My colleague Rosemary Davies-Janes of Miboso.com does a LOT of work in with clients on developing their authentic personal brand. Rosemary works with independent service professionals… sometimes referred to as “solo-preneurs” who need an “outside eye” to help them see what is unique about them and how that uniqueness translates into an authentic personal brand.
Dan Schawbel also works on personal branding, except he works with job seekers, because in today’s workforce, even wage slaves have to worry about developing a personal brand.
Both Rosemary and Dan agree… Personal branding is not all about you. Developing a personal brand is really an exercise in defining
- Your USP (unique selling proposition)
- How that USP translates into benefits for your customers or clients.
What gifts do you bring to the table? Once you’ve identified those, then the next step is to discover how to package those gifts into a product that other people, be they clients or employers, want to receive.
THAT is the basis of personal branding… packaging yourself to present to others.
I often see people going off track with personal branding. The most common mistake is believing that your brand is all about you. Mistaking your life purpose statement for your brand statement leads to a lot of public flaunting of personal values when you should be providing solid benefit statements that tell others what you can do for them. A brand is NOT a collection of adjectives that describe the aspects of yourself that you particularly like. Building a brand that YOU love that doesn’t offer clear benefits to your target market can lead you to describe yourself as, “The Master Mixer,” expertly blending business, entertainment, the arts, and education to create innovative new products and the next level of success—often in untapped or unimagined areas.” This is a “word salad” masquerading as a legitimate brand. And I’m sure that I’m not the only one left trying to figure out what the central message is! At worst, this approach to personal branding makes you seem overly self-involved, and at best, it’s straight out confusing!
Imagine a cell phone network that markets itself by listing ONLY the specifications of its technology platform. Without telling its targeted customers how those features translate into benefits for them, they won’t know why or how its service is superior to its competitors.
In branding you have to START with an understanding of what makes you unique and distinct (all about you). THEN you have to translate “how” you operate into the specific and powerful time, cost and hassle saving benefits desired by the customers you want to attract. This rule applies equally to service, product and personal brands. Why? Because if you don’t know why it’s exciting and easy for you to do what you do best, or conversely, why nothing could induce you to interact with certain people or to take on certain tasks, you can’t be at the top of your game.
You need to begin your personal brand building process by learning “all about you” in an objective way. MIBOSO’s authentic branding process balances your perceptions of yourself with others perceptions of you and reports from the best profiling tools available. This complied perspective gives you the solid foundation you need to be able to consciously position your brand as beneficial to others. By understanding who you are and then moving to what and whom you most enjoy serving, you will build a compelling and highly focused brand much faster and more effectively than you can by randomly patching together your positive experiences.