Category: Personal Branding

The Quest for Authenticity

We often hear or read personal branding advocates exhorting us to “be authentic.” I’m fine with that- after all, what is the alternative? To be unauthentic, a fraud, a phony? Given a choice, being authentic aligns better with my personal values and I suspect will be better for the health of my personal brand. Convincing us of the importance of authenticity is one thing; understanding the attributes that comprise your brand’s authenticity is a more challenging endeavor.

What Authenticity Means

How do you know when you have found the purpose that drives your personal brand? You know purpose when you are able to observe consistent behaviors and actions in your interactions with others. That consistency also plays out in terms of being the same person across different life contexts- home, school, work, social situations- you cannot nor need  not turn your brand on and off  depending on your environment. This state of consistency is authenticity, which has been described as a “moral inner voice”  that develops from our experiences. Authenticity is an admired characteristic in corporate brands and personal brands because when we encounter authentic brands we can be assured that “what we see is what we get.” An authentic brand does not hide its true character behind mission statements or slogans; actions follow beliefs.

Finding Your Authenticity

So, what does it really mean to be authentic? How do you develop that moral inner voice to align daily performance with your principles? Some personal branding advocates mistakenly equate authenticity with “being ourselves.” That works as long as who you are is who you want to be! In contrast, Seth Godin believes authenticity is based on doing what you promise, not “being who you are.” Thus, we can shape our authenticity by what we promise and how we follow through on our promises. Being who you are suggests a certain level of helplessness or inability to control authenticity, which  is not the case. Marc Ecko, the pharmacy school dropout turned fashion entrepreneur, has built a billion dollar business in part through a focus on brand authenticity. Ecko has three criteria for assessing the authenticity of his personal brand:
  1. How truthful am I to myself and others
  2. The emotional impact that can be made on others through actions
  3. How flexible I am to change.
Don’t subscribe to the notion that your brand authenticity is predetermined based on “you being you.” You have a voice in defining the authentic you. It requires deliberate thought to ask questions like those raised by Marc Ecko and make promises on professional and personal levels. It also requires actions to answer the questions and follow through on the promises.
What does being authentic mean to you when it comes to personal branding? Share your take on authenticity.

What is Your Why?

There is no shortage of advice on how to build a personal brand. Many experts tout the importance of a communication platform and using it to build a community and nurture relationships. But, if your focus on branding begins there, you have made the same mistake many product brands commit. Great brands are just that because they know something about themselves that permeates everything they believe, feel, say, and do. They understand their purpose and are able to articulate it throughout their business operations.
On a personal level, if you cannot state your purpose, how can you build a meaningful brand? It would be like taking a car trip from Florida to California without a map. You may get there eventually, but it would be a trip full of uncertainty and be less meaningful than if you had a clearly mapped journey.
The Purpose of Purpose
Purpose defines your core, the foundation of all that you believe, feel, and do. Values are the guiding force of your core. They serve as your belief system and operating principles that influence choices made, attitudes held, and actions taken. Widely admired corporate brands tend to have very distinct values that are not only communicated through mission statements and marketing campaigns, but they affect all business decisions made. An example of a brand heavily influenced by its values is Patagonia, known for its high quality outdoor clothing and gear. Patagonia’s mission statement leaves little doubt about the company’s values:
Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.
The company’s values reflect the personal values of the band of climbers who founded Patagonia. That reflection extends to seemingly routine business decisions about lighting systems for stores and dyes used in clothing, with concern about the environmental impact of these and other practices factoring into how the company is run.
Answer the Unasked Question
Your personal brand should be built on a core foundation of values just like Patagonia. Interestingly, many brands do not follow this guideline. Business and leadership expert Simon Sinek suggests that brands are comprised of the answers to three questions:
1.      Why – What is our purpose?
2.      How – What is our point of difference or capabilities that create value?
3.      What – Can you state the product category or industry in which you compete?
Sinek maintains that many brands can easily answer the “what” and “how” questions, but they are less clear on the answer to the “why” question. Thus, these brands are essentially working backwards; they go through the motions to compete but are unclear as to the purpose of their existence.
Answer the “why” question first so that your values and beliefs can rightfully exert their influence on how your position yourself to add value in your chosen field as well as what you do to create value in an industry or category. And, it will bring clarity to how you should proceed to follow the abundant advice on how to communicate and promote your personal brand.

Your Story, Your Brand


I am a strong advocate of personal branding. As a college professor who serves students in their junior and senior years of business school, I introduce personal branding concepts in my classes. Students are encouraged to manage their professional careers using marketing principles learned in the classroom. It is a challenge for many people, especially if you are at the outset of your career, to embrace personal branding. Uncertainties about what to do or say as well as doubts of how one can add value for others are common obstacles to launching a personal brand. 

How to Craft Your Personal Brand Story
One approach for simplifying the task of creating a personal brand is to build it around stories. This idea is not a suggestion to create fictional escapades but rather stories about events and people in your life that have shaped your values and purpose. Author Amber Mac gives three tips for how to base your personal brand on stories:
1. Discover Your Story – What are things that have happened to you that people would find interesting and create common ground?
2. Re-write Your Story – Craft a collection of “short stories” into your brand story. Stories do not replace credentials like education or skills, but they do add personality to your brand and can increase your brand’s appeal. 
3. Share Your Story – It is communicated via your social networking pages, oral presentations, and personal interactions. Remember that the purpose is not to brag about you but to develop connections with other people.

Tell to Sell
Keep this in mind: stories are more interesting than facts, bullet point lists, and résumés. Think about brands you like and admire most- they probably have stories worth telling. The beauty of a storytelling approach to personal branding is that everyone has stories to share. Let your stories shape your brand.

Fast Company – “Mastering the Uncomfortable Art of Personal Branding”

Note: This article first appeared on the Marketing DR blog on March 9, 2012

Embrace Rejection to Build Your Personal Brand

No, the headline does not contain a typo- it was not supposed to read “brace yourself for rejection.” Yes, embrace rejection as a stepping stone for development of your personal brand. It is the “make lemonade from lemons” directive that we often hear but can find hard to follow. Rejection hurts, it makes us angry, and it can be difficult to say “thank you- I am going to learn from this.” But, that is exactly the mindset we must adopt.

You Will Be Rejected
Rejection is a given occurrence in any pursuit. In the book Choose Yourself, James Altucher discusses how rejection will find you… and that is normal. Whether it is trying to find a publisher for a book, line up a buyer for a business, or convince someone to hire you, rejection is an outcome to be expected- often happening many times over. The key, according to Altucher, is how you respond when you are rejected (notice that is “when” and not “if”). Your response may make the difference between rejection winning out and you persevering.

Using Rejection to Your Advantage
When you experience rejection, accept it is part of life and resolve to use it to your benefit. Three ways you can make rejection be a matter of turning lemons into lemonade are:

  1. Improve – Rejection can trigger external attribution for why you did not meet your goal. Instead of pointing to other people or factors, look at the person in the mirror. James Altucher says to ask yourself what are 10 things you can do to improve. Let rejection make you stronger.
  2. Ask for Advice – People around you including friends, teachers, and mentors can help by giving you feedback on how you can become stronger at whatever it is you are trying to accomplish. If you apply for an internship or job and did not get an offer following an interview, ask the interviewer if he or she can provide feedback on why you were not selected and how you can improve (going back to #1).
  3. Dance with Failure – Rejection may not be as detrimental to our future as our reaction to it. When you are rejected, do you slam yourself for inadequacies? Blame those idiots that did not choose you? Or, do you look at these disappointments as opportunities to learn and get better? I won’t go so far as to say that failure is your friend, but given that it will cross paths with you why not learn to co-exist with it and use it to better position yourself for future opportunities?
You have probably heard stories about successful people overcoming rejection. Colonel Harlan Sanders could not find any takers for his fried chicken, so he started KFC. Fred Smith got a C on a paper at Yale University in which he proposed a business that would use aircraft to deliver packages overnight (he later founded FedEx). Likewise, whether you are at the outset of your professional career or striving to move ahead, you are almost certain to be rejected. Accept it, deal with it, and use rejection to move you toward your career goals. The stories of how you overcome rejection can be powerful in defining your personal brand.

Note: This post was adapted from a post appearing on the Sports Biz U blog on September 19, 2013.

Avoid the Phrase that Can Harm Your Personal Brand

I believe LinkedIn is a valuable networking platform for professionals. It expands our connectivity by removing geographic barriers to interacting with other people who have shared interests. LinkedIn expands the reach of our personal brands, increasing exposure in the marketplace and potentially leading to new opportunities. All of the benefits I have mentioned about LinkedIn are contingent on one thing: Applying common sense networking principles. Unfortunately, not everyone uses their common sense, and they fail to realize the full potential LinkedIn holds as a connector of people.

What not to Say
How do people fail with LinkedIn? The number one mistake can be summed up in the following phrase:

 
I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.
 
Yuck! This phrase, the default networking language LinkedIn has crafted for its users, is disastrous for your personal brand when it is used as a stand-alone invitation to connect with someone. Yes, it seems innocent enough, and the statement does specify what you want. But, this “pick up line” can be interpreted in other ways:
  • You are lazy – It is too much trouble for you to write a personalized note explaining why you want to connect
  • You want something – The other person has no idea about your motives for reaching out because you have given no explanation for the invitation connection.
  • You are not really interested in networking – Without showing some interest and effort, you seem to be going through the motions of networking.
The only thing worse than getting this impersonal LinkedIn connection request is getting it from this person:
Do you recognize him or her? Worse yet, is this you? I know you are much better looking than this silhouette. I don’t want to network with graphics, I want to network with real people!
Make it Personal
When reaching out to someone with a connection request on LinkedIn, approach it as you would a face-to-face encounter. Among the critical elements of a connection request are:
  • Introduce yourself
  • State a common interest or common connections
  • Briefly explain why you wish to connect
Let’s face it, you would not initiate communication with someone you do not know in the following ways:
  • Hi, I’m Sharon- will you hire me?
  • This is Joe here- will you marry me?
  • My name is Steve- can you lend me $10,000?
A very simple definition of networking is “building good relationships.” Commit to using LinkedIn as a channel to do just that. In order to build relationships, focus on communication quality. Make your interactions personal and show genuine interest in others. Online networking might be relatively new, but it is built on timeless principles of human relationships. Take an interest in others, make your personal brand personal, and enjoy the process of building good relationships.

 

Position for the Right Kind of Security

As another academic year begins for college students across the country (including beginning of the fall semester at my university this week), my thoughts are focused in two directions. One direction is to be expected- the here and now- meeting classes for the first time and orienting students to the courses they will be studying this semester. At the same time, I am looking in another direction: Forward. The here and now is important, but that is not why students are pursuing a college degree. They are laying the foundation for their future. It is my responsibility to not only impart subject matter expertise, but I must guide and mentor students to transition from being marketing students to marketing professionals. My task to complete the latter was clarified recently in a blog post by executive career consultant Richard Kirby.

Strive for Positive Security
The career model that my generation subscribed to when in college was to strive to land a job at a large corporation, move up the ladder, and stay there indefinitely. In the past 15 years, this model has imploded through downsizing, increased appeal of working for start-ups, and negative connotations attached to being “corporate.” As Richard Kirby says, job security, or the idea of finding long term employment with one organization, has been fading in America for several years. Kirby suggests that this trend calls for workers to rethink the approach to their careers, shifting from “job security” to “employment security.” I could not agree more. While the notion of security has appeal to virtually all of us, job security can be perceived negatively. “Maintaining status quo,” “avoiding risk,” and “path of least resistance” could be associations people hold with staying put at a single employer. The inference is that if we crave job security, we could miss out on growth opportunities.

What is Employment Security?
In contrast to job security, employment security does not define success as being able to keep a job at the same employer. In today’s environment in which professionals may be contractors, “free agents” moving from one project to another, expecting to work long term for the same employer can be unrealistic. Thus, the mindset and skill set of workers must adapt to the fact that we may not work at the same company forever, but the value we offer is so great that we will be working for someone… if not ourselves. Richard Kirby identifies two skills in particular that are vital in the age of employment security: 1) commitment to build industry and professional knowledge and 2) self-marketing and self-selling skills. No one else is going to give these to us, not even employers that still invest in employee training and development.

In today’s “free agent nation,” workers should be loyal to their personal brands first and foremost. I am not suggesting forget about loyalty to employer, but blind loyalty can be hazardous to one’s career trajectory. When employment security is the positioning basis for your personal brand, job security is more likely to be an option if desired. But, when winds of change lead to the end of one job, a personal brand built on marketable skills and communicated to the marketplace will serve you well to provide the security that is a fundamental motivation in our lives.

Vulnerability is a Desirable Brand Trait

An important aspect of brand management is proactively monitoring image and reputation. How a brand is perceived by others is influential in determining its standing in the marketplace. Whether a product brand or personal brand, meticulously overseeing for what is communicated about our brand is vital to maintaining trust with others… or is it?

Why Vulnerability is a Desired Trait
I would have argued strenuously in favor of obsessively managing a brand to “protect” it until hearing a statement in a podcast that called this belief into question. Best-selling author Ken Blanchard was interviewed on Dave Ramsey’s EntreLeadership podcast about his latest book, Trust Works! The book teaches how to assess the level of trust others have in you as well as discussing “trust busters” that diminish a leader’s effectiveness. The idea that brand management is about striving for perfection is debunked by a statement Blanchard made about how others perceive leaders:

“People admire your skills but love your vulnerability.” 

This statement resonated with me. I think of branding as being “always on”- our guard is up to minimize chances of something being said or done to harm our brand. Yet, the reality is we cannot prevent missteps or mistakes- we are humans, not machines. Vulnerability is a state in which we all are in from time to time; it makes you no less effective as a leader if vulnerabilities are revealed. In fact, your brand can benefit when you reveal traits with which others can relate.

Vulnerability is Part of Your Brand Story
Stories bring out unique qualities and help paint the picture that is your brand. Revealing vulnerabilities and your efforts for dealing with them does not portray an image of weakness. Instead it conveys authenticity. We work hard to build credibility by developing expertise and building trust. But, underneath all of our brand building efforts remains a person with weaknesses. We don’t have all the answers; in fact, we are rarely the smartest person in the room. Share your humanness rather than obsessing with control in a futile attempt to project a perfect identity that does not exist.

Dealing with and overcoming vulnerability can be a captivating brand story, and one that is more credible than a facade of perfection.

Why Good Grammar is Important to Your Personal Brand

I was curious what I was writing about this time last year, so I went back through my posts. Here is a post from July 29, 2012 on the importance of good grammar. It could have been written five years ago or fifteen years from now and still be very relevant. 

A blog post with a provocative title caught my eye recently. A Harvard Business Review post by Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit and founder of Dozuki, was titled “I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar Here’s Why.” Wiens uses a grammar test to screen potential employees at his companies. Writing is central to effective performance at both firms – Wiens describes iFixit as “the world’s largest online repair manual” and Dozuki helps clients write product documentation such as user manuals. For Wiens, proper grammar usage is not about achieving perfection as much as it is about demonstrating professionalism.

Response to Wiens’ post was surprising. Although many people agreed with Wiens’ stance that good grammar is good business, many people critiqued his use of grammar and questioned his audacity to have what he described as a zero tolerance policy against grammar mistakes. Interestingly, some of the more than 2,300 comments devolved into evaluation of grammar usage in other persons’ comments. The Grammar Police had a mighty presence on Wiens’ blog post!

The article resonated with me as I see firsthand the effects of poor spelling and grammar on the quality of students’ written communications. A correlation exists between grammar skills and perceived credibility of the communicator. For Kyle Wiens’ companies, the quality of his brands hinges on proper presentation of information. He cannot afford to take a laissez-faire approach to his employees’ writing craft. Nor can you or I. Our written and oral communication is a part of our product. Inferior product quality of our personal brand is not an option in a highly competitive market.

Command of spelling and grammar has three benefits:
1. It demonstrates a commitment to learning. Kyle Wiens says if a person has not mastered spelling and grammar after 20 years is it indicative of his or her learning curve in general?

2. It reveals attention to detail. Good grammar usage sends a positive signal about the communicator, just as poor grammar raises questions about the communicator’s message quality and even credibility.

3. It can be a source of competitive advantage. Commit to sharpening this element of your personal brand. Think about how many job announcements seek a candidate with outstanding communication skills. Make it a point to stand out in this area.

You do not have to be an English professor to use grammar effectively. You only have to adopt a mindset of continuous improvement, pushing yourself to become more skilled at communication. Make your communications skills a strength that gets you hired or promoted, not allow it to be a liability that holds you back.

5 Myths of Personal Branding

Personal branding has taken off as a practice for managing one’s professional identity. The ease of communicating via social media channels has lowered the barriers to building a personal brand. I was first exposed to the concept of personal branding in 1997 through Tom Peters’ seminal article “The Brand Called You.” The ideas in Peters’ article were a little unsettling- could you really market yourself like Levi’s markets blue jeans? I was skeptical, but the confluence of less loyalty to employees among corporations and the emergence of the “new economy” brought about by the Internet convinced me that personal branding was going to be very relevant. Today, I encourage my students to apply marketing and branding principles learned in their coursework to managing their professional brands.

There are obstacles to putting personal branding into practice. Fortunately, most of the obstacles can be found between our ears- they are our own perceptions and fears about the importance of establishing and managing a personal brand. In my work with students and professionals looking to establish their personal brands, I have observed five misconceptions, or myths about personal branding:

1. Personal Branding is Bragging
Some people are reluctant to embrace personal branding because the idea of promoting one’s abilities and performance can be difficult for someone who is modest or does not like to “toot her own horn.” Yes, promotion is part of personal branding, but a great brand’s true value resides in the product itself and the benefits of the product to users. Promotion is how we communicate our brand’s meaning and makeup to the world, and that messaging needs to be real and relevant.

Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Dizzy Dean was once asked how many games he and his brother, Paul, also a pitcher both playing for the St. Louis Cardinals, would win in in the 1934 season. Dizzy Dean predicted they would win 45 games between them and went on to say “It ain’t bragging if you can back it up.” The brothers won 49 games between them that season, and the Cardinals won the World Series. I would say Dizzy Dean wasn’t bragging- his message related the value he and his brother could bring to the team. Personal branding is not bragging; it is backing up your meaning and makeup while communicating your value.

2. Personal Branding = Your Social Media Presence

The huge user numbers for major social networking sites can lead people astray, thinking social media is the key to personal branding success. Social media is a communication channel- nothing more. We can tirelessly work to post updates on Facebook, send tweets on Twitter, make connections on LinkedIn, and so on, but those efforts represent only a small part of the overall management of a personal brand. Social media plays a major role in the implementation of your personal brand, but your brand is not the words you say and images you share through social media. 

Personal branding is a process for identifying, developing, and communicating your unique value. The “identifying” and “developing” have to happen before there is anything to “communicate.” Thus, personal branding is by necessity more than one’s social media presence. You can have a brand without using social media, but you cannot communicate using social media independently of your brand.

3. Personal Branding is for Celebrities

You may have heard of personal branding but dismissed it because you believed it was something that only celebrities and other high profile people need to be concerned with their brand image and reputation. And, you are correct- celebrities in entertainment, sports, politics, business, and other fields use personal branding to communicate with their followers and maintain their status as opinion leaders. Social media has given opinion leaders in the “offline world” another channel for exerting their influence. 

Remember, most people who have popular social brands already had well known personal brands. For example, Justin Timberlake has more than 23 million fans on Facebook and 22 million followers on Twitter. His brand is so strong online because of the value he has offered through his singing, acting, and performing for nearly 20 years. Social media has elevated the stature of personal brands like Justin Timberlake because fans and admirers can connect with him as well as other people who share an affinity for him. You, too can build a reputation for offering value to others… and it does not require you be a celebrity.


4. Personal Branding Requires You to Act Differently
The prospect of having to “act” like a brand is unsettling to many people. Their thinking is often something like “I’m a person, not a pair of running shoes!” Personal branding might be avoided by some people because of a perception that it requires them to act out of character. Thoughts like “putting on airs,” “phony,” or “arrogant” may cross the minds of those who believe that personal branding requires us to maintain a persona that could differ from who we really are. But, the most admired brands in the world are known for being remarkably consistent (think Amazon, Apple, Disney, and Google). They are authentic.


Building a great brand is not about coming up with a clever slogan or tagline, creating eye-catching brochures, or designing a slick website. Great brands make promises to customers and deliver on those promises. Do they fail sometimes? Of course they do, but even when a customer service failure occurs these companies work hard to recover from those failures to restore customer trust in their brand.  So, contrary to the myth that personal branding would require you to act differently, you must act yourself- be authentic! 


5. Personal Branding is All about Appearances
A brand is a multi-dimensional concept, with one dimension being observable characteristics or features. Product and service brands use tactics such as logos, color schemes, slogans, distinctive packaging designs, unique fonts, and brand characters to strengthen people’s association with their brands. These tactics help establish mental connection between a brand as observed by the senses and its Meaning and Makeup. Likewise, tactics can be used to associate your personal brand with what you. Your appearance, business cards, wardrobe, and résumé are some of the tactics used communicate your personal brand. But, there is a tendency sometimes to put too much emphasis on these outward expressions of a personal brand.


History can be an effective teacher, and to debunk the myth of personal branding being all about appearances we go back in time to the late 1990s. The commercial Internet began to grow and created opportunities to develop online business models. Entrepreneurs did just that, attracting great interest from investors seeking to profit from the Internet’s growth. But by 2001, many dot-com companies were going bankrupt, having burned through their investment capital while making little (and often no) profits. One reason some companies failed was they spent excessively on marketing, attempting to use marketing tactics like those of popular brands such as Coca-Cola and Chevrolet. The difference between dot-com brands and established brands was that the established brands enjoyed the benefits of decades of marketing. They did not buy their exposure overnight; it was payoff for years of delivering value to customers through their products and advertising.


Let Go of the Myths
Any of these five myths of personal branding could be persuasive in delaying or even foregoing the decision to develop one’s personal brand. Do not let the myths define your brand through inaction. Embrace your responsibility as manager of the world’s most important brand: You.

A Social Media Marketing English Lesson

I am a marketing professor, not an English professor (as one can determine from reading my posts). But, I feel compelled to weigh in on a practice that makes me cringe when I see it occur. Some marketers and individuals misunderstand their role in communities. Social media has empowered the voice of the people, transforming us from “targets” to participants. Unfortunately, some people are stuck in the old mass media model of broadcasting messages. In a world in which social networking sites have elevated second and third-person pronouns to star-of-the-show status, too many brands are still communicating in “I” and “me” terms. If you want to increase the likelihood that your “target market” will tune you out, just keep doing what your are doing.

Align Pronouns with Objectives
If you are not an English professor either, no worries. Let’s demystify how to avoid falling in the narcissistic trap of a first-person voice in social media. The voice that you use should be consistent with the objectives for using social media in the first place (you do have objectives, right?). For example, if you have an objective of growing a community around your brand, you do it by focusing on the community instead of you. Think about the person you talk to at a party (or maybe better described as listen to) that only talks about himself. He complains, he brags, he jokes, but he is in control of the conversation. And, you are pretty sure he does not really care about you at all or he may have actually tried to engage you in an actual conversation.

Don’t be that guy! The tone of your content should align with your community. Talk about the problems or challenges your community members face. Celebrate their joys and accomplishments. Ask questions to learn more about what is on their minds. Lift up employee success stories. It is not about you, it is about the community. One of my favorite quotes is from John Maxwell, who says “people don’t care about how much you know until they know how much you care.” Too many social media marketing messages try to show us how much the sender knows rather than conveying care and concern for the community. Social networking is a participation sport. As a marketer you can play, but you are far from the only player in the game.

Don’t Ditch First Person 
You do not have to eliminate “I” and “me” from your vocabulary. The point to remember is that when participating in communities we step back from the center of attention to be part of the circle of community members. There are times that you want to assert yourself as a resource (i.e., how much you know); just be careful to avoid that practice being the primary use of social media. Some people might disagree, but social media can be used in pursuit of sales objectives. For example, Panda Express used Facebook to distribute coupons for a free serving of orange chicken, part of a promotion touting the chain’s extended summer hours.  

This pronoun dilemma is particularly challenging for individuals looking to build a personal brand. Of course, you need to persuade your audience of your knowledge, capabilities, and value. However, there is a need to stake a balance between asserting brand credibility and fitting in among the community that interacts with your brand.