Brand You, Brand Me
Brand Building is neither a science nor an art. I believe the answers lies somewhere in between. Anyone with a bit of knowledge on Marketing would understand a Brand Life Cycle. In the initial days of the brand, it is important for the brand owner to put in a lot of effort, time and resources to make the brand ‘well-known’, ‘asked for’ and successful. Once it reaches the plateau (Maturity), it is important for the brand owner to derive the best value out of the brand.
At some point, it is important for everyone to put themselves in the place of a brand and view themselves through this magic mirror. Which part of the life cycle does the brand ‘you’ belong to, what kind of effort needs to invent / re-invent oneself, grow and mature and make money out of the ‘brand you’.
I believe that it is possible to consider oneself as a brand and ‘build it’. By employing almost every technique that you would for a brand on yourself, it is possible to achieve great brand salience for yourselves amongst your peers, industry and the market in general.
Let’s take a few key issues that one needs to answer which would help in building a great personal brand.
Values & attributes: There has to be a bunch of values that you would stand for at a very fundamental and honest level. It is important that you identify them because those are the key elements which will bring you happiness. If you are not honest here, then you would probably land a great job or be known in the social circles, but you would never be able to experience happiness when you are by yourself. Choose your words carefully. Similarly there must be a few attributes (adjectives), which would define you as a personality. This would outline the kind of jobs you should get into for success to follow.
SWOT: Standard operating procedure in understanding and presenting oneself in front of others. By understanding the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats you are clearly defining your every move in making a good brand of yourself.
Research: Any brand requires a bit of research to understand where it stands, what position it can take and what needs to be done to reach the desired goal. You are no different. It is important to do your own research (qualitatively or quantitatively) on where you stand on various parameters. This could include not just your area of operation but also finer details like soft skills, leadership qualities etc.
TG: Every brand stands for some values to a certain set of audience. From 50000 feet, Coke is a serious soda, while Pepsi is the irreverent, yuppy, generation now kind of soda. The TG is clearly defined. Similarly, you need to clearly delineate who you are catering to. It is possible to do so at every sphere of work. You can be a Customer Service Person, but clearly delineating yourself to be a CS resource in a BPO, Telecom company or Technology company can be possible. It is just a function of understanding where you want to be and who would be your consumer. At a different level, you can provide a different message to different people without lying. And the overall brand message (what you stand for) can still be the same. If you doubt it, read an earlier post here.
Competition: Less said the better. However, by understanding your competition in a given space, you would be able to position yourself better in your consumer’s mind. If it is a job offer where you are pitted against say 2 others with a similar skill set, by positioning yourself as a better leader, it is possible to attract your TG. Many times, many brands sell for some reason totally different from what it fundamentally stands for. Just look out for the Nissan Micra advertisement and you would realize that the car is being sold on a premise that it doesn’t need a key to operate. But a car is supposed to give you ‘driving experience’, mileage, comfort, maneuverability etc. What Nissan does is not wrong at all. But is just a proof of concept that you can be a great Customer Service Resource, but the prime reason for choosing you over someone else could be ‘Leadership’.
Finally, I would like to leave with a thought.
Operate within your sphere of influence. Example: Rajnikant. If the radius of his sphere of influence is 3 kms, you will always find that he is operating at the epicenter. You would seldom find a movie where the title is not based on the character he plays, where he is not introduced with a song, where he does impossible things to win over the heroine and annihilate the felon. This is a thought germ for a complete post in itself. However, I have used Rajnikant as an example for the perfect brand manager of brand ‘Rajnikant’. If he can do it, any one of us can. I am just working on it. 
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