Personal brand - introduction
When we apply to advertised posts, the basic strategy we use is to work out what the employer wants and then try to show how we match those requirements.
But if we are intending to take a more active approach, we need to think about what kind of message to portray before we meet people. It’s important to have a very clear idea of what we offer and are about – and to be able to express that in a few words or key terms.
One way to do this is to learn from the way businesses create messages about their products – through Branding.
‘Brand’ is a fairly modern idea and central to the study and operation of modern marketing. Brand is about a set of characteristics associated with a trade name or range of products. Although we may have our own ideas about the products, branding attempts to influence by creating and promoting the right kind of associations.
If we apply this principle to ourselves, it means having thought consciously about the key messages we want to get across to those we will be meeting, and how we communicate them. Personal branding is a way of paring our personal message down to the essence – what is really important about you and how do you express that?