Don’t just work for a company, build your brand

In a 1997 article “The Brand Called You”, Tom Peters laid out a kind of manifesto about the potential for personal branding.

“Starting today,” Peters wrote, “you are a brand.” The article set the tone and influenced much of what we know as personal branding. Your personal brand is the total set of associations — emotional and intellectual — that people have with you. Whether you work for yourself or within a company, you already have a brand because people already have these unconscious associations with you. The question that Peters raises is, “Are you branding yourself intentionally?”

The idea of personal branding was repellent to groups of professionals, executives, and creatives. The notion of drawing too much attention to yourself or your accomplishments might feel gauche and egotistical. Better to downplay everything than risk being judged.

If you’ve already put yourself out there and have tested your marketing and content marketing chops as well as your social media skills and you have a supercharged website, you might feel as if you’ve sort of over-reached how you put yourself out there and made everything about you. Professionals and executives also rightly worry about publicising private information.

Yet it’s a vital misconception to equate personal branding to being self-centred or airing dirty laundry. Several examples and studies point to a different trend: Executives, professionals, and creatives can develop personal brands based on integrity and authenticity — not on self-centred self-promotion. In many ways, the use of authenticity as a positioning device has long been recognised as resonating with consumers.

Even if two social actors behave in similar ways, the authentic set of behaviours are those that are believed to reflect the actor’s true self, not simulated to achieve a particular effect. In fact, some researchers have said that “the search for authenticity is one of the cornerstones of contemporary marketing”.

So how do you manage to access this authenticity from a perspective of personal branding, without feeling as though you’re straying from your integrity?

Find your burning motivation borne from your or your business’s heritage and experience. Find the idea you cannot help but pursue over the years. You have to know what’s jazzing you about developing a brand or book or business.

Get curious about your deeper intention and drive. To earn $200k or to build another $3 million in revenue doing what you love is not an intention. It’s a goal. A worthy goal, mind you, but still a goal.

Instead, examine what excites you about your work or the potential impact of your work on the world. Examine why it is that developing a brand or authoring a book and expanding your platform could make a difference in other people’s lives. By exploring not only your passion for your work but the impact your work could have, you’ll tap into a core motivation for developing your personal brand.

Building a personal brand and company brand in the 21st century requires building relationships with your potential clients and customers.

Self-disclosure has long been identified as one of the most effective ways of building a relationship with another person. A study performed by the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the California Graduate School of Family Psychology, the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Arizona State University, proved this under test conditions.

College students were paired off and told to spend 45 minutes getting to know each other — the first group was given the opportunity to use small talk, the second was given the opportunity to talk more deeply. At the end of the test, it was shown that real relationships were formed faster when there was more selfdisclosure than small talk.

Think about a powerful CEO like Tim Cook of Apple. His Twitter feed is an excellent example of how you share the personal, without treading into the private. We know his affinity for sports and can get a feel for who he is, simply by what he chooses to self-disclose. But with nearly 11 million followers, he never strays into revealing the private.

Self-disclosure is also an excellent way to help build your community of readers or viewers. The best way to assert this is by making sure that your biographies and profiles are complete and personal — to you. Profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, G+ can be peppered with the personable so we get acquainted with the person behind the package or service, the program or product.

Let your motto always be: pepper, don’t douse. —Psychology Today

Jeffrey Davis is a creative consultant

Think about a powerful CEO like Tim Cook of Apple. His Twitter feed is an excellent example of how you share the personal, without treading into the private.