Personal branding

Branding yourself is increasingly important in today’s job market, even though I do not think it is absolutely necessary. It all depends on the individual and their ideal career path and work place. For example if the person’s dream job is an accountant and they want to have a strictly 8 hour work day in the office, after which the work doesn’t follow them home – I don’t think personal branding would be all that important for them. It feels like the benefits wouldn’t come even close to covering the time and effort it takes to maintain a personal brand. But if one is aspiring to become the head of marketing in a global company or editor-in-chief of a magazine you are kind of required to have a carefully planned and executed personal branding strategy. I think the higher you aim the stronger the need and the pressure is to have all of that in check.

Lisa Quast wrote a blog post to forbes.com about personal branding. (http://www.forbes.com/sites/lisaquast/2013/04/22/personal-branding-101/) According to her the most important parts of personal branding are finding out

-          who you are

-          what you want

-          how people have gotten to the position you want to be in

-          what you have to do in order to get to that place

-          how it should reflect in your personal branding strategy

-          creating and maintaining the brand

It all makes sense and isn’t too complicated to actually do. The biggest problems are probably the execution (what and how to do) and the single most toughest part – what do you actually want. How do you brand yourself if you have no point of reference to what you should say or where to say it – how do you complete an equation when a necessary variable is missing? Now there is a topic I would like a 101 post on!

-Viivi