The concept of “branding yourself” was once used predominantly in the marketing industry. Today, however, with the growth and development of technology that enables anyone access to the Internet, personal branding is no longer reserved just for those who have the assets to pay for an expensive marking strategy. Anyone can use multiple media platforms to get their brand out into the marketplace: Twitter, Facebook, blogging, and LinkedIn.
If you were to ask 50 people to define personal branding, each would likely give you a different answer. For the purpose of this lesson, however, we will define branding yourself as promoting your unique identity. We equate self-promotion with branding because branding is what you are doing when you develop your personal assets, personality, and passion through online and in-person marketing.
With branding, you promote yourself to attract even more opportunities to talk about yourself to others. You find opportunities to tell your story, give your pitch, and let people see what makes you special. The two things that you will need to be especially passionate about are who you are and the work you do. You must build a personal brand that evokes feelings of well-established brands such as Starbucks, McDonalds, Facebook, and Google.
Knowing yourself helps you to create your personal brand, to be able to state what sets you apart from others, and to identify what gives you motivation and drive. It will provide you with the confidence to get out there and sell yourself to the industry, and, specifically, to the positions that you aspire to. This confidence will spring from your competency about your unique product (you). When you are confident in your skills and assets, others will feel more confident about selecting you for that position.
Defining your brand is the first step in developing a sales and marketing plan for your defining qualities. You may be quick to say that you dislike selling-or even the idea of it-but we all have learned to sell from an early age. As children we begin by selling our parents on things we want, such as staying up late, or going to a friend’s house for the weekend, or the destination for our next family vacation.
Most buying decisions are based on trust and confidence in the product the consumer is buying, feelings that often inspire a sense of connection with a person or service. Often, the trusted relationship is more important than the product’s performance itself, and brands have become very powerful-especially with the changes in our technological environment. We are bombarded with branded advertisements. It is commonly known by marketing experts that consumers are willing to pay up to 12 percent more for a brand that they feel they can trust and know than a new brand on the market.
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