Personal branding is all about how people marketing themselves and their careers as brands. Personal branding concept shows the way to an individual that success comes through self-packaging and it’s being replaced previous self-help management techniques such as self-improvement. Analogous to building and managing a corporate brand, one should build and manage his or her own personal brand as well. But yet, most people don’t take it seriously. However, in order to be successful, one should be careful about the image that he/she portrays to others. Personal branding is in many ways synonymous with one’s reputation. It refers to how other people see you. Are you a genius? Are you trustworthy? What do you represent? What do you stand for? And many more so it’s high time one should think of it loudly.
There are so many tenets about personal branding but yet most promising one given by Oscar Wilde. Substance of one of the most important tenets of branding which is also alike to personal branding: all strong brands are based in what’s true, genuine, and real. Since branding is based in authenticity, genuineness and realism, one need to understand who he/she is and what makes him/her compelling to his/her target audience. Besides, If you think about what makes you “YOU”, ponder these questions:
• What’s your core competence? What do you do better than anyone else?
• What are your top values & operating principles?
• What are your true passions and what inspirational factor (s) entice to achieve that?
• What sort of adjectives do people consistently use to describe you – perhaps when they’re introducing you to others?
• What makes the way you achieve results interesting or unique?
Obviously personal branding is more than just being yourself, but lacking of material foundation of authenticity, it will be a truly challenging endeavor for building your brand, and a less than fruitful one. Authenticity is as an indispensable ingredient to personal branding as eggs are to omelets.
