Preparation
Building your own personal brand
Everyone needs position their professional identity so that they are differentiated from other candidates.
Personal branding is the process whereby people and their careers are marketed as a branded product. The personal branding concept suggests that success comes from self-packaging. Like it or not, your personal brand defines who you are in the eyes of the external world.
Dan Schawbel1 states that personal branding consists of an individual’s personality, appearance, competencies and differentiation. These elements need to be woven into a concise and coherent narrative, which is then communicated to a target audience.
It is common to divide branding into tangible and intangible.
Tangible branding involves associating an individual’s name with some specific advantage that they are presumed to offer, while intangible branding involves creating a more general positive feeling about them.
The key to your professional image is to consider what your core message is, to whom you are propositioning it and how this is going to happen.
Our materials provide a wide variety of examples of how, where and when to do this so that you don’t miss an opportunity.
1. Dan Schawbel, Personal Branding Expert as noted by Fast Company Magazine, August 1, 2007.