Ok, so we’ve established that everybody has a personal brand.

We’ve also established that a positive, values-based personal brand is desirable and that personal brand can be cultivated and managed.

But did you know that brand is infectious?

Yes, your brand can rub off on others – and their brand can rub off on you!

Let me tell you a story…

Now you’d think that the world’s mightiest rugby team wouldn’t lack for motivation or cohesion, but in 2004 the All Blacks were in terrible trouble.

Having feasted for 100 years on an extraordinary 75% winning record, results were slipping. The Men in Black had just come a miserable last in the Tri Nations, a championship they’d come to regard as their own.

Even worse, morale had plummeted. Their inspirational captain, Tana Umaga, was threatening to quit. Others too. The culture was drunk and disorderly, rotting from the inside.

Something had to change.

So the senior leadership gathered for a three-day summit under head coach, Graham Henry, in what he now calls the most important meeting of his career. Out of it came a new resolve – to redesign the world’s most successful sporting culture – and a new phrase; Better People Make Better All Blacks.

The strategy?

Develop the character of the players off the pitch, so they perform better on it.

And this policy was tested – in 2007 the team was banished from the Rugby World Cup in the quarter finals – an absolute affront to a rugby mad nation of 4 million people.

But those at the top of the hierarchy stood firm, assessed the situation, stood by their values and policies, reappointed the losing coach and went on to phenomenal success.

Between 2004 and 2011, the All Blacks took their winning record to an almost unbelievable 86%.

They won the Rugby World Cup in 2011 on home soil and remarkably went ‘back to back’ in 2015 at the Rugby World Cup in the UK.

So the final lesson here is you don’t have to do it alone.

Your brand is actually more than you – it is actually the point at which you and everything you associate with intersects.

Therefore you can exponentially leverage the investments in your own brand by taking the journey with others.

Source: James Kerr