Vivian Leung's Blog

This is a true story.

It happened a few weeks ago, as I was walking through the mall to get to work. As always, my eyes have a tendency to wander around as I walk, and that day was no exception. My eyes stopped at a particular young man, not because he was especially attractive, but because of what he was doing. He appeared to be a customer service representative at that Fido store, dressed in a light blue shirt and ironed dress pants. However, during work hours, he decided to walk out of the store, step in front of a large mirror located beside the bright yellow “Fido” sign, and just stare at himself. I’m pretty sure I was not the only one who noticed, but the man didn’t seem to care. He kept looking at himself in different angles, fixing his shirt, fixing his collar, practicing his smile. He tugged at strands of his hair, messed it up, just to fix it back to what it was 5 minutes ago. It was oddly amusing to watch him. Why did this man put so much attention on his own appearance, even during work hours? Was it that important to stare at himself for 5 minutes in front of the mirror? Did he like his reflection that much?

I’m tempted to say that this is a prime example of extreme narcissism, but perhaps there’s a reason behind this. I thought back to COMM 299, the course where we learned about personal branding. We can think of ourselves as our own individual company, and each person develops his/her own marketing strategy in order to succeed in the business world. So how do we do it? Just like how Apple sells its iPhone 4’s or how Starbucks sells its coffee, we use the same marketing plan:

1. Business mission and objectives: Instead, we develop our main objective as to why we wish to work at a particular company.
2. Situation analysis: We analyze our personal strengths and weaknesses, as well as external opportunities and threats (competition).
3. Identify opportunities: We look at the different career opportunities available and filter through them to select the positions most suitable for ourselves, based on our character and personality.
4. Implement marketing mix (4 P’s): I would rather not view people as products, but perhaps this is the step to focus on our past experiences as well as our overall professional impression and appearance.
5. Evaluate performance using marketing metrics: A time to reflect and improve ourselves by reviewing our successes and failures.

Now back to Mr. Mirror Man. How was he trying to brand himself? Perhaps he was focusing a little too much on the appearance part of Step 4, but there’s definitely more to a product than just packaging. As colourful and “cool” as the packaging may look, if the chips taste horrible, people won’t buy it. However, if the packaging itself isn’t attractive, consumers would not be interested at all in the first place.

Let’s just say, if I were Fido, I wouldn’t pay an employee $15/hour to stare at himself in the mirror. I wonder if Mr. Mirror Man still works at Fido.

How often do YOU look at yourself in the mirror?