Tom Keifer of Cinderella provides a good lesson in personal branding and staying relevant.
I love 80’s hair metal music.
My favorite band then was Cinderella; still is. Great blend of rock, blues and country and local folks…from a town only 20 miles from where I grew up.
Tom Keifer was the band’s singer and leader. He and the band were unfairly-tagged as paper-thin, trendy, 80’s-era talents. Not the case at all. Tom is an incredible guitarist, pianist, songwriter and composer. When grunge hit in the early 90’s that was the end of hair metal…but not Tom. He continued to write, produce, tour, experiment and reinvent himself to stay meaningful, relevant. All the while staying true to his brand.
A “grunge-like” revolution hit marketing hard in the mid-90s with the advent of tech. If I insisted on doing the same things now with my career that I did back then, I’d have been put to pasture by 2000.
Stay restless, curious, open-minded, relevant to continue to build a life and career. So many are stubborn, rigid, inflexible. Do these sound familiar?
- “I know what I know.”
- “This is the way we’ve always done things. No need to change.”
- “We’ve tried that before and it doesn’t work.”
The people I’ve met in my career who’ve stood fast by these sayings have been mostly passed by those willing to challenge conventional wisdom and reinvent.
