, embodied in the umbrella brand. For example, quality, innovation and customer centricity. Visually, this can be achieved by incorporating the same element in the logo of every sub-brand, then adding a distinguishing feature unique to the business.
The main benefit of this strategy is that it will allow you to market yourself as a multi-passionate entrepreneur, emphasizing your different talents and interests.
It can also be cheaper and easier to manage than having multiple brands, as you can have, for example, a single website with sections for each brand. Perhaps you will also be able to cross-sell products and services from one brand to a new and unrelated audience.
With this strategy, however, failing in one sub-brand can cause irreparable damage to the others. There is also the problem that customers will fail to see and understand the unifying thread between the businesses, defeating the purpose of the umbrella brand.
Finally, the opposite strategy of keeping the brands separate is to try to unite them in a personal brand. Under this approach, all of your skills, interests and projects will have a single unifying brand without sub-brands to distinguish them.
This strategy is best suited for when your services are strongly related to each other and cater to a similar audience.
For example, if you are a life coach, you can successfully become a fitness guru and motivational speaker, as your audience will likely be interested in all three areas. Think no further than Gary Vaynerchuk (a.k.a. Gary Vee).
If you run a YouTube channel to promote your services, you can easily add a blog, an e-book, a TikTok account or a podcast to your marketing mix without damaging the brand.
If your areas of expertise are all related, they can compliment and reinforce each other, helping you create a strong image of a multi-talented professional. With this strategy, you can also gently and gradually shift what your brand is about over time without necessarily needing to rebrand.
Once again, to make it work, it is crucial to make sure that the areas are sufficiently related to each other and that the audience responds well to each of them.
As we have shown, being a multi-passionate entrepreneur, being involved in a number of businesses and projects, brings unique opportunities and challenges.
From a brand perspective, being a Jack of All Trades carries the risk of diluting the brand to the point where it loses its meaning and becomes confusing to your customers.
By focusing on multiple areas you also risk diluting your expertise, which could lead to brand damage, should customers be disappointed from one of your offerings.
As it relates to branding, simultaneously operating multiple businesses can be handled by keeping their brands separate, using an umbrella brand with sub-brands or relying on a unified personal brand.
All of these approaches have pros and cons and become relatively more or less attractive depending on how much your businesses and target audiences differ.
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