Authentic Brand Personality

As the job market becomes more and more competitive, students and recent grads are feeling the importance to stand out from their peers. One way to accentuate your presence is to build a compelling and authentic personal brand. Literally, every point-of-contact becomes an opportunity to create a unforgettably positive brand impression. Thus, you need to be intentional about how you establish your brand, and your personal brand needs to be:

• AUTHENTIC: Be honest about who you are — your attributes and qualities. Seek to understand the big picture in life, that is discovering your mission, vision, core values, passion, and strengths. I call this the internal architecture. If you can honestly evaluate yourself, you can promote an honest brand.
• HOLISTIC: Your personal brand should not be limited to your career domain. Your personal brand needs to broad enough to tell your holistic story,  spanning across the various domains in life, including family, career, social, and community.
• CONSISTENT: Tom Peters said that you need to “ensure that your message is consistent. If it is erratic, it will undermine your efforts. Everything you do — and choose not to do — contributes to your personal brand, from the way you talk on the phone to the way you behave at meetings or write emails.”

Four-step process of creating your personal brand 

1. Establish your Internal Architecture: You simply cannot create an authentic brand story without gaining a thorough understanding of who you are. Self-discovery is a pre-requisite to building a brand that is aligned, authentic, and holistic. If you don’t spend time learning about yourself, your values, personal mission, and unique attributes, you will be at a disadvantage when marketing your brand to others. Start by removing yourself from distractions and ask yourself, “Who am I?” and, “If I could do anything, what would it be?”  Also, when discovering your brand, you’ll want to lay out a development plan for yourself, that includes your current situation and your goals broken down in intervals, from one year to twenty years in the future. It’s extremely important to have a destination in your head and on paper before proceeding to create your brand in step two. The most successful individuals will be able to merge their passion with expertise, so that they have the fuel needed to push through adversity, and the skills required to solve customers problems.  Also, selecting an unsaturated niche that you can claim during this stage is significant for positioning your brand as unique.”

2. Identify your Default and Desired Brand: Now, conduct a self-assessment of your default and desired brand. You need to know how you are perceived by others.

 3. Seek Feedback and Evaluate Alignment:  Once you’ve worked on your brand identity, you need to get input from those around you. It’s critical to keep checking the value of your brand. Build your own “board of directors” (i.e., mentors, peers, friends, family) to give you feedback on your branding plan and how you are putting it into action. Branding is ultimately about communicating your identity; thus it is crucial that you know how it is being received in the minds—and hearts—of others. Thus, without input from the outside, you only have half the picture of your brand. This can be done by formal methods such as 360 feedback or informally, by asking people around you for honest and constructive feedback on your performance. Another good way to check is to go for job interviews, regardless of whether you wish to change jobs, which will help you test your market value. 

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