Personal branding is a concept of packaging and presenting yourself as a brand, or in other words, a unique promise of value to current and future employers and/or business partners.

In this free agent economy, it is important to differentiate yourself from others who offer very similar skills and experience. It is no longer sufficient to be just good at what you do. You need to create a brand identity and then develop and promote your brand so that you can control your own destiny.

Last month’s luncheon speaker, Susan Amey, gave an overview on the topic of personal branding. She is the Director of the MBA Career Management Center at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, where she uses her strategy, communications, and brand management background to help MBA candidates build and launch their personal brands. Prior to UNC, Ms. Amey held several marketing leadership positions at Black and Decker and Steelcase.

Your personal brand is your unique promise of value. It is widely believed that the term “Personal Brand” was first used by Tom Peters in his 1997 article in Fast Company titled “The Brand Called You”.

All brands need a good positioning statement. As you develop your positioning statement it is important to clarify what you want from your career and how you define success. The answers to these questions are not static. So it is important to check back on these regularly. A good understanding of ones interests, passions, drivers, and motivators is very helpful, as these will act as key differentiators for your brand.

Your brand pyramid

One of the tools that Ms. Amey discussed was to “Build a Pyramid”. Visualize a pyramid with four levels. These are knowledge, experience, soft skills and unique attributes. The base level of the pyramid describes your acquired knowledge, such as education and technical skills. The next level in the pyramid contains your accomplishments and experience. The next contains your soft skills, such as leadership, networking, development of self and others, etc. Finally, on the tip of the pyramid are your unique attributes or talents.

Articulating one’s attributes is quite challenging. To help with this, Ms. Amey provided another tool. In this exercise consider a soft skill such as “cross-functional leadership”. Now, separate this into different activities that have to be performed in order to be a successful cross-functional leader. Examples would be facilitating group buy-in, building a cohesive team or executing through team leadership. Finally, against each activity, describe attributes needed. In this example, attributes needed for facilitating group buy-in would be collaboration and being persuasive. Repeat this exercise with all of your soft skills. You will find some common themes. Analyzing these common themes will help determine your unique attributes.

Positioning yourself for success – get out there

Once you have a list of your best unique attributes, it is time to put together the positioning statement for your personal brand. Ms. Amey shared some examples with us. Another useful exercise she shared was to create an elevator pitch based on your brand position. This would be a short (<20 seconds), specific, and open-ended pitch that starts to define how you can help people (or organizations). The goal is that it will interest people enough so that they would want to ask more questions about you and get in touch with you.

Having an attention grabbing position statement is not enough. Just as all corporate brands need on-going product development to maintain market leadership, your brand also needs on-going development. To develop Brand “You”, work on developing your key strengths as opposed to only focusing on improving weaknesses. Consider a number of activities to get known and noticed for your best skills and talents such as:

• Volunteer for tough jobs
• Apply your skills to other organizations
• Teach a class,
• Become the “go-to” expert in your field (by reading and continuous learning)
• Develop hobbies that hone your talents
• Take on a freelance project
• Write or blog about it

Well positioned and cutting edge brands need to be promoted. For Brand “You”, networking is your best tool for promotion. One key to using networks is to build and nurture one before you need it. While networking, always be on the look out to help the people you associate with. Be giving and interested in others. Have an action plan for your network.

Some believe that personal branding is the new way to manage your career, as it enables you to create a strategic direction for your career and stay focused on how you create value for your stakeholders (customers, employers, business partners etc).

Additional Reading:

• William Arruda’s web site on personal branding
• Article on networking and personal branding on Marketing Profs web site
• Career Distinction: Stand Out by Building Your Brand, William Arruda and Kirsten Dixson
• The Right Job, Right Now, Susan Strayer
• Career Warfare, David D’Alessandro

Thanks to AMA member Hena Pyada for contributing this piece. Hena analyzes new business opportunities and market segments for the Microcircuit Materials business group within DuPont Electronics Technologies.