Lifehack has a really interesting post about why it makes sense to begin considering how to best branding yourself.
They write: “A brand is an opportunity to have meaning in your life and to stand out from everyone else around the world.”
Take a look, it might make you see the world differently.
Jim,
I went to the page on Lifehack.org about branding yourself. While I found it interesting, I don’t see myself as a product. Yes my skills need to be marketed, but the author, Dan Scawbel, goes too far. He’s still talking about self-promotion, just calling it something else. The 80s and 90s were full of ‘personality profile’ type tests (where you fit in) and this is one giant step further. Yes, I will market my skills when I leave McGgill, but I won’t be branding myslef. Has anyone else read the article? What do you think?
Yes I have read the article, and I’m of the opinion that whether or not we consciously brand ourselves, we are being perceived as a certain brand all the time. That’s why I think it’s a good idea to go through the process of really thinking about what we’re putting out there. For example, personally, I used to think that I didn’t have to buy into corporate culture to work in a corporation. (Oh, when I think of some of the “outifts” I wore to interviews!) Well, I was wrong. Now, although I dress the part, because I’m interested in the paycheque, I try to give small signals that I am still not corporate through and through. It could be mismatched earrings, patterned tights, an unusual collar or necklace. To the outside world, these markers would not stand out, but in what is often a bland corporate landscape, they do. They may not always work in my favour (oh boy, here’s another non-conformist we don’t need…) but that’s part of it too. I don’t want to work for a place that can’t handle even little deviations.
I think we all already have a personal brand. What we like, how we like to work, who we associate with, what we value are all aspects of who we are that are communicated at all times.
Personal branding, at the heart of it, is about building the compromise about where you want to go and who you are willing to be, and then making the most of it by being unambiguous in your interactions.
Once you bring that up into consciousness, you can work to redefine yourself along the lines of your goals.
Personnal branding is a good idea. It will make an image of us in the front line of society by becoming well known from our branding trade.
But is it really good? As the marketing common sentence says : To brand or not to brand?
It depends on the seller’s intergrity to get a good result from banding. Branding began with the art of signing their own art.
”Branding is a strong force that hardly anything goes unbranded” As said the autor, the first step to branding success is to accept that we are a brand. Individual are labeled as brand because we are all judged based on impressions, we are all salespeople.
If we can be aware every hour of our life that we are judged on our impression, maybe we will take more care about ourself by providing a better attention to us of what
do we do, what do we wear and what do we say; such as developping our own branding. Having a better brand of our person means also a easy way to sale ourself. By being aware of our own branding, the next step is really close and more easy to be our branding salesperson. Make the branding of ourself an expertise, a specialty.
”A brand is an opportunity to have meaning in your life and to stand out from everyone else around the world”.
(Pierre Lessard, Graduate Diploma Public Relation Management, McGIll 2009).