To be relevant to someone or an organisation, you need to understand what is of utmost importance to them.
Just as with a consumer brand or service, a brand must deeply understand what the customer wants.
It’s essential to fully grasp the value of relevance, as it is by your relevance that you can make an impact.
It's what you can do, not what you are, the notion of being something, not someone.
Why Relevance is Important
The more relevance you have, the more opportunity you have to influence and make an impact for the better. People who seek you out are more open and willing to listen to your ideas and implement them.
The value of relevance is in the ability to make an impact at scale. For example, you might want to change something about your community, your company, the city, or the world, and we all know there are plenty of things that need changing.
How You Can Use Your Relevance
Let's take something that impacts us all, like climate change. You might want to do something to help make this change. Still, without relevance you're probably limited to recycling at home, working in the community garden, signing petitions - all worthwhile efforts, but they have little impact.
Conversely, if you're a scientist and you have become actively engaged in scientific, public, and governmental discussions and policymaking over a period of time, you'll become more relevant and make a larger impact.
The value of relevance can also be seen in the workplace. The more relevant you are in whatever area you want to make an impact on, the more impact you can make.
Managing Your Reputation
You can be relevant at a point in time but also over a period of time. With a consumer brand, a consumer usually wants a car or television that is top of the range for a short period of time. If you're a car brand or a television brand, you are relevant at that time when the customer has the need… And then it's gone.
Similarly, with our personal brand, the skill sets and reputation you have are often only relevant to people when they're focused on a specific outcome or goal they want to achieve.
Relevance at a moment in time is about being visible and on top of your game when the moment occurs.
How To Maintain Relevance Over Time
In different parts of our lives and in our various circles, we fluctuate between being more and less relevant and therefore have more or less impact.
For the purpose of exploring relevance over time, we've chosen four key areas:
family,
business,
community,
and our country.
At any given point in time, your relevance to each of these areas is different, and your travel pathways are also different.
Maintaining your relevance takes a conscious effort. More importantly, it requires a level of self-reflection and emotional intelligence, leading to a deeper exploration of the real purpose in life.
As Simon Sinek has captured in his now-iconic Ted talk about leadership, we need to start with the “why.”
How Great Leaders Inspire
I'd suggest Roger Federer is the master of relevance over time. He's built up a highly recognised personal brand and mastered relevance at a point in time through Grand Slams and winning time and time again.
While his relevance may be changing over time due to his age, his performance at a point in time has extended his relevance
Separately, but connected, are his strong values that underpin his reputation and he's linked with sponsors who share those values.
Key Takeaways
You can achieve relevance by understanding what people want and providing for that need.
Once you have relevance, you have more opportunities to influence people and make a difference for the better.
The difficulty lies in the fact that you’re often relevant for a certain time, so you need to build up your reputation to maintain your relevance over a longer period.
The best way to do this is to highlight your values, make them visible as part of your brand, and stick to them fiercely.
