A Personal Image Is Not a Personal Brand, Get Authentic!

Dont fall for all the trash that is being sold in the name of Personal Branding.

Personal Branding is not just about Looking Good or some Social Media Gimmick, its about your unique combination of rational and emotional attributes – your strengths, skills, values and passions – and using these attributes to stand out and make an indelible mark on the organization & people you wish to influence.

All of us have a personal image. It’s a collection of qualities people identify with you: your sense of humor, your hairstyle, your clothing, your favorite food, your physical characteristics, your sense of dressing, your mannerism etc and so on.

Together, these qualities help people form a mental picture of you. A personal brand on the other hand is different; it’s about what people ‘Think – Feel – Perceive’ about you. It’s the words they use to describe you to others and it’s how you make others feel about you – just like any other corporate brand or a product brand.

Personal branding is far more than an ego-play or a look good factor. It is not just about creating a great image – a superficial image that doesn’t reflect your true individuality, your unique promise of value and personality will always be transparent and clearly be unauthentic. Creating a powerful personal brand goes much deeper than that. It’s what you stand for — your uniqueness, values, abilities and actions that others associate with you.

There are three important component parts to a person’s personal brand that we must bear in mind if we hope to create our own compelling personal brands.

First, your personal brand is your personal identity.

Second, it must stimulate a meaningful emotional response.

Third, your personal brands must be the embodiment of the specific unique value and quality for which you stand.

Personal Branding for Students

Personal Branding is a concept as crucial for Students as it is for Entrepreneurs or Working Professionals. With companies developing a variety of solutions to meet the needs of emerging markets, what remains challenging is the need to be constantly innovative, therefore today’s employers want more than just a polished resume, more than the right skill sets and knowledge base.

Students need to be aware of the existence of their brand and they need to strategically craft out a plan for their career path, as the competition is stiff and it’s only going to get tougher. Personal Branding will help you differentiate yourself from everyone else who has your qualification or who says they are in the same field as you.

It is needless to say that a student who is aware of his Personal Brand is highly employable and is en-route to a successful kick-start in his/her career. He/She is one who plays to his/her strength and passion and will always add value to the market.

As a student your immediate step is to cast aside all the usual descriptors that students and campus placement heads use to locate jobs for themselves and come up with innovative ideas to sell yourself and for that you will first need to build a holistic, powerful, personal brand.

All the students today need to ask themselves: What do I do that adds remarkable, measurable, distinguished, distinctive value? What do I do that I am most proud of? What have I accomplished that I can unabashedly brag about?

When you’ve done that, sit down and ask yourself one more question to define your brand: What do I want to be famous for? What’s the pitch for Me?

There’s literally no limit to the ways you can go about enhancing your profile and once you get started, you’ve got a track record and you are on your way to a successful career start!

Personal Branding for Entrepreneurs

For all Entrepreneurs and Small Business Owners, their Personal Brand is what becomes their Corporate Brand. Building and positioning your Personal Brand helps you position yourself strategically and grow your business.

People who aspire to become Entrepreneurs need to first uncover the secrets of building and communicating a charismatic personal brand and that will then greatly enhance the success of his/her business.

You have two choices; you can do things as you have always done it before or you can choose to change your Life and your Business by Discovering and Communicating your Personal Brand in the most effective manner possible.

We need to compare Brand You and Brand X — the approach the corporate biggies take to creating a brand. The standard model they use is feature-benefit: every feature they offer in their product or service yields an identifiable and distinguishable benefit for their customer or client. A dominant feature of Nordstrom department stores is the personalized service it lavishes on each and every customer. The customer benefit: a feeling of being accorded individualized attention — along with all of the choice of a large department store.

So we need to find out what is the “feature-benefit model” that the brand called You offers?

Personal Branding for Corporate

Tom Peters makes the following statement: “We are all CEO’s of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be Head Marketer for the Brand called You”.

Start right now: as of this moment you’re going to think of yourself differently! You’re not an ‘employee’ of XYZ Company. You don’t ‘belong to’ any company for life, and your chief affiliation isn’t to any particular ‘function’. You’re not defined by your job title and you’re not confined by your job description.

We all need to learn a lesson that’s true for anyone who’s interested in what it takes to stand out and prosper in the new world of work. Careers are not linear anymore. There are no more ladders. A career is now a checkerboard. Or even a maze. A career is a portfolio of projects that teach you new skills, gain you new expertise, develop new capabilities, grow your colleague set, and constantly reinvent you as a brand.

Craft your value proposition you offer to the company you work for, your unique differentiator, position yourself effectively and begin to set yourself up as both indispensable and highly desirable. By understanding who you are, what you offer and how you add value, you will be on the road to fast tracking your career.

Because if you do, you’ll not only reach out toward every opportunity, you’ll not only make a noteworthy contribution to your team’s success — you’ll also put yourself in a great bargaining position for next season’s free-agency market.

The good news is that everyone has a chance to stand out. Everyone has a chance to learn, improve, and build up their skills. Everyone has a chance to be a brand worthy of remark.

The brand is a promise of the value you’ll receive.

You’re hired, you report to work, you join a team — and you immediately start figuring out how to deliver value to the customer. Along the way, you learn stuff, develop your skills, hone your abilities, move from project to project. And if you’re really smart, you figure out how to distinguish yourself from all the other very smart people walking around with suits, high-powered laptops, and well-polished resumes. Along the way, if you’re really smart, you figure out what it takes to create a distinctive role for yourself — you create a message and a strategy to promote the brand called You.

Starting today you are a brand.

Why is Personal Branding Important

Personal Branding is arguably the Only Survival Strategy in today’s era! Personal Branding aims at helping you in your Career Success, whether you are looking at moving up the corporate ladder, more responsible/strategic roles to play, better pay package or a promotion, looking out for a job or looking at growing your Start-up. The benefits of managing your careers through Personal Branding are tremendous:

• Enhance your Self-awareness
• Clarity about your Goals
• Build Market Value
• Discover your ‘Uniqueness’
• Create Visibility and Presence
• Align your Passion, Expertise & Career Goals
• Differentiate Yourself
• Tools, Tips and Techniques to Network & Market Yourself effectively
• It helps you Regain Momentum in your Organization thereby Accelerating your Career Growth

Introduction to Personal Branding

What is Personal Branding?

Tom Peter’s the Guru of Personal Branding (also credited for having coined this term) says, “Big companies understand the importance of brands. Today, in the Age of the Individual, you have to be your own brand.”

A personal brand is your promise to the marketplace and the world. In this era of ubiquitous social media, everyone has a personal brand whether they acknowledge it or not, we are consciously or sub-consciously building and communicating our brand. Personal Branding is like an extension to Corporate Brand and since familiarity breeds indifference, we cannot afford to do nothing about our brands. Everyone makes a promise to the world, one does not have a choice of having or not having a personal brand. The real question is whether someone’s personal brand is powerful enough to be meaningful to the person and the marketplace. Like traditional corporate and product branding, you now have a choice in whether you wish to influence how the market views you, your experience, core competencies etc.

Personal Branding is all about Discovering your Uniqueness, your True Key Strengths, Crafting your Positioning Strategy and Communicating or Marketing it to the world. And since you already have a brand, if you do not brand yourself effectively, somebody else will do it for you.

An individual’s Personal Brand is his/her living truth and discovering this unchanging idea (your living truth) is a daunting task, since it requires painstaking introspection. Once this is done the idea has to be interpreted in your brand’s visual identity since communication is equally important. Therefore it becomes all the more critical for you to invest in yourselves and market yourselves effectively.

Also we have to look toward crafting an Authentic Personal Brand for ourselves since Transparency is an important element of personal branding. The most trusted mode of communication today is word of mouth and that makes authenticity all the more crucial. People are talking about you or your company behind your back and pretending you can’t hear them does nothing except make the criticism more strident and the laughter more condescending. There is only one way out: engage them in conversation by building a powerful authentic personal brand.

In simple words Personal Branding connects your passions, attributes and strengths with your value proposition, in a clear message that creates a singular recognizable identity that differentiates your unique promise of value and resonates with your target audience.

Like Corporate Branding, Personal Branding is an Ongoing Process. This is a very important (and often overlooked) aspect of your personal brand, that it’s NOT permanent. It’s not something that you can get and keep for life. You have to work hard to get a powerful personal brand. But that’s only the first step. You have to continue to work hard to keep that powerful personal brand and grow it.

Today it’s more about how you differentiate, rather than whether you differentiate. How you brand, rather than whether you brand. Therefore we all need to consciously and carefully work and build on our individual Personal Brands.

Like Tom Peters puts it, ‘the main chance is becoming a free agent in an economy of free agents’, we should constantly be looking to have the best season we can imagine in our field, looking to do our best work and chalk up a remarkable track record, and look to establish our own micro equivalent of the Nike swoosh!