Brand Me

Whether you’re in the market for a new role or you want to secure your current position by impressing the boss, you’ll need to concentrate on your ‘personal brand’. How you are perceived by employers, both existing and prospective, can have a significant impact on your future.

As well as producing our own guide to Your personal brand, we asked Charlie Wagstaff, Managing Director for Criticaleye, The Network of Leaders, to explain how and why you should be looking at your personal brand in the current climate.

Brands

Avoiding exposure to brands, and the values and messages behind them, is near nigh impossible. As soon as we get up in the morning, we use a certain make of toothpaste, or eat a particular cereal, items which, because of clever marketing and branding, exude a number of messages about our preferences and the lifestyle that we aspire to. Directly or indirectly, the association between the products, and the brand values that they contain, will have influenced our choice in using them.

What experiences, skills and beliefs do you have that make you who you are?

In the business world, we can see for ourselves how strong brands aid the recognition and success of an organisation. They engage us emotionally with stories and messages that we either relate or aspire to. Either way we want to buy in and be part of that brand. Apple is a good example; an exciting and innovative company at the forefront of design and technology which consumers want to be seen with. What we don’t see is how meticulously organisations with strong brands shape and develop their brand name, ensuring that everything they do feeds back into the core values and perceptions people have about their products or services.

So, with this in mind, the question we should all be asking, and especially in the current climate, is how can we tap into the power of the brand? How can we step back, look at our own skills and personality traits and present them in the same way as a premium brand product? In a recruitment market where we need to stand out from the crowd, how can we take the ‘Apple approach’ with our own profile?

Personal brand

To begin the process of personal branding, you need to identify your key personality traits. What experiences, skills and beliefs do you have that make you who you are?

There are a few fundamental questions you need to ask yourself:

• What aspects of my life or career set me apart from my peers?
• What are my unique selling points as an individual?
• What am I passionate about and how can I harness that energy and represent it positively to an external audience?

It is not unusual that by completing this analysis, you’ll find that you are in a role for which you are not entirely suited.  In many cases though, it is an externally imposed event, such as redundancy, which forces us to take stock and undertake a radical review.  While these shocks can be difficult and inconvenient, they enable us to redirect our careers and reassess our priorities, both of which contribute to understanding our personal brand.

When you’ve identified what your key qualities are, it is time to start developing them. It’s important at this stage to adopt a marketing approach. Keep in mind that there are likely to be many others with similar skills and experiences so focus on building messages around the core qualities that define your personal brand. From the list of experiences and skills already identified, draw out around five overarching personal qualities or values. Underneath these core values, list related experiences, personal and professional, to add substance to the key messages of your brand.

It can be a difficult process, but to develop a personal brand you need to step outside yourself, take a holistic view of your career, and indeed personal life, to date. Essentially, you need to view yourself as a product.

Understand achievements

On reaching a point in your career where you are leading teams, or even an organisation, identifying the successes which are most significant to you can be difficult. One way of categorising your achievements, both personal and professional, is to view them as ‘Gold’, ‘Silver’ and ‘Bronze’ medals. Like last year’s returned UK Olympic athletes who wear their medals as recognition of their skill and endeavour, you should carry your successes around with you, and use them as basis for your personal brand.

Again, this takes us back to the core values, or characteristics, identified during the process of developing the personal brand. The ‘Gold Medal’ achievements will be intrinsic to the type of person you are and should, therefore, be right at the core of your personal brand. It is important to keep these accomplishments front of mind at all times if you are going to build a strong brand identity. ‘Silver’ and ‘Bronze Medal’ achievements will also have played a role in forming the skills and passions which contribute to your personal brand, but these may be smaller, less significant incidents.

To help you identify your core qualities and achievements, try answering these questions:

• What distinguishes me from my colleagues/peers?
• When am I most productive and in what environment?
• Am I at my best when leading or being part of a team?
• What are my motivation drivers?
• Am I a conformist or do I prefer to challenge?
• Where do I want to be in ten years time and what skills do I need to get me there?

It is crucial that you regularly revisit your achievements and keep your “medal collection” up to date. Clearly, as careers progress you will build upon your successes and these should strengthen your personal brand. It is a good exercise to step back and reassess your major achievements at least once a year, so that the brand reflects recent successes, especially if these support your core values.

Developing and evolving personal brands

Personal branding is not just about success in the present. In the current climate, it is not enough to simply understand your achievements and hope this will be enough to secure future success. The next step in the branding process is to identify what you want to achieve in the future and take action in promoting and evolving your brand to achieve these ambitions. In other words, knowing where you want to be in ten years time has a crucial role to play in defining what your personal brand will look like now.

step back and reassess your major achievements at least once a year

In an environment which is set to become even more competitive as the recession takes hold, you need to actively push your personal brand if you want to be successful in the long-term. When times are tough, it is easy to get bogged down in the short-term as a survival mentality sets in. And while it is, of course, necessary to maintain focus during the crisis, like any economic cycle, there will, eventually, be an upturn. Ensure you are ready to capitalise on the personal and career opportunities this will bring and having a strong personal brand in place will help you do this.

For individual success, make sure you are able to define and communicate your achievements effectively and tell a story that is real and practical. Take action now, so that you are building a strong and sustainable brand in the long term.

Download a copy of the guide here Your personal brand: making yourself atractive to employers

(A version of this article first appeared in Connections, May 2009)