Articles

10 Self-Branding Strategies for Career Success

By Catherine Kaputa

Brand strategist (www.selfbrand.com) and author of U R a Brand, How Smart People Brand Themselves for Business Success
(www.urabrand.com)

Success in any endeavor these days requires careful, calculated branding, both to enter the arena and to stay in the game.  Corporate icons,
Hollywood celebrities and high-profile athletes have long tapped into the branding model to create and build a personal brand.  Now, savvy
professionals, business people and entrepreneurs are using personal branding to be more successful.

After all, and this is important, because it goes against everything you’ve been taught, smarts and hard work are not enough.  Your talent
and brains, your years of experience, your top schools and accomplishments, your superior ability – none of these factors are “enough” to
create demand for you over others. (They help, mind you, but they are not enough.) We all know lots of hard-working, intelligent people who
are unrecognized, underemployed or even unemployed.  (You may have even been one of them.). Creating positive impressions and
building demand for the Brand You is the work of self-branding.

Here are 10 self-branding strategies to help you achieve career and life success.

Success Strategy No. 1

Tap into branding and “soft power.”

It isn’t the hard, quantifiable things, like educational credentials, experience, and IQ, that contribute the most to success. The real power is
soft power – image and visual identity, your communication and persuasion skills, your visibility and reputation – all the things that will attract
people to you.

Developing a winning self-brand requires some work. The left-brain work involves analyzing facts and trends as well as planning tactics.
Right-brain work involves tapping into your intuition and creativity as you develop a personal brand strategy, a visual identity (your
packaging), and a verbal identity (your self-brand messages and communications skills) in order to reach your goals.

Success Strategy No. 2.

Learn how to consciously build positive impressions about yourself.

If people think you are on top of your game, you will be.  If people think you’re a B player, you will be – until you change their perceptions. 
You success in business or life is based on perceptions, other people’s perceptions of who you are, how good you are, and even what you
are worth.  Branding strategies and tactics can help you build the right perceptions in the minds of others about who you are.

One of the first things marketers do is conduct a brand audit to gauge the perceptions people have about a product, and you should do the
same. You already have a lot of information at your disposal. What do people compliment you for? Criticize you for? What do you love to do?
What do your clients or bosses say about you? You can even formalize the process and take some colleagues to lunch and tell them you are
exploring self-branding. Ask them: What’s different, special, unusual or weird about me? What should I be doing to make meaning in the
world? What key piece of advice would you give this brand? If you were a famous person, who would it be?

Success Strategy No. 3.

Have something that is different about you and your message.

The cardinal rule of branding is, “Be different.”  Brand strategy is about pinpointing relevant differences and creating positive perceptions. It’s
the same with people. It used to be about, “Can you do the job?” Today many people can do what you do.  So it has to be about something
more.

Branding for people is about finding your Big Idea – the a compelling strategy that brands are always searching for.  A big idea gives a brand
a strong value proposition with its target audience. Likewise, you want to represent something special that sets you apart from others and
establishes a value equation for you and your abilities. You might explore it through analogy. Try to put two different ideas together to
express your brand, such as “I’m a cross between ____ and ____,” or “I’m like _____ meets ______.” For example, Tazo tea defined its big
idea as “Marco Polo meets Merlin.”

Success Strategy No. 4:

Celebrate yourself and your uniqueness, but also keep tabs on the big picture and market changes.
Another key tenet of branding is, “Be relevant.” That’s why marketers frequently monitor their brands. One method is the SWOT analysis - 
studying a brand’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.  You can do the same. The SWOT analysis is an intensive look at your
strengths, and weaknesses in a real-world framework.  “Strengths” and “weaknesses,” the first two areas, deal with you.  Start with skills,
experience and accomplishments.  Then expand the list to include personality traits,  Expand it to include anyone you have ever known or
ever met, or anything you have ever explored or been interested in.  The “opportunities” and “threats” deal with things that could affect you in
the future.  What is going on that could dramatically change things?  Business is dynamic so there is always movement and change.

Success Strategy No. 5:

Use the principles of visual identity to create a powerful “self-brand package.”

It may seem superficial.  It may be unfair.  We may not like it.  After all, why should you be judged by your looks? Self-presentation – your
visual identity – is important because of the link people make between what something looks like on the outside and what is on the inside.
We do this today despite all the familiar admonitions, such as “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” or “Beauty is only skin deep.” The fact is the
way you look, carry yourself, the clothes you chose, the way you decorate your home or office have a profound influence on other people’s
judgment of you.

Developing a signature item as a trademark of your visual style is a great tactic for self-branding.  You’re creating a branding element that
identities you, like McDonald’s golden arches. For example, Bono has his tinted, wraparound sunglasses, Larry King has his suspenders,
and Donald Trump has his hair style.

Success Strategy  No. 6

Harness the power of verbal identity: names, signature words, and phrases to lock in your self-brand message.

The counterpoint to visual identity is verbal identity: a brand’s name, messages and tagline.The words you use can be powerful and
memorable or blow away like a feather in the wind. What if President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had not crossed out the phrase “world
history” and replaced it with “infamy” in his Pearl Harbor address. One little word. Now, Roosevelt’s phrase is one of the most famous ever
said by a president.

Brands try to own a word, or a short phrase, in the minds of consumers.  If they succeed, people think of the brand when they hear the word,
and vice-versa.  For example, “overnight” is FedEx, and “safety” is Volvo, and one could argue that Apple now owns “cool.”  Owning a word
helps self-brands too. Your word or phrase can be a positive attribute that defines you or it could by a catchy phrase that describes a key
initiative at your company or your philosophy. Many people secure their hold on a word by writing a book, as Jack Welch did with “winning”
and Rudy Giuliani did with “leadership.”

Success Strategy  No. 7:

Become a little bit famous.

In self-branding, we’re talking of being famous for something – an idea, a belief system, an accomplishment, an area of excellence. And
we’re talking about visibility on some level – your industry, your company, your community, even the nation if you’re ambitious.

Visibility – what advertisers call mindshare - brings big rewards.  You can get a higher price for your services or a bigger salary.  People will
seek you out.  That’s because of the connection people make between something that’s well-known being better than something that is not.
(“She must be good, or why would she be so well known?”)
.
If you work in a corporation, there are a lot of low visibility tactics you can use to build mindshare in the company and in your industry such as
volunteering to be a project leader, writing trade articles, chairing a committee for an industry organization or business group, participating in
an industry panel, or contributing to the company newsletter.  Senior executives and entrepreneurs can use high visibility tactics such as
being an expert on television, writing a book, being quoted in national media articles, serving on charitable or corporate boards, giving
keynote speeches, or the ultimate high-visibility tactic these days, associating with a celebrity pal.

Success Strategy No. 8

Build a power network of contacts and associates

Business success is about accessibility. Networking gives you accessibility. Knowing people is especially important today. Whether it’s job
security or job progress, you can’t count on your company. You have to rely on the people you know and the people who know you. This is
true no matter how talented, smart and experienced you are. Great networkers don’t just fish for the big fish, the senior executives and power
brokers. They realize that you need a lot of different types of people on the road to success. And when you go to an important conference or
event, practice strategic networking. If you don’t do your planning and homework beforehand, you won’t connect with the people you want to
meet. If there is a project or area of mutual interest, e-mail or call the person to suggest getting together beforehand.

Success Strategy No. 9

Build an emotional bond with your key target markets

Today, brand managers put a strong emphasis on emotional branding because people form the strongest relationships with brands they like
and care about. Your goal as a self-brand is to build satisfied, loyal “customers” - people who have good things to say about you because
they have strong feelings about you.
Remember, it’s the emotional ties that bind. Rationally, we often can make a case for why the capabilities of one company are better than
another’s or why one person is superior to another. Yet our gut tells us something different. We choose the one that makes us feel more
comfortable emotionally.

Success Strategy No. 10

Create a success story for the Brand You.

Defining a big idea or self-brand strategy is one thing. Making your self brand a reality is another. So after you develop your strategy, your
visual and verbal identity, you need to develop a marketing plan with tactics that get you from A to B all the way to Z. A self-brand action plan
includes the following: goals, target markets, the self-brand strategy, time frame, tactics and measurement.  Without a tactical plan your
success is left to chance.