The Upside of a Personal Brand

Most things, it appears, are being changed in the colliding worlds of business, communications, media and politics, and this is directly impacting how brands are built today. With all of these changes it makes having the strongest brand possible a necessity, not a luxury that is reserved for the larger companies or the rich and famous. In order to succeed today, you need an extremely well-defined brand just to stay in the game, and one way to accomplish this is to build a personal brand.

Most brand experts agree that a brand is a name, term, design or other feature that distinguishes one seller’s product from others.

For a personal brand, this makes your message and brand your story. There are gobs of articles written on 'brand'—just Google the word brand and you will receive 1,710,000,000 results! To save you some time, here are a few principles to help you build yours:

Figure out what makes you so distinctive and different than everyone else and make that your core strategy. In order to pitch yourself comfortably and effectively, you must first know what makes you such a good choice and what your strengths are. When you are reaching out to people they can feel what is real and what is not, so don't try to fabricate an image that does not represent you. This is probably the most important principle for building a personal brand. Make it real.

Stand for something you believe in and others will want to believe with you. Who you are, or your core values, constantly helps you make decisions on all sorts of levels from family to business to finance and everything else going on in your world. When you take the time to figure out just exactly what is going to guide all of your decisions, it makes making decisions much easier. This gives you more time to build your brand because you have a clear value compass to guide all of your steps.

Help others first before you help yourself. This probably sounds counter-intuitive to what you might have learned as you earned your MBA, but in point of fact, people help people who help them. Think about it. If you had two people calling on you for business and one was asking how they could be of help to you personally and the other was running through their features and benefits, who would you want to work with? Once you’ve made a friend, two things happen. Your business will increase, and you’ll have a new friend for life.

You are best defined by what you stand for and what you don’t. Knowing what you most believe in and making that your constant message will separate and differentiate you over time. Personal brands have the ability to grow quickly into leadership brands because they typically have a singular point of view and make it easier to communicate and find others that have the same interests.

As you create and develop your business, and as you enlarge your circles of influence and excellence, a profound benefit will occur when you bring much more focus, intensity and definition to everything you say and do because it’s communicating what you truly believe in. They’ll feel it and respond favorably because they find true meaning in who you are and what you say.

Tom Wants to Hear Your Branding Issues:
Tom Marin, managing partner of MarketCues, wants to hear from you! Follow MarketCues on Twitter for branding and social media tips, as well as the latest trends. Tom also welcomes emails, new LinkedIn connections, calls to (407) 330-7708 or visits at www.marketcues.com. How can he help solve your branding issues?

Note: If you are a printing company or product/services company serving the print-media market and would like to be considered for a feature in this blog, please contact Tom Marin for an interview.