Business

Your personal brand is your reputation: the impression you leave with the people with whom you interact, their perception of you.

Your personal brand is your reputation: the impression you leave with the people with whom you interact, their perception of you. Your personal brand reflects the aura and impact of the choices you’ve made in life and how you present yourself to the world: mode of dress, communication style, profession, educational level, values and priorities, how and with whom you socialize.

Primarily for professional reasons, it is a smart idea to connect selected dots that you wish to emphasize and create a narrative that will communicate to prospective clients or employers, VIPs and colleagues that you bring value and relevance and that professional or social affiliations with you are worthwhile.

Fail to proactively build and advance a personal brand that conveys integrity and competence and you risk being denied numerous opportunities in life. Take control of the professional and social aspects of your personal brand and do whatever possible to create a destiny and legacy that have a positive impact. Create a story that succinctly communicates your story, or brand narrative, to the world. Portions of your brand narrative will be included in your curriculum vitae, bio, website, press kit, LinkedIn and Facebook pages. As you write your brand narrative, keep in mind three attributes that form the pillars of an excellent personal brand:

Authentic
The self you present to the world must reflect your expertise and experience, core values and beliefs. Have the courage to be your best self. Emphasize the relevant. Acknowledge your expertise and what you enjoy doing. Be compassionate. Pay it forward. Keep it real.

Consistent
People want to know what to expect when they plan to interact with someone. We trust that which is dependable and reliable. Meet or exceed client expectations. Keep your promises. Monitor your choices, for at some point you’ll need to respectfully decline certain offers because they do not appropriately reflect your brand. As the late, great Diana Vreeland, former editor-in-chief at both Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue Magazines once said, “Elegance is refusal.”

Coherent
In line with Ms. Vreeland’s famous quote, choose to live your brand and that means you must learn to say no. Your lifestyle: the associations that you join, social comrades, causes with which you align and skill sets that you promote must all reflect your brand and fit within the narrative. Surround yourself with people who respect and support your life choices and who do not undermine your goals and values. Carefully manage your time and resources in ways that will open the door and welcome your preferred future.

I think “brand” is one of those words that is widely used but unevenly understood. What does “brand” mean, and how has the word’s application changed over time?

Language is supposed to illuminate meaning, but it doesn’t always work that way.  As usage evolves, definitions become unmoored, and different people start using the same word to mean entirely different things.

I think “brand” is one of those words that is widely used but unevenly understood.  What does “brand” mean, and how has the word’s application changed over time?

The first definition of “brand” is the name given to a product or service from a specific source.  Used in this sense, “brand” is similar to the current meaning of the word “trademark.”

More than a century ago, cattle ranchers used branding irons to indicate which animals were theirs.   As the cattle moved across the plains on their way to Chicago slaughter houses, it was easy to determine which ranches they were from because each head of cattle was branded.

With the rise of packaged goods in the 19th century, producers put their mark on a widening array of products—cough drops, flour, sugar, beer—to indicate their source.  In the late 1880s, for example, as the Coca-Cola Company was getting started, there were many soda producers in every market.  Before Coca-Cola could get a customer to reach for a Coke, it needed to be sure the customer could distinguish a Coke from all the other fizzy caramel-colored beverages out there.

In the first sense of the word, then, a brand is simply the non-generic name for a product that tells us the source of the product.  A Coke is a fizzy caramel-colored soda concocted by those folks in Atlanta.

In earlier times, we referred to these non-generic names as “brand names.”  When Baby Boomers like me were growing up, marketers might have said that Proctor & Gamble sold a laundry detergent under the brand name Tide.  Nowadays, people would simply say P&G sells the Tide brand of laundry detergent.  Problem is, the shorthand suggests there’s no difference between a brand name and a brand.  But, in contemporary marketing, there is.

Beginning in the later part of the 20th century, marketers began to grasp there was more to the perception of distinctive products and services than their names—something David Ogilvy described as “the intangible sum of a product’s attributes.”  Marketers realized that they could create a specific perception in customers’ minds concerning the qualities and attributes of each non-generic product or service.  They took to calling this perception “the brand.”

Put simply, your “brand” is what your prospect thinks of when he or she hears your brand name.  It’s everything the public thinks it knows about your name brand offering—both factual (e.g. It comes in a robin’s-egg-blue box), and emotional (e.g. It’s romantic).  Your brand name exists objectively; people can see it.  It’s fixed.  But your brand exists only in someone’s mind.

In fact, one of the ways we sometimes see that a brand is growing stronger is when its customers start referring to it by something different from its brand name.  Think “FedEx” or “Tar-jé.”  This only happens when customers feel enough of a relationship with a product to bestow it with a nickname—which, in the cases I just mentioned, happily reinforce the brand attributes Federal Express and Target seek to promote:  speed and efficiency for the former and affordable chic for the latter.  But sometimes, customer perceptions can be a headache for brand managers.  Natural and organic food retailer Whole Foods Market has been struggling for years to shed the moniker “Whole Paycheck,” which captures public perceptions of what it costs to shop in the store.

From now on, We’ll use “brand name” to refer to the name signifying the source of a product or service, and “brand” to refer to the perception customers have about that product or service.