What is Personal Branding?
I was recently looking for books about personal branding in the Kindle store, and unfortunately many of them were spam. However, I did find one kernel of wheat in the Amazon chaff, called What Is Personal Branding? How to Create a Memorable & Powerful Brand that Sells YOU! by Murray Newlands and Jim Kukral, that stands apart from the everyday marketing books that marketing types and aspiring marketers might pick up off the shelf.
Newlands and Kukral seek to make a book that’s accessible to ordinary people who want to learn about personal branding without oversimplifying any key concepts. Many books deem this too difficult, and thus aim at only one audience. They are either too technical, which makes them inaccessible to aspiring marketers looking to make money online, or they’re too basic, so professional marketers don’t learn anything new.
Books that try to appeal to both often get stuck in the middle ground by having concepts that professional marketers already know, but are too advanced for beginning marketers to understand. Kukral and Newlands, on the other hand, appeal to both groups. They do not lowering their content to the lowest common denominator, but they keep What is Personal Branding? accessible with easy-to-understand textual illustrations of what they’re trying to convey. Consider the following passage by Newlands:
Three out of four recruiters will look up information about you online, and those who do will use that information to eliminate more than one in three candidates they are considering.
This tells people who don’t have their foot in the door yet to make sure their Facebook profile pic conveys a brand, probably a professional brand, suitable for the job they’re applying to. But it also speaks on a deeper level: You have a personal brand that affects people’s perceptions of you, and even small things like what people find about you online can have dire consequences. In addition, once you’re aware of this brand, Newlands says that you should shape it so that it benefits you:
Taking the responsibility and owning your own personal brand puts you in the driver’s seat, and you will find that your awareness, not only of your brand, but of the way your brand interacts with and affects your business and field overall can be a powerful thing.
Newlands initially sets up a feeling of powerlessness by placing the reader into the perspective of a potential employee who’s just gotten a background check from a potential employer. Here, he flips it by giving the reader a feeling of control, since they can be in control of their personal brand (by shaping it online) instead of letting their brand control them (by not getting a job because of what people find about you online). He reinforces this point again later on, so that the reader is thinking about it before going deeper into the book:
Owning your personal brand means owning your personal future. Personal branding not only allows you to harness what is your essence in the here and now, it gives you the base to build on it as you grow, change, and build for the future.
Throughout the book, Newlands and Kukral use shifts like these to solidify advanced marketing concepts that many professional marketers haven’t even thought about yet. To further distil their knowledge, Newlands and Kukral explain concepts by using metaphors and common situations that most readers have been in. This makes the book easier for beginners to relate to and easier for marketing veterans to quickly learn advanced concepts so that they can take their marketing career to the next level.
Steve Sims
Steve Sims graduated from UC Berkeley in 2011, and now works for a PR and marketing consulting firm in San Francisco.
