Nancy Behrman on Strategic Planning: Taking the Longview for Personal Branding in Hollywood

With so many would-be social media influencers vying for attention across every imaginable platform, the deeply competitive and increasingly global environment makes establishing a sustainable brand identity -- especially on the level of the Hollywood elite -- an especially difficult task.

Although branding is undeniably challenging in Hollywood -- and increasingly so, regardless of one’s geographic location -- it is possible to cite several examples of immediately recognizable social media influencers who established a personal brand in Hollywood in just a brief period of time. Naturally, this raises a question regarding these ascendant outliers, as one has to wonder whether they are an exception, or instead represent a more effective and efficient path to successful personal branding.

Nancy Behrman, founder of Behrman Communications and a highly regarded beauty and lifestyle brand building expert, offered her professional insight on strategic planning, providing her take on the recent successes of Hollywood’s newest social media influencers. According to Behrman, the ideal approach to lifestyle branding ought to begin with strategic planning that ensures the brand-building campaign yields short-term success, while also being sustainable -- or “evolution-friendly,” as Behrman and her team at Behrman Communications prefer to call it -- over the longer term.

Behrman also emphasizes the importance of considering the long view in brand-building, as achieving short-term brand-building success is relatively easy, compared to creating an evolution-friendly lifestyle brand capable of thriving among a shifting distribution landscape.
Behrman was quick to note that she had no intention of either criticizing or praising any specific effort of the social media influencers. Instead, the lifestyle brand pioneer simply wished to relay that far too many brand ambitions focus on short-term gains, while failing to consider how to achieve true staying power in a competitive environment such as Hollywood.

Behrman then turned her attention to addressing the possibility that Hollywood’s most recently successful social media influencers could be either statistical outliers or innovators responsible for breaking new ground in brand-building methodologies.

The inventive, creative spirit behind Behrman Communications discarded the Manichean terms of the question and instead opted to offer a more nuanced response, pointing out that these new social media influencers clearly understand the strategies necessary for generating short-term brand-building success and might be onto something innovative and therefore worthy of deeper exploration.

Behrman’s insights seem to conclude that there is little reason to discard any strategies capable of generating a specific kind of result simply because the long-term outcome is still unknown. Instead, it is best to consider pairing these effective short-term methodologies with an overarching, evolution-friendly strategic plan for lifestyle brand-building, whether it is in Hollywood or any other corner of the globe.