Building Your Personal Brand: The #1 Mistake to Avoid
These days, the topic of personal branding is everywhere. We learn about it in business school, we hear about it from Oprah, and it is a frequent topic in business and consumer media. In all of this dialogue, there are a lot of great pieces of advice that should be heeded: build brand that is authentic, consistent, compelling and inspirational.
Your brand is part of your personal and professional identity. In this era of meaning and purpose, it’s no surprise that leaders are seeking – and consumers are expecting – a better understanding of what you stand for, what you value, what you know, and what kind of legacy you intend to leave behind
It gets more complex than that, of course. If your brand is your identity, then it’s also important to show how this connects to the other related branded entities in your midst: your company, the products or services you provide, the partners and colleagues on your team. With so many personal brands walking about, the world can quickly get noisy and chaotic.
This is why, as personal branding increases, we have also seen a growing need for brand alignment in the work that we do. We help leaders chart out those points of connection where their story and their values overlap with, and reinforce, the companies and teams that they may lead.
But as the world around us becomes increasingly brand-savvy, there is one critical element that many leaders – and companies – tend to overlook when developing their brand strategy: relevance.
Those same market forces that have driven the popularity of personal branding – the rising emphasis on meaning and purpose – are also the reasons that relevance is such an important element for a successful brand identity. Why does the world need your brand to exist? Why should anybody care?
Sometimes a great personal brand just needs some help to be translated and adapted to the realities of the world around it.
Just like when branding a business or a product, a strong personal brand should have equal footing in internal (what makes you, you) and external insights. At Captivating, we build every brand to live at the intersection of three key elements:
Personal Truth – This requires the self-awareness to recognize your own strengths, values, aspirations and formative experiences.
Functional Role – This is the nexus where you connect who you are with the role that you play on your team, at your company and in the world. Where your ‘hard skills’ and ‘soft skills’ as a leader come together.
External Truth – Drawing on data and insights about the marketplace and the audiences that your brand must influence – be they colleagues, customers, peers or influencers – the external truth is where we connect everything back to what is going on in the world around you that makes your brand matter.
If you can find the sweet spot where these three elements connect, your brand will be better positioned to reflect all of the attributes required for success: it will be authentic, compelling, impactful, motivating and – perhaps most importantly – relevant.
Building a personal brand should be a reflective, sometimes emotional, and hopefully empowering and creative experience. If you can strike the balance between the internal and external elements of your brand identity, then you will ensure your brand is relevant, inspirational and impactful.