[ad_1]
What is a Personal Brand and Why Do You Need a Brand?
Personal branding is the idea of creating a brand around a person rather than a business or product. Just as a business brand helps the business attract the right kind of customers and sell its products, it is useful because it helps you become more memorable and identifiable. Whether you want to advance your career in the workforce or are the face of your own business, you need to make sure your personal brand represents the best version of you to make the biggest impact. It can help you position yourself as an expert in your industry, grow your social following and get better jobs or customers, and sell more products (no matter what you think of them personally, the Kardashians are experts at using their personal brands to sell their own and other companies’ products) .
If you want more credibility or want to be noticed more for the right reasons, it’s well worth a conscious effort to build a unique personal brand. As Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, said, “A personal brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.” This creates an impression of you from others’ experiences of you plus your reputation and how you present yourself (both in person and online). The mental picture people have of you when you leave the room is something you have some control over.
Building your personal brand won’t happen overnight, but if you stay consistent and aligned with your image and message, your personal brand will become identifiable with you. It’s easy to think of examples like Oprah or Richard Branson as strong personal brands that are easily identifiable and we know something about their values, vision, and mission.
What is Personal Brand Image?
It is a visual representation of your vision, mission and values, which are the elements that make up your personal brand. It is how you present yourself through your image, what you wear, what you carry, how you act. Both verbal and nonverbal (body language, grooming, clothing, etc.) form part of your personal brand image. Your style comes into play here as it is a silent form of communication, but it has great power to help or hinder you in life.
Your personal brand image is one of the ways to market yourself, your skills and expertise. It helps you gain control over how others perceive you and how accurate the picture is of who you are, what you represent, and how you want to be known.
What you wear is an important part of your personal brand, helps tell the story of who you are and supports what you say.
Consistency is the Key to a Strong Brand Image
Duck branding at Peabody Hotel
In 2012 I went to an AICI conference at The Peabody Hotel in Orlando Florida (no longer a Peabody hotel, the original Peabody in Memphis Tennesee still has local duck residents). Peabody’s brand symbol is ducks ( here’s the history of how ducks became such a part of the hotel image) and are truly consistent with brand awareness (yes, they are duck-shaped) from the signage to the soap to the bath mats to the buttery dough. Each room has at least 2 works of art featuring ducks, and at 11:00 and 17:00 daily the Peabody ducks walk the red carpet to and from the hotel fountain where they spend their day.
What does this have to do with personal style or fashion? Peabody is very consistent with their branding message and flows throughout the entire hotel experience, you know that if there’s going to be an animal motif, it’s a duck motif, not a giraffe in one room and a lion in the next.
Consistency is really important when considering your personal brand. We all have a personal brand, it’s the 5 or 6 words others tend to use to describe us. Fortunately, we can control to some extent how we are perceived when choosing the clothes we wear, the hairstyles we sport, the makeup applications (drag queen, natural girl, etc.), and we can also control our behavior and communication styles.
Even the toilet paper in The Peabody is duck-themed
You also know that Peabody is known for ducks, memorable because of their brand image that helped them become more widely recognized.
Consistency builds trust, so it’s a crucial part of building a positive personal brand image.
How do you translate this idea into your personal brand image and style?
If I want to be perceived as lazy, all I have to do is wear clothes that are constantly wrinkled, wrinkled, stained, or frayed. If I want to be perceived as in control, I always make sure that I do my hair and make-up well, rather than bothering sometimes to do my hair and makeup, and sometimes to groom it, and not worry about other days.
When you choose your clothing and grooming, you decide how you want to be perceived and what your personal brand is. It’s worth taking the time to think about what you want to achieve, your goals in life, and align them with your appearance, behavior, and communication so that you can get what you want out of life more easily.
I’m not saying you have to wear exactly the same outfit every day (but that works for some, think Steve Jobs) or a very similar outfit every day (think Anna Wintour), but your style and image need to be identifiable to you. and somehow consistent. If you dress like a pirate one day and a princess the next, if your personal brand isn’t all storybook characters, you won’t be seen as consistent and make your message confusing and inconsistent.
Originality is Mandatory
Building a personal brand image that is not unique is something that often backfires quickly. Trying to be someone you’re not will make you see you as a fraud rather than trustworthy. It is very easy to want to present the perfect image, but no one is perfect. It’s time to deal with your quirks. Rather than trying to copy yourself into someone else’s style, what makes you memorable is what makes you different. As they say, “be you, everyone is taken”. The originals we remember (because cover groups don’t change the world).
Being authentic is something we all adore, and when you’re real, you don’t have to manage your image the way you should if you’re trying to be someone you’re not really. Admiring someone else’s image doesn’t mean it’s right for you. It usually works for them because it is authentic and original to them, but if you try to copy it you will come across as a weak imitation. Even something as simple as the colors you wear on your clothes can express this, for example, as a friend said the other day. “I love your outfit, I would love to have all of these, these colors look great together and I would love to wear it”.
Now, this friend of mine has a very contrasting color to me – she’s warm and brunette, I’m cool and light, so if she’s wearing my outfit, it wouldn’t suit her. The reason she enjoyed (and wanted) to see it on me was because it worked for my coloring and was a good representation of my personal style and brand image. If he did, he looked pale and would be jarring rather than flattering. But she looks amazing when she wears her best colors, and that really portrays her own beauty in a better light.
Building a positive and authentic personal brand image can help you elevate yourself, your career, your business to new heights and increase your chances of success. You or I may never be as big of a brand as Oprah or any of the Kardashians, but a strong personal brand image in our own worlds will help open up opportunities that might not otherwise exist for you.
Where Your Personal Brand Appears
In this digital age, when you meet people face to face, you don’t have to worry only about your image, all these video conferences and any social media are places where people can experience you (even if they’ve never met you) and form opinions. You and what do you represent? That’s why it’s important how you present yourself everywhere. You want to be seen as positive and also help you set yourself apart from others (which is why you should embrace your quirks rather than try to hide them). From your LinkedIn profile photo Instagram Feed, people who want to learn more about you and your abilities will often check you out online before meeting you. If what you offer in these areas is different from what you are in the real world, it will be much harder to build trust and get the opportunities you want to come your way.
Start Building Your Personal Brand Image
If you want to start truly grasping your personal brand image, building a brand that authentically represents who you are and allows you to communicate your values and vision, then learn more about me. Style Level Up program This helps expert women build a strongly aligned personal brand image.
More Tips to Help You Define Your Personal Brand Image
Why Does Having an Inconsistent Style Damage Your Personal Brand?
[ad_2]
Source link