Creating a Personal Brand – What does it Mean?

Since the turn of the millennium, probably fueled by the dot-com boom that was in full swing at the time, the concept of branding yourself became a trend for those entering the high-tech job market. This eventually spilled over into other industries, including bankcard. But what is personal branding?

Branding defined.

The term “branding” actually goes back to the time of the Wild West. Ranchers “branded” their cattle with a mark that identified the animal as their property. Unfortunately for the livestock, this involved burning a mark into the thick skin of a piece of cattle, usually bulls, cows and horses. Being Dutch myself, I think that it’s not far-fetched to think that the word “brand” (burning the animal with a hot poker) comes from Dutch “brand” which means “fire”. When bringing cattle to market, buyers would start focusing their purchases on brands that had a good reputation for yielding excellent meat and leather. Thus some brands became more sought after than others – and the branding process, as we know it today, was born.

Branding in modern times refers to the marketing and PR process of developing a unique and prominent identity for a product or service. A result of a successful brand is to be instantly identified with a product category. Examples are: soda: Coca-Cola, Pepsi; sneakers: Nike, Reebok and upscale cars: BMW, Mercedes, and so forth.

Brand development is a pillar of marketing; and probably initiated by a marketing professional, the concept of branding became applicable to ‘you’ as an employee. Thus when branding began to play a role in the job market and hiring process, it was called “personal branding.” Some experts swear by it while others urge job seekers to stick with the traditional route of having a resume and cover letter.

The idea behind the personal branding approach is this: Regular job seekers count on primarily reaching out to employers; branding can supplement your outreach by having employers reach out to you.

How can you brand yourself?

The idea behind personal branding is to treat yourself as a product that employers want to seek out and hire – and this means that you have to successfully distinguish yourself from other qualified candidates. The way this is achieved is by means of two factors:

Self-awareness. You need to know you. How else can you sell yourself? Hence to purvey your uniqueness and distinguish yourself it is important to take a good look at your own self. Now I’m not telling you to walk the earth like Caine in Kung Fu, but just to perform an exercise that can help you define what makes you different:

1. Identify your own strengths. We’re not looking for the clichés of resume writing like “great relationship skills” or “hard worker.” Many use these points, and you will not stand out using clichés. Base unique strengths on actual experiences, like the “ability reverse declining sales trends into success and profitability with minimal need for operating expenses.”
2. List your weaknesses. You will be asked about your weaknesses – may as well identify them up front and put a constructive and truthful spin on them – more on how to respond to weaknesses in our article “10 Tough Job Interview Questions.”
3. Capitalize on your strengths. Focus much of your brand message around your unique strengths.
4. Find valid ways to make your weaknesses irrelevant.
5. Determine how you uniquely fit a job market need. This is important. What is it that you have that others don’t? Take a look at your strengths and see which one is most unique, yet 100% relevant to your targeted job. If you are gunning for a Risk Management position, don’t make your main strength your ability to quickly analyze merchant statements (just an example) – stay relevant and focused.
6. Describe and define that unique fit as your personal brand. Once determined – put your unique fit into words.
7. Determine how your image can communicate your brand. Some successful sales managers or Sales VPs have created an image where its known that hiring them brings success – the same can be done for other positions. If you are a POS Help Desk Manager, then create an image of being knowledgeable, a diagnostic thinker and being meticulous about error-free installations. Hiring you will bring the company a kick-butt POS installations department.

Market yourself. Promote your brand! Many job seekers have created brochures about themselves; many have personal web sites or make sure that they are on professional social media sites (e.g. LinkedIn). Now, don’t go overboard like that gentleman in Wisconsin that put himself on a huge billboard next to Highway 45. Yes, he did get hired, but not because of his billboard. However explore the following outlets:

1. Social Media: As previously mentioned, social media is a strong branding channel; specifically professional social networking sites. Use sites like LinkedIn, Ecademy and Ziggs to promote your professional side. Stay away from social sites that generally aren’t related with professionals, such as MySpace and Fubar.
2. Personal web site: In addition to being connected to social media sites, many professionals register their own name (or variation thereof) as a domain. Once again, don’t go overboard. Don’t make your site come over as narcissistic, self-absorbed and egotistical. If your site’s content is 100% about you, it will come over the wrong way. Bring other topics into the mix, such as companies you worked for, associations you belong to, causes your support, etc. Provide information on these topics and purvey your brand through them.
3. Business Cards: True, you likely have business cards if you’re currently employed, but do you have personal cards? It won’t hurt to keep some cards in your pocket that label you as John Smith, Sales Professional (or whatever your specialty may be). These personal cards come in very handy when meeting people at networking functions and trade shows. For instance, Risk professionals can attend the MAC meetings (which, by the way, are very informative). Hand out your personal card and make the card hint that you are in the job market.
4. Brochures: Relatively simple to make by using templates; use two-fold brochures to establish your brand. Don’t go overboard with graphics, lots of photos and multiple crazy typefaces – keep it clean, simple and most of all, focus on your brand identity, what distinguishes you above the rest. It is not advised to create a PDF version for emails – more will be explained about this later. Now you may ask yourself where brochures would come into play. Think job fairs. The banking industry has been known to throw job fairs in larger cities – and hiring managers receive piles of resumes. Stand out by adding a brochure to your resume. However, it is not advised to bring brochures to job interviews (in lieu of, or in addition to, your resume).
5. Your Resume: The most important branding component you own. Nothing, but absolutely nothing, replaces the traditional resume. We will feature future articles on writing killer resumes, but write your traditional resume with the strength you isolated in this exercise – include these qualities in your cover letter as well.

How do you know you’ve created a personal brand? Well, have you ever been in a company meeting where the executive said “We need to hire a kick-butt *insert title here* - We should see if we can hire *your name here*.” If your name become synonymous with a certain title or position, then you have done it my friend. Just make sure that the title you’re positioned with is what you want it to be – that is key.

Avoiding pitfalls.

The branding process, if not properly executed, may backfire. Hiring Managers see many resumes, specifically in this economic climate. They can afford to be picky and when browsing resumes primarily look for any reason to say “no” and dismiss a resume. Only the strong survive. So in order to properly develop ‘you’ as a brand, take heed to the following:

1. Avoid getting your skills and competencies lost in a sea of type. As I mentioned many times before, focus on your uniqueness, and don’t add fluff – it’s annoying and may put your resume in the trash bin.
2. Clean up your cyber image. Ask sites to take down pages that may put you in a bad image and submit these pages to Google and others search engines to be delisted (once they are down). Now, if you are not able to do this – because you had a DUI arrest and it is public record – then drown out these black marks with lots of good PR.
3. Be 100% truthful and don’t hype yourself up. You’ve taken time to build a brand. You’ve gathered the attributes and strengths that you want people to see as yours. But are they really just pipe dreams – wishes instead of realities? Ensure that your brand is not established on false pretenses. People recognize soon enough when you’ve oversold or over hyped yourself. They see it in what you can’t do or answer. You not only lose your brand. You lose any credibility you might have had. It’s exponentially higher, if not impossible, to win back trust, than it is to earn trust you never had.
4. You think your brand is an entitlement. Never lose sight that your personal brand isn’t really about you at all. It’s about the employer, and the employer or hiring manager is a person who is NOT you. A personal brand is a way of communicating to the employer what you stand for and what you can bring to their show. The brand message should be that you’re there for THEM, not the other way around.
5. Stay focused! Don’t go into 10 different directions. Focus on your core brand message. Don’t dilute your strengths with fringe decorations – stay focused on your identity! One major rule of branding is to purvey one solid message that can easily be remembered and associated. E.g. Jim Smith = Sales Pro. The moment your message becomes unfocused (e.g. Jim Smith = Sales Rep who is a golfing pro that knows much about expensive art) the whole purpose of branding is negated.
6. As previously stated – there is no substitute for a traditional resume. Brochures are good for job fairs and personal business cards are good for trade shows, networking and industry events, but never apply for a specific job using this type of collateral. That is why there's no need for a PDF brochure - you want to email your resume instead. It's a law of busines; when applying for a job, the number one item is your traditional resume and next is your cover letter – just ensure that your brand is cleverly communicated in your resume and cover letter.

I hope this has given you a bit of insight on how to build a personal brand. Use this to supplement your existing job searching efforts. You can build your brand when employed as well. Just keep it real, and understand that there are risks when overdoing it. When done right, your personal brand can result in employers reaching out to you in addition to you reaching out to them – and in today’s job market, having an edge goes a long way.

Source: Cardgigs