Branding The Product: You

       

     ‘People make an opinion about you in the first 7 minutes they meet you’

The word branding in this situation needs more emphasis to be laid on it, what do you carry about as your name, sex, member of an organization and what you have? Branding is just not for companies, Nollywood celebrities, politicians or highly paid athletes. People in all works of life are starting to use self-branding to get ahead in the game of life. The simple factor that often explains the difference between a professional who is competent and doing well and one who earns a significant income and generates lots of business is self-branding, branding the product – you.

Branding the product – you (self – branding) is a strong personal identity based on a clear perception about what you stand for, what sets you apart from others and the added value you bring to a job; the situation of achieving your vision. Your self-brand is the sum total of other peoples’ feelings about your attributes and capacities, how you perform, even their perceptions about what you are worth.

To Brand or Not To Brand?

Many people think if they do a good job, their career will go on fine. But no matter how secure your position seems to be, you are in a competition with more people than you think – personality competition. To some people, branding may seem manipulative or phony. They think branding is being pompous and say that they are not good at marketing themselves.

If you don’t brand yourself others will. The fact of the matter is you are giving people the power to brand you if you do not do it yourself. Self-brands are created not born. Branding is mainly a process of analyzing a product in relationship to a market figuring out how to maximize the brand’s potential. Branding is creating an asset out of something. It is a matter of satisfying a market need in a different manner and figuring out a plan of action – the marketing plan to build awareness and trial of the brand.

Self-Branding Mindset

Self-branding means seeing yourself as a marketer would look at a product that he/she wants to make a winning brand. You don’t think of yourself as an employee even if you work for a boss. You think of yourself as working for yourself, marketing the brand you.

The first thing a marketer does is analyze the market and the product to understand what opportunities are, what the threats are. What are the current conditions? What are the assumptions about the future? What problems need to be solved? What needs are not being met?

Act like the marketer of the product – You

In self-branding, after analyzing the market, you do a self-audit (SWOT analysis). What are my strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats? How does my brand compare with the people I am competing with?

You focus on key attributes and resources that differentiate you- Skills, abilities, even personality traits you have that are a solution to a market need. Then you adopt what Theodore Levitt called ‘the marketing imagination’. You build a self-brand identity that is different, relevant and adds value.

Plan to Dazzle

Write out a marketing plan. It is important to set personal brand goals with a specific time frame and plan of action for achieving these goals. Just like a marketer would, you write down marketing activities to achieve your goals. Of course, you execute the marketing plan. You can’t get to where you want to go unless you plan it and then do it.

Characteristic of a strong personal brand

1. Strong personal brands are Distinctive

Your brand starts to become strong when you decide what you believe in and then commit yourself to acting on those beliefs.  Making a commitment means doing what you said you would do despite the obstacles. As your beliefs are not always shared by another, standing up for and holding to them is often a courageous act, and courage of this kind is none too common in our world. That by definition is distinctive.

To truly understand what it means to be distinctive is to learn that it implies much more than just being different. Brand building is not image-building.  It is not selling you to someone else. It results from understanding the needs of others, wanting to meet those needs, and being able to do so while staying true to your values. Your values affect not only what you think and feel but also how you behave. In fact, how you act on your values distinguishes you from the crowd. As people observe your actions, they make Judgments about why you do what you do. Those Judgments then become the perception of you they carry around with them. The more distinctive the action may seem the better defined your brand becomes for them. In other words, personal brand connect and grow strong when they focus on meeting the needs of others without saucing the value on which they are based.

It cannot be over emphasized that a strong personal brand is not some kind of veneer – something painted on to present a more pleasing appearance. It is a reflection of those ideas and values that are distinctively you. This is the only substance upon which a truly lasting relationship can be built. The lesson:

‘Your personal brand is based on your values not the other way round’

2.       Strong Personal Brands Are Relevant

Being distinctive is not the only thing that matters to someone else. What you stand for needs to be relevant to them. Relevance begins when a person believes that you understand and care about what’s important to them. It gains strength every time you demonstrate that what is important to them is important to you. The synergistic effort of being both distinctive and relevant is what ignites the power of a personal brand.

Relevance is often a function of circumstance. Parents are naturally relevant to their children, for they are the caregivers and protectors of those children. The relevance of one spouse to another extends far beyond the bonds of a marriage contract: the actual relevance occurs when both people in marriage are concerned about and committed to each other’s well-being.

 

Relevance is what distinguishes a friend from an acquaintance. A worker may be only relevant to the degree that what they do affects what you do, whereas a mentor’s support and activities in your career and future makes the relationship far more valued and lasting than an ordinary relationship with a fellow employee. Your relevance to a client or customer is determined not only by your product or services but by how it (and you) can proficiently solve their problems and meet their needs. The more relevance you demonstrate, the stronger your brand become to them. That is why strong brands always attract attention: they attract attention from those who find them the most relevant.

       

Building relevance involves a skill we call “thinking in reverse”. If you want to be considered valuable to others, you must move out of your world into theirs. Your first concern is to determine their needs and interest. Then you have to connect those needs and interests to your own personal strengths and abilities. 

That means relevance is a process. It starts with questions, what do they want? What do they need? What do they value? What do they expect? When you have a sense of someone else’s needs and their frame of reference, that information allows you to guide your action in ways that will make you relevant.

The lesson;

“Relevance is something we earn by the importance others place on what we do for them and by their judgment of how well we do it”  

3.       Strong Personal Brands Are Consistent

The third component in building a strong brand is consistency – doing things that are both distinctive and relevant, and doing them again and again. Consistency is a hallmark of all strong brands. As a brand, you only get credit (acknowledgement) acceptance, or recognition by others) for what you do consistently. Consistent behaviours define your brand more clearly and concisely than the most polished and practiced patter.

In a relationship, consistency is established by dependability of behaviour, over time, people learn that they can trust you if they experience consistent trustworthy behaviours. In the absence of personal experience, they may decide to trust you because of what they have learned of your track record from others. Your previous actions – not your intentions – lead them to believe that you can be counted on to behave in a similar way again and every time you behave the way they expect, you reinforce the strength of your brand with them. Trust grows.

Conversely, the quickest way to diminish and unlimitedly destroy someone’s trust is to become inconsistent. No matter how high the highs may have been, roller- coaster behaviour will work against the long-term prospects of any relationship.

The lesson;

“Consistency is the hallmark of all strong brands. Inconsistency weakens brands and suspends belief”

For the purpose of this analysis, the ‘right way’ to go about building a strong personal brand is to make sure your brand resonates and is relevant, in the most distinctive way possible, for those people with whom you want to build strong relationship, on a long- term basis.

Building a strong personal brand takes courage. The way to make a distinctive, enduring, positive impression on someone else is to ensure that who you are, what you say you are, and what that person experience from you are the same, time and time again.

To see that in greater define we are going to explore a three – dimensional model for understanding how people perceive your brand, which are your personal brand dimensions.

to be continued.........