Leveraging the Campus Club Brand

It is this Founder Value dedicated to the individual which made Toastmasters a natural choice for my own learning journey.  Just as I utilize beBee as the hub for my online (virtual world) learning journey, Toastmasters is instrumental in being the base for my offline (physical world) learning journey.  This idea of "individual" is something I take seriously as a personal intelligence and not as a personal brand.  My aim at the club is not to brand people but to brand the member experience.  At a campus club that experience is born initially from a club charter of Toastmasters International but we are also a student club, governed by rules of the Student Union.   We therefore first are brought into existence under the auspices of the SSU charter - and there are rules which we follow that community (single charter) Toastmasters clubs do not have.  One such rule is that the Club President must be a full-time student of the college.

That adds to the challenge of the club because each year the President will tend to be a student who is relatively new to the Toastmasters program.  Each executive role on a Toastmasters club is actually a part of the education credit program.  So there are even more things to juggle and hold together before we can arrive at dealing with how we implement the brand promise.

If there is a commitment to a brand experience, it should NEVER be a superficial one.  Great thought needs to be put into this because delivering that brand experience requires a lot of high-touch maintenance and a forward-thinking mind.  It is tough work, especially when there are effectively two charters to think about - and then the individuality of each club member.

We do have a few members who have paid attention to their own personal brands and again this is not a superficial exercise on their part.  They spend considerable time on maintaining their personal brand.  It is not a marketing gimmick to them and they work hard at maintaining their personal brand.  That is why I am so aghast at mass-marketing of personal brand as a off-the-shelf thing - that is something easy or that anyone can do.  It takes a lot of nous to engage in any kind of serious branding, period. 

I respect that nous and the people who are intelligent enough to understand that challenge.  I have no time for superficial slogans without any meat on the bone and more importantly I am absolutely a champion of the individual, and as an individual one can choose personal branding - and one can choose a myriad of other affinities.  I understand what great branding is and I have no time for superficial means of generalizing branding or compare branding to a box of detergent.  I am not a product - I am a thinker and I value brand at its highest level and not at its most superficial level.  That is the challenge I look forward to as I work with students at our twin-chartered student club - to honour not one but two brands - Toastmasters and Sheridan Bruins.  If our club executive team achieve then we will achieve a lot.  Branding is a challenge for serious people with longer-term vision.

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