The document discusses personal branding, a concept popularized by Tom Peters in 1997, which involves marketing oneself by defining and communicating unique attributes to achieve specific goals. Key principles include authenticity, transparency, and visibility, with advantages such as promotions, happiness, and compensation. The personal branding process consists of discovering, creating, communicating, and maintaining one's brand, tailored for different career stages from high school to entrepreneurship.

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PERSONAL BRANDING
BRIEF HISTORY
The discovery, understanding and marketing of an individual‘s unique attributes is a concept
brought to the mainstream by Tom Peters in 1997 with his seminal article ―‘The Brand Called
You’. Since that time, numerous books, articles and websites have emerged to help individuals
develop a "brand plan". Personal branding called for everyone to become a “free agent,” which
not everyone bought into back then
WHAT IS PERSONAL BRANDING?
Personal branding is the practice of marketing oneself to society. It is the process by which
individuals differentiate themselves by identifying and articulating their unique value proposition
and then leveraging it across platforms with a consistent message and image to achieve a specific
goal. An individual’s personal brand is a reflection of his or her skills, abilities and lifestyle.
According to Dan Schwabel (Managing Partner of Millennial Branding, a Gen Y research and
consulting firm), Personal branding is how we market ourselves to others. Simply put, ‘your
personal brand is you’. It’s who you are. It’s your skills, the way you carry yourself, your
individuality, your traits, your persona. It’s what you can do and what void you fill that no one
else can. You can’t fake it.
Personal brands are built on being genuine and letting people see you as you really are. -Lisa
Barone, BruceClay.com
Developing a personal brand is an ongoing process that involves interactions with others in face-
to-face communication and online. Students need to understand and deliberately cultivate their
digital presence. Educators need to teach students about the social processes and artifacts that
influence perception so that students can better maintain and control their personal brand.
According to Tom Peters,
“Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us
need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To
be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.”
THREE LAWS OF PERSONAL BRANDING
✓ Authenticity
✓ Transparency
✓ Visibility

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Authenticity: You need to be yourself because everyone else is taken and replicas don’t sell for
as much. Furthermore, you need to define your brand before someone else does for you!
Transparency: It’s better to be straightforward and honest, than lie, and have your actions work
against you.
Visibility: The notion that if you aren’t known, you don’t exist.
ADVANTAGES OF PERSONAL BRANDING
➢ Promotions: Anyone who is ambitious and works at a company will want to move up. By
building a personal brand, one becomes the best choice for a promotion.
➢ Happiness: By aligning who we are with what we do and appending goals to it, we can
turn “work” into a “hobby.” We can position ourselves on a topic we love, so that we get
paid to do what we would count as a hobby.
➢ Compensation: Personal brands command premium prices. Just like Apple and Google
Pixel can charge more for products we can get for less, we can do the same.
➢ Business: People want to purchase from other people who they know, like, trust. When we
make those people happy that they chose us, by giving them great results, they will refer
us to even more people.
➢ Perks: Strong brands get perks. For instance, famous celebrities, like Halley Berry or
Rajnikanth don’t have to pay for anything because of who they are.
PERSONAL BRANDING PROCESS (DCCM)
1. Discover your Brand: The first thing you need to do is to figure out who you are, what you
want to do in life, while focusing on your strengths, passions and goals. After that, you should
create a development plan that aligns your short-term and long-term goals and, finally, a personal
marketing plan.
DISCOVER CREATE COMMUNICATE MAINTAIN

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Insights about YOU Insights from others
• Goals • How do others describe you?
• Personal Drivers • What are the three compliments people make
about you?
• Values • What about you makes people stop, watch
and say WOW?
• What are you passionate about?
• What are you known for?
• What do you have answers to?
2. Create your Brand: There are traditional and non-traditional ways to create your personal
brand. The traditional ways include a business card, professional portfolio, resume, cover
letter and references document. The non-traditional ways include, a video resume, LinkedIn
profile, blog, Twitter and your existence on the various other social networks. While you create
your brand, ensure that the content, including pictures and text, are concise, compelling and
consistent with how you want to represent yourself.
• Identify your target audience
• Write a professional profile for your target audience “You are the only person on earth who
can (Should also be on the top of your resume)
• Understand your “unique value proposition” use your own ability”
• Answer why are you the “go-to-person” for your field/area of expertise?
(accomplishments)
• Find five personal brand attributes (strengths)
o Strategy
o Competition
o Achiever
o Woo (winning others over)
o Positivity
Personally and professionally it is important to know what makes you different.
So get to know what exactly makes you great and learn to communicate it!
Very few candidates, vendors or competitors are able to quickly and effectively communicate their
strengths. Memorize your strengths and understand how they can apply to your next client,
employer, etc.
3. Communicate your Brand: After you’ve created your brand, it is only natural (and human
instinct) that you want people to see what you’ve done. Depending on your audience (hiring
manager, teacher, clients), you may want to tweek your materials accordingly. To properly
communicate your brand, through self-promotion, you need to have your story down pat and find
the right sources that would be interested in what you have to say.

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• Create a Communications Plan
• Select a combination of vehicles to reach your Brands target audience and that play to your
strengths
• Develop a timeline to implement that supports constancy in your communications
• Remember Clarity, Consistency, Constancy = (Transparency)
4. Maintain your Brand: As you grow, the brand people see has to grow at the same time. For
every new job, award, press article, and client victory (to name a few), everything you have created
has to reflect that. The reason is simple:
Also, as you become more popular, your reputation will be knocked around and tossed throughout
the web, from blog post, to tweet, to video, and more. You’ll want to keep a close eye on where
your name is.
• Search for information about yourself online? “Google” yourself; set up Google Alert
• Be consistent ; “walk your talk”
• Assess your brand regularly (Linkedin)
• Gather feedback (ask others for recommendations)
• Evolve to stay relevant - The best brands are flexible (multiple copies of your resume)
PERSONAL BRANDING DEPENDS ON CAREER STATUS
❖ High school student: If you’re in high school, personal branding still applies to you because
getting into a top college is very competitive. Your goal is to position yourself as worth of
a top school, so getting good grades, good SAT’s, interviewing at schools, networking with
alumni who can endorse you, writing a compelling essay and all things social media, will
help you.
❖ College student: A college student is interested in either getting an internship, starting a
business or getting a corporate job upon graduation. They have to compete on experience
and network extremely hard in order to get a job. They need to position themselves as
superior relative to their peers. This means, becoming a leader in college organizations,
meeting as many people as you can, forming a personal branding toolkit and starting when
you’re a freshman are critical to your success.
❖ Corporate employee: If you work for a company, and enjoy doing so, then personal
branding becomes the cornerstone for how you move up the hierarchy and become
recognized as a leader.
You want to use what you did in the past to get what you want in the future.

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❖ Entrepreneur: An entrepreneur needs to think about branding his or her company, as well
as him or herself in the process of establishing a business. The entrepreneurs brand must
reflect the company, yet be set apart from it simultaneously. The entrepreneurs brand is
VERY important in securing venture capital. For instance, if Jason Calacanis wanted seed
money, he has a better chance of getting it than someone without a track record of success
(he sold Weblogs Inc for millions).
❖ Consultant: These individuals are obviously all about personal branding because it’s all
they got. Many consultants brand themselves as masters of a specific trade (at least the
good ones). They are able to track value and attribute it to the work they provide for clients.
PERSONAL BRANDING EXAMPLES
Neil Patel:
“Teaches us to Interact With our Audience”
Recognized by the former President Barack Obama as top 100 entrepreneur under 30, Neil Patel
is a world-renowned digital marketing expert. Neil is the co-founder of Quick Sprout,
KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and, most importantly to our topic of personal brand examples
here, Neil Patel Digital. If we take a look at Neil Patel’s blog, we’ll notice that almost every blog
post has 200+ comments. More importantly, we’ll notice that Neil replies to almost every single
comment, which is something his audience really appreciates. Neil’s close interaction with his
audience adds extra credibility to what he does and helps build his personal brand image.
The Man – Ratan TATA:
A similar case of the impact of personal branding can be observed in the Cyrus Mistry – TATA
situation. The reputation of the TATA brand took an immediate hit due to the fiasco. However, as
soon as Ratan Tata returned to the company, the TATA stocks soared up and recovered quite well.
Ratan Tata has a great reputation in the market. The market trusts the stature of someone like him.
A great social figure, a great philanthropist, a great trust figure, he actually banked on his charisma
or personal branding to take his company out of a sticky situation.