Personal Branding
Personal BrandingPersonal branding is the most overused and most misunderstood of all the branding jargon I come across in my job title (Brand Strategist).
Luckily I have never been asked to work on a personal brand in my professional career.
The whole idea of personal branding caused Google to reconfigure the search engine dynamics of my branding category about four years ago.
Too many of the so called brand companies that specialized in personal branding were practicing what the industry calls black hat SEO.
This means they were using less than respectable practices to score higher in Google searches.
Like the snake-oil salesman of years ago, these personal branding charlatans took peoples hard earned cash for little or no return.
However, the idea of personal branding is not completely stupid
I try to help companies understand their brand equities by using VERY personal examples. I have been known to ask CEOs of fortune 100 companies to “pretend for just a moment that your brand was a person and not a corporation. How would you describe that person?”
Personal branding
It is an important realization exercise because I want business executives to understand the emotional fabric of their brands.
When you bring a person to mind, it is not just a list of attributes that define that image in your mind’s eye. It is mostly a rag-tag conglomeration of feelings that color and form that memory.
Go ahead for just a moment and visualize your grandmother. When her image comes to mind do you FEEL more or THINK more? Proves my point.
Brand is an emotional connection that defies dissection in a rational manner. Personal branding, as it turns out, is the foundation of all branding. It is how we feel about everything in our lives.
