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Kasumi Mihori is creative director of Troika, a Los Angeles-based branding and marketing agency. Troika partners with entertainment and sports media clients to provide marketing support.
Mihori is also an Emmy-award winning director whose work has been featured on broadcast cable, and social media, as well in commercials. She has worked with every major network, broadcaster and media company including Disney, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and Warner Bros, along with international networks such as Sky Broadcasting UK, CBC, and Fox International.
Mihori recently sat down with Daily Brief for an interview at PromaxBDA headquarters to discuss personal branding.
At Troika, brands thrive when they are crafted, marketed and stewarded in a unified fashion, so Daily Brief was curious how Mihori applies personal branding to her own career.
How would you describe your own personal brand? Are there things you did specifically and intentionally to develop it to this point?
My own personal brand was built over many years. For me, as a designer, when I started in the industry it was all about the work. So that really defined what my brand was becoming. But after a while when you leave design and go into strategy or other categories, it eventually becomes about your relationships. At this stage in my career it’s really about how you forge those relationships. It’s still about the work and building teams, but it’s really about relationships both externally and internally within the company.
[That means] a lot of work outside of work. Keeping connected with people and networking is a huge part of it. But it’s also about establishing a work ethic. For me, my personal brand is really tied into that. There’s just certain processes and ways that I work and ways that I connect with people that hopefully become part of my reputation and part of my personal brand.
How would say having a personal brand has helped you in your career?
The foundation for me is still in the ethics. It’s the discipline and the way you achieve the work or achieve the goal or solve the creative problem. Everybody works in different ways but for me part of the personal brand is making connections, making sure that artists feel safe when they work [with me] and actually create the creative, and clients as well.
Why is it important to discover and develop your personal brand as you grow into a leadership position?
It’s really about having a point of view. Everyone’s personal brand should represent what they believe in both within and outside of the industry. When I look at young executives or young artists coming up in the ranks, one of the questions I always have for them is “What are you interested in? What are you passionate about?” That’s also how you stay authentic to your personal brand.
What makes a personal brand unique? What elements of a personal brand do you think are most important to have?
You really have to not be afraid to stand for something even if it’s controversial.. All those things will automatically become authentic if it really comes from within, as opposed to trying to put on some kind of image or air to get a job or to get ahead.
What sorts of things do you recommend up-and-coming leaders do to build their personal brands?
When somebody’s building an online portfolio or blogging or trying to establish what their identity is, it’s again putting forth what you’re intimately passionately about. It doesn’t have to do necessarily with entertainment or sports or the industry, I think it’s important to put out there what you love to do. So it could be fine art, it could be photography, it could be something outside what your core competency or skill set is but it’s just more of an inside view on who that individual is which is extremely important.
For me, it’s really about understanding the people I work with, whether they’re writers or editors or designers or producers. I love to understand how they think and how they actually attack a problem. Part of it is knowing what this individual is passionate about outside work. That’s important and that’s part of the personal brand.
What tools are critical for business leaders to use to stand out in their personal brand exposure strategy?
For me, I’m a little bit more old school because I’m older! I think LinkedIn is still a really great way to put your professional presence out there. Personally, it’s really having a strong online portfolio if it’s really about the work. Obviously ,everyone’s loving to Snapchat and Instagram and even having Tumblr sites still, so having all of those sites built up as well.
But it’s really about putting the work first and foremost and out there in an innovative way. So that’s still the first place I go … I look at people’s reels and portfolios. I’m more interested in how the person is face-to-face as opposed to how they are out there in the ether.
What does your social media landscape look like? What is your persona online?
It’s all about the work. I keep the personal stuff to myself. So those who have been my friends or colleagues for a really long time know a little bit more about my personal life. But my LinkedIn persona and everything out there digitally is very curated. That’s on purpose, so I’m not as much an exhibitionist as maybe other people are. I’d rather talk to somebody in person or meet them in person or pick up a phone—and text message, too—but it’s more about having those more intimate kind of personal connections. They’ve actually taken me very far in business. That’s the way that I like to authentically communicate as opposed to putting a whole bunch of stuff out there. I think using social channels is great, it’s just not intrinsically who I am. I’m not tweeting and I’m not on Instagram and I’m not Snapchatting all the time but LinkedIn I pretty much keep up to date just because it’s a great way to connect and see what other people are doing very quickly.
How do you advise others on what their brands should look like in the public sphere?
I think it’s really about being passionate and if you are comfortable with putting slices of your personal life out there and other quadrants of your persona out there, that’s up to the individual. But as a creative, it’s always interesting to see what he or she is super passionate about. I think passion and curiosity are the two things that go the furthest as far as making an executive in my mind, and in the creative industries. Those two things intertwined will take you very far—that and a great work ethic.
How do you encourage mentees to develop a personal brand and maintain one’s authenticity?
I think if it’s your own work you’re touting it’s automatically going to be authentic,. I have a mentee at Hulu and what I tell him is that it’s about not just getting the latest and the greatest work out there on your site, but it’s also about sharing, again, what he’s personally passionate about and curious about in the world, and it can be completely outside of his Hulu universe.
But as a creative, what are you curious about? Are there things in the world that you would want to change? It’s never too big of a problem to solve, so how can we solve it together creatively?
Those are the bigger issue things are super interesting to me. That’s what I look for when I look for team members to bring into Troika—innovative thinkers, people who actually think outside of the box for real. That’s what I tell him and I think he’s starting to do it.
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