Guest Post By Catherine Kaputa
You may be skeptical about branding. After all, it should be about brains and getting the job done, right?
In a perfect world, yes, but we’re not in a perfect world. The reality is that branding affects us all, more than we’d like to acknowledge.
Personal branding is particularly important in a down economy. We all know smart, talented, hardworking people who have been laid off or who are worried that they will be. Personal branding can make the difference between someone who is on the list to be let go and someone who is on the list to stay, and best of all, the ones on the list to lead the company turnaround. So if you don’t take part, you could be left behind. And you won’t be using tactics your colleagues and competitors are using.
To be successful in business, you need to have a distinct brand, or career identity, so that you can stand out from the crowd. You want your brand to stand for something that’s different, that’s relevant, and brings value. Self-branding means being able to articulate a simple, clear expression of who you are, doing it consistently, and delivering on it again and again, so that when people think of X, they think of you. Or when people think of you, they think of X.
Look at President Obama. His personal branding skills, I believe, are the single most important reason he is the President of the United States today. Obama built his brand around the idea of “change” and it turned out to be a very compelling brand identity during the 2008 presidential election. And he “packaged” his brand idea with a strong visual identity and a phenomenal verbal identity – an eloquent message superbly delivered. And he put together a game plan for success using his grass-roots organizing skills to defeat more well-known, experienced competitors.
Branding can help you move up in your career, and it’s never more important than when you are in transition looking for a job, particularly in the job market we face with many people competing for one job. And today, professionals have so many tools at their disposal to communicate their brands, such as blogs, Twitter, and profiles on social networking sites like LinkedIn.
The following questions will help you find out if you need to develop a stronger personal brand.
• Can you explain your big idea clearly in a couple of sentences, so that people know what’s different, relevant, and special about you?
• If people were to Google your name, would they find you and discover high-quality information about you and your accomplishments?
• Can you clearly define your key target markets and the best way to market yourself to them?
• Do you have a visual identity that is appealing to your target markets, consistent with your personal brand, and different from others?
• Do your personality and your leadership style engage others?
If you answered No to any of the above questions, you have more work to do. Here are eight tips for creating a stronger personal brand.
Keep your brand focused. As a brand maven once said to me, “There is no ‘and’ in brand.” The more specifically you define who you are and what you do, the better your chance of selling yourself will be. It’s counter-intuitive because so many people think if they define themselves broadly, they’ll have more options. But the opposite occurs. If you come across as a Jack or Jill of All Trades, you will confuse people. People will wonder how good you are at any one thing if you are good at so many.
Make your brand different. Being like everyone else will stunt your success. Ask yourself, “What’s different, relevant, and special about me?” When communicating your uniqueness to others, use analogies, such as “I’m a cross between X and Y” or “X on steroids.” Look at who you are, and then accentuate your difference. In the branding world, analogy is often used as a device to quickly communicate an idea. (In my book, U R a Brand! there are a series of exercises you can do to figure out what makes you special and ways to differentiate your brand.) Obama did this to great effect during the presidential campaign. When everyone else was emphasizing experience, he made “change” his brand. Find the “white space” – a brand position that you can own that is not associated with someone else.
When others zig, you should zag. You’ll want to develop your own game plan for success – your own career path, visibility strategy, and credentials. Continuing the Obama analogy, the politicians he was competing against took a traditional fundraising approach with dinners and letter appeals. So Obama zagged. He used the internet as a tool and concentrated on small donations. The vast majority of Obama’s campaign contributions came from small individual contributors who sent in checks of $20, $50, and $100. Yet Obama was able to build the largest campaign war chest ever.
Create a memorable verbal identity. Brands try to build a compelling brand story for their brands through commercials, ad taglines, sound bites, and web messages. Your verbal identity can help your brand, too. One of the hottest ideas in business today is using “story” to bring a company mission, project, or accomplishment to life. Stories have been powerful for centuries because they are a memorable way to convey complex ideas. Work on your communication skills so you are known for your adroit business stories and interesting presentations that people remember long after the PowerPoint slides end. Also, master the “elevator speech,” a thirty-second personal commercial you can use in networking and pitching yourself for a job or stretch assignment.
Create a powerful visual identity. In many ways, women have an advantage here; they have many more “imaging tools” to work with, including hair, makeup, clothes, shoes, accessories, jewelry, and colors. (See my new book, The Female Brand). But men have the size advantage, and that gives them a more authoritative image studies show. Like it or not, you are a package – just like a product on a shelf. Spend time thinking about how to make your image more powerful and distinct, whether it’s by working on your posture, or by updating your clothes.
Establish powerful alliances. The people, projects, causes, and organizations with whom you are affiliated help define who you are. Having worked at certain companies because they are iconic brands gives your brand an aura. You’ll also have fairy dust sprinkled on you if you are a technologist and you graduated from a premier school in technology like Stanford, MIT, or CalTech. Or if you’re a business school graduate of Harvard or Wharton. But you can always add brand alliances throughout your life. Get involved with alumni, community, professional, and/or philanthropic organizations that align with your personal brand and that will help you network.
Take charge of your brand. Just as every brand manager assesses his brand against competitors every year to make sure that the brand is relevant and up-to-date, your personal brand needs periodic upkeep, too. What worked last year may work this year, but then again, it may not. The world is dynamic and you want to make sure that you are aware of new opportunities as well as the new threats that are on the scene. Being complacent is the death knell for any brand. If your capabilities or accomplishments seem out of step with the current marketplace and your competitors, it may be time to revisit, reinvent, and update your brand.
Define and prioritize your target markets. Brand managers think in terms of markets. If you work in a company, your boss is your key target market, followed by other senior executives. Of course, you have the most control over your own brand. But if you work in a company, your boss and other key executives are the people who have tremendous power over your brand because they decide whether to promote you, how much to pay you, or whether to send you to Siberia. Your secondary target market will likely include colleagues, clients, your network, and your staff. Their perception of you will also play an important role in your success. Many a talented executive’s career has been stalled by bad buzz. One executive I worked with – we’ll call her “Alex” – was brilliant but short on team and people skills. Later when a project blew up, few people had anything nice to say and she eventually had to leave the company.
When you start thinking of yourself as a brand, you discover how powerful it can be. Rather than being viewed generically as one of the worker bees, you’ll be someone who stands for something distinct and desirable – a brand. In today’s over-communicated society, the brands that stand for something relevant and build positive perceptions are the ones that succeed.
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Catherine Kaputa is a brand strategist, speaker, and the founder of SelfBrand LLC (www.selfbrand.com), a NYC-based personal branding firm. Her newest book is The Female Brand: Using the Female Mindset to Succeed in Business (Davies-Black, 2009, www.femalebrand.com). She is the author of U R a Brand, How Smart People Brand Themselves for Business Success, winner of the Ben Franklin award for Best Career Book, 2007.
