I had the opportunity to speak with Lyn Chamberlin. Lyn is an experienced executive coach who works with professional women to create meaningful public profiles that showcase their expertise and accomplishments in new and exciting ways.
In our discussion, she highlights how her career path led her to a successful career in branding.
Q: What was your trajectory? And how did it lead to branding?
Well, you know, it’s funny, I believe in sort of the power of the universe. And then I thought I wanted to be a lawyer and I did so poorly on the LSAT that I thought that option was closed.
I think that I ended up getting my very first job at NBC in Washington, as a lowly production assistant, really basically getting coffee for people. And I realized that television as I began to move through the ranks, Boston, New York, etc., television is branding, that it’s really about telling a story. In other words, I was working in news for a long time I was on the air as well as being a producer. And successful television, whether it’s a live talk show, a documentary, or whether it’s a limited series is about telling a story successfully and creating a brand around that story.
If you think about things like The Sopranos, or Breaking Bad, you know, those are all brands, really at the end of the day. So I was fascinated by looking at things through that lens. Through a series of sort of serendipitous occurrences, I was hired by Harvard, to come in and be their Director of Communications. And I found that even schools like Harvard, and I’ve been at Harvard and a bunch of other places. What they needed to do was tell their story to compete for the kinds of students that they needed and wanted.
At that point, Higher Ed was really in the dark ages, as far as marketing is concerned. Marketing was a dirty word and still is, to some extent, because it’s perceived. I think that this gets to the heart of our conversation about branding for faculty, and administrators, it’s still seen in many quarters as being something that taints the academic purity of what an institution does, it is seen as spin, as you well know. And for many people, that’s getting over the hump.
So to make a long story short, branding has been very good to me. Because as a television producer, I knew how to tell a good story. I knew that stories are what people remember you can say, everything is, wonderful, meaningful, and successful, but those are just words. What people remember are the stories that you tell.
So that has led me through many academic institutions, many private companies, and nonprofits, and also working with individuals, particularly women who are at the top of their careers but want to know what’s next. Is there more for me? Am I putting myself forward in a way that tells my story? So branding for me, which is a highly misunderstood concept, is really about successful storytelling. If you want people to see your value, or if you’re an institution and you want more people to enroll, you have to tell a story that brings people to you. I’m very fond of saying, being good is not enough. You have to tell people why they should trust you, why they should like you, and why they should come to your class or enroll in your institution.
So that’s a very long-winded answer to your question. But I hope that helps give a sense of why branding is intrinsically important to people in particular, and that we are all brands at the end of the day. It’s not just FedEx, it’s not just Band-Aid. It’s not just Lysol. We are all brands, and it’s our job to put those forward.
Q: Why do you think branding is misunderstood? And why do you think it’s important for people in higher ed to be paying attention to this?
I’m also fond of saying that higher ed is very late to the marketing game. I think the pandemic rocked the foundations of higher ed and has forced institutions to take a really hard look at what it is they’re selling. Branding is, at the end of the day, about putting something into the marketplace, and being able to attract the customers that you want to buy that product.
To answer your question. It’s an emotional response. As I said earlier, stories are what we tell. And people gravitate to those stories emotionally, not intellectually, the more intellectual layers, and this is something that faculty in particular struggle with, the more of an intellectual layer you put on a brand, the less resonant it’s going to be. It has to be authentic, and it has to be emotional.
To get to the heart of your question, and why is it important, because it’s a crowded world. And it’s a crowded marketplace. If you are going to succeed in whatever field you’ve chosen, whether you are a faculty chair, a Provost who wants to be president, or an administrator who wants to move from the mid-level administrative role to a more senior leadership role, you have to pay attention to how people perceive you. So perception is the name of the game. I think that’s where higher ed, goes off the rails, because people say, Well if I’m good, they will come. You’re not, they’re not going to come. If you don’t tell people how to think about you, they’re going to make it up. And that is never a good strategy. Because there are so many messages in the universe, there are so many brands that are competing individual as well as corporate, that are crashing into each other, that if you don’t take charge of that, then it’s going to work against you. If you think of all of your assets and all of the things that you do well and your accomplishments are sort of being billiard balls on a pool table, and they’re all sort of going around you have to put them into that triangular thing, whatever it’s called, is that a rack something? And you have to decide which ones go where what colors are important. And that’s probably a simplistic analogy, but if you don’t take charge of that, then you’re going to be applying for positions, you’re going to be going for tenure, you’re going to be out in the marketplace, recruited by recruiters, and you’re going to be at their mercy.
I think that women, in particular, have a really hard time with touting their skills and ability, because they see it as bragging, we’ve been brought up that you don’t call attention to yourself that you let other people praise you that you let other people put a tiara on your head and say, Oh, thank you very much, that stuff just doesn’t happen. So part of this is sort of this inner Rolfing of ourselves to say, this is what I’m good at, this is my value. This is why you should pay attention to me, there has to not only be a statement of value, which is authentic and comes from inside but there also has to be almost a personal call to action. Meaning, this is why you should pay attention to me, this is what I can do for you, and these are the results that I will produce. It takes some really hard tactical thinking. And a lot of front-end work to put that all together. But once you have it, it’s not only compelling to the people who are in a position to hire you or to promote you or support you. It also gives you a whole new framework for thinking about yourself, which I know from experience is, is a winning strategy.
So you work with somebody like you, you work with somebody like me because it’s really hard. I mean, it’s even hard for me to do this for myself, it’s very good for yourself. And you know that right? Somebody who can say, wait a minute, this is incredible. You put this down here, this belongs here. And oh, by the way, let’s figure out a series of keywords for you. So that those words can begin to be part of your universe. And they will permeate the social media strategy, they will be part of how you describe yourself, and you will begin to have that wonderful kind of organic viral profile on social media. And just a word about social media. People I work with all the time, say I don’t need that. I don’t know if what they’re saying is I don’t get it. You know, that might have been okay, three or four years ago. And this is particularly true in academia because it’s hard to even get the admissions office or the Alumni Affairs Office to embrace social media, which is crazy. But for individual faculty in particular or administrators, you’ve got to meet people where they are and it is no longer some sort of vague place out there. The marketplace is social media. It’s Tik Tok, Facebook, and LinkedIn. It is tough to conquer that universe. But we can and we do. Where you start is with yourself. And then you put yourself out there.
Q: Dare I say, there are people in higher education that don’t think they have a brand. But they do and it’s them. That brand becomes your reputation, how you engage with people when people see you physically or even on paper, at conferences, in the faculty room, or when you’re talking to the President or Provost. Do you agree and also some could use a refresher?
You’re right. And you hit on a critical piece. Perception is reality, period, period. Now, some people see that as bad news, right? But the good news is, you can change that, that you can craft it, you use the word narrative, which is such an important word here. And you can live that brand. And I think you’ve got to drop the idea that brands are suspect. Because we live in a world of perception. I go back to my early days in television, it’s about creating reality. But that reality it’s not something that you could acquire and bring in and put on a costume. Really good brands take FedEx, for example, when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight. That is an authentic, intrinsic statement of value, right? And that’s what one, an individual, faculty, or senior leader is trying desperately to find. What is that intrinsic value that I want to sell to you? Because let’s face it, it’s transactional. And if I can put my value forward to say to you, Loren here’s what I know, keeps you up at night. And here’s how I can solve that. Because I have accomplished X, Y, and Z. And because I know about X, Y, and Z, it’s a very compelling proposition.
Q: I have done rebranding work with you and it takes someone with expertise and an eye for authenticity. Because let’s face it, I get people trying to send proposals to me all the time, like, Hey, we got something for you, hey, we can help you. And you have to be sort of discerning about that. But I think if it’s not gimmicky, which you are not, you don’t take on too much, you know, you’re not trying to do volume, you are trying to do quality. And when you work with someone who does quality, then you get quality outcomes.
It really is about throwing all the cards up in the air and seeing where they land. I would love to have that first conversation with somebody where we immediately get into a conversation, tell me what you do. Tell me what you’re really good at. And that’s where people stop. That’s like, oh, I don’t know. And so we begin to talk about it. And suddenly, everything starts to become evident that here are the pieces of gold. Here’s what we need to work with. I just finished working with a woman who was not only a department chair, but also had significant accomplishments on the administrative side, and had been working at this, top 10 University for 20 years and had completely lost sight of what she had done and what the value to the university was, and she couldn’t understand why she couldn’t move either up or over into a different position. And she kept saying to me, this is so therapeutic. I feel like I have just taken this huge deep breath and can see things in a different way. And again, that’s not to say that what I do is so unique, but as with you, it’s really a way of looking in a different mirror and having that mirror reflect back to you something that means if we don’t value ourselves, who else is going to, and we can’t say this is what I’m good at and be able to articulate it, by the way, then nobody else can do it either. And I think people like you and me, and then I’ll stop on this, not only give people a sense of their sort of core value, but we also give them the words to talk about it. Because it’s very hard to write your own script. So the words are important too.
Q: Well, the other thing that I want to bring up, which is not so pleasant is when you’re working in industries, and you may be a woman or a minority, or there’s some demographic box that makes you marginalized when you’re in some industries specifically, right now we’re talking about higher ed. It can be very unkind and then unwelcoming. You’re, doing the scholarship, the teaching, running a department, running the lab, and nobody is throwing you a ticker tape parade. It can be hard to highlight the accomplishments you have when you are constantly being told, that’s not enough. So I think that working with someone like you, or working with a coach can help you put a narrative together on paper that shows who you are and what you’ve done. Because guess what, you are a rock star. Right? Have you encountered any of that?
I wish I could say no. I’m somebody who’s been late to the party to really point the finger at the kind of gender, and racial-ethnic marginalization, particularly in industries like higher ed. I can only speak from the gender perspective. But it is prevalent, it is rampant. In 2022, we are facing not only misogyny but ageism and racism. I work with a lot of universities and colleges that are facing all of these issues. They think it’s enough, and I’m not making a too sweeping statement here to say that, we’ll issue a policy, and our policy will be this. What students are saying now is, what are you actually going to do to combat this stuff? But to get back to women, I think that it is not simple. I think that the value of knowing who you are and what you’ve done, and your ultimate worth to an organization is your armor. It is how you can stand up in that boardroom or that faculty meeting and convey a sense of competency. In other words, you don’t have to be aggressive. You don’t have to be a shrinking violet. Just be yourself and be able to exude the brand that you are, which is what I know how to do. This is why I am able to speak on this subject. And this is why you should listen to me. May I also say that it doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a daunting process and realization that you are valuable and that the only person who can hold up that billboard is you. That takes some practice, we’re never going to get rid of all the things that plague the perception of competency, particularly with women in higher ed. But we can be a flag waver. I think eventually our daughter’s generation will have an easier time being equally valued. Not having men take credit for their ideas and the evaluation of one’s worth.
Q: What you said was very moving. And I so appreciate that. I’d like to add you said that it takes time, right? And it takes support, right? So you absolutely need a coach. You need someone to help you rebrand someone who will throw you a ticker tape parade and say, Yes, you really are you are a rock star. We need social support, networking support, we need coaches, we need branders, we need all of this. I like to call this team me.
Yes, I completely agree. And I’ll just add one thing to that getting very tactical for the moment. Part of the process that you and I do is to actually get this down in writing. In other words, what is your brand narrative? What is that one paragraph that summarizes all the things that you want people to know about you? What are the key messages that makeup that brand narrative, is probably four or five sentences. This becomes your elevator speech, you’re able to pedal it when somebody says that awful thing oh, what do you do? You have an answer and give you branding yourself at that point. You have a personal website, or you have a faculty bio that’s on the University website, you’ve got your statement. So once you do this work, it pays you back again and again. So that everywhere your name, let’s say Lynn Chamberlain has mentioned that narrative does not change it is right there. And you are building that perception every single day. So that’s an important part of the work that you and I do.
This has been a very informative conversation. Lynne has been very gracious, and she is offering a special discount. Contact Lynne and mention academic career podcast/ branding. You will get a 25% discount. It will be well worth your time and investment and just have a call with her.
If you’re looking to advance your career in academia, and you’d like to talk, please schedule a call on my calendar. It’s a no-obligation call and we’ll have a quick chat I’ll see if I can help you out and answer any questions you might have. Continue to connect with me by going to www.theacclivity.com.