Unit D.2.1 Personal branding skills & having digital presence
Personal branding skills &
Personal branding skills and having digital presence
Personal branding skills and having digital presence
Personal branding skills and having digital presence
Branding
What comes to your mind when you first hear of branding? All around us, we are constantly exposed to brands and behind each is a carefully thought out process that was created to give products, services, and even people a unique identity in order to gain a competitive edge.
By definition, a brand is the sum total of its physical elements such as a logo, font, colour and style plus more intangible elements such as beliefs and expectations around products. Its pre-identified target audience is captured by the brand personality that is designed to create perception and image around the product and make it relatable or even admired – meaning it speaks directly to the hearts and minds of its target audience.
Recall a brand that you admire and identify specifically why you like this brand.
Do you like it because of its physical attributes (i.e. how it looks) or what it makes you feel, or what it stands for?
Exploring exactly what makes you like a certain brand can help you start understanding that these factors are not accidental and can be replicated.
Personal Branding
Almost anything can be branded to obtain a unique position in its target audience’s mind. Think about it: if branding and positioning work to gain a competitive advantage for products in a market, then these strategies can also be applied to oneself – to gain an advantage in, for example, the job market.
This particular type of branding is called personal branding. This process includes defining yourself, identifying traits that make you unique and creating a promotions strategy to get yourself ‘out there’. The goal of most personal branding is for professional career development so you would like to think and make decisions towards this direction.
– What is your position in life?
– What is your most important work skill?
– What value do you bring through your work?
– What is your most important accomplishment?
– What do you wish people would celebrate about your career?
– What do you want your professional legacy to be?
These self-reflective questions will help you bring your focus to what exactly makes you unique. What branding teaches us is being everything to everyone will not get us an edge. Ultimately, we are speaking to a specific set of people with wants, needs, desires – the focus would be on meeting these and not everyone else’s, which is impossible.
Every choice – from your name and the choices you make later on – your education, what you choose to learn, who you connect with, where you choose to live, and your interests – all make up your personal brand. Your personal brand is consistently evolving as you make new decisions. Each choice you make for yourself has an association and this in turn creates perception that people recognise and is a huge factor in attractiveness, relatableness, and desirability.
Think of one word that would sum up the choices you make for yourself. For example, it could be that your choices are directed towards well-being, sustainability, or innovation.
To narrow down the focus, this exercise will concentrate on personal branding in order to market yourself and in the process increase your network, gain more opportunities and do work that you value and that you could create value for as well. In personal branding, you will do a deep dive into your personality, values, vision and consequently identify your skills, competencies, and knowledge areas.
To help you define who you are through words (or even images), choose 5 emojis that you think would best describe your personality.
Personal branding is said to be the intersection between reality and perception. This middle portion is the brand that you create for yourself. Reality is as is, but perception can always be adjusted. What’s important is to create a balance, to remain authentic but focus on your unique attributes and tell a story around these.
Much like in product or service branding, we can identify brand identity elements that can be the foundations of your personal brand. This begs the question: what do you want to stand for?
Personal Brand Identity Elements
1. Professional Attributes – identity in the context of a career, such as your field of study, work industry, profession, job title, and the hard and soft skills that you have (i.e. creative, innovative ,intuitive, analytic, growth-minded, detail-oriented).
2. Personality – key attributes that you want to stand out from your personality (i.e. meticulous, detail-oriented, organised, loyal).
3. Relationship – how you want others to relate to you (i.e. friend, mother, colleague, manager, equal)
4. Imagery – would refer to the style and metaphors that are associated with you specifically on a physical level (i.e. wearing colourful clothes, having artistic photos, a particular way of speaking).
Identify your four personal brand identity elements to help you build the foundations for your personal brand and write them in your notebook 
1. Professional Attributes
2. Personality
3. Relationship
4. Imagery
