Welcome to the first part of our 10-part series on Building a Powerful Personal Brand. It’s going to be an exciting journey!

When we consult with clients in organisations, we often encounter their frustration at not being taken seriously. In fact, if you are in any service division of an organisation, this is a persistent threat. Because your contribution to the bottom line is often more complex to illustrate, line managers may be prone to underplaying your value in the organisation.

One way to counter that is to build a powerful, credible personal brand. Over the course of the next 10 weeks, we’ll be helping you to build a personal brand that will:

  • Enhance your credibility
  • Accelerate your career growth
  • Help you to enjoy your work more

Each week, we’ll cover an important principle of personal brand building, and each week, we’ll give you a homework assignment to complete. Make sure to try these: that’s the sure-fire way of building brand: You!

Here’s a short (but powerful) branding principle for you to start with:

Brand You: Know your target market.

When advertisers select how to market their products, they try and find out as much about the target market as possible. In other words, who is buying what we’re trying to sell? For brand you, your target audience is often your direct managers, senior officials, and colleagues. If people report to you, your subordinates are an important subset of that audience.

Some important questions to ask yourself are:

  • Do I understand my target audience?
  • What are their day-to-day concerns and challenges?
  • If I could magically change one aspect of the way they worked, what would it be?
  • Is my brand appealing to them?

If you haven’t got good answers to these questions, don’t panic. Finding answers is the first step to constructing a powerful Brand:You!

A key step in this journey is to address your target audience’s pain. If you can associate your personal brand with the solution (at least in part) to what’s keeping them up at night, you’re on the right track!

Next Time:

In next week’s instalment, we’ll cover more practical steps on how to become a powerful brand in the minds of your target market. And just in case you thought we forgot, here’s your homework:

Explore some of the questions above. Try and discover more about what your target audience needs from someone in your position. Is it quick reaction times? Pro-active decision-making, or perhaps sage advice? Knowing what they want is key to Brand:You!


Thanks for reading the first in our series in Building a Powerful Personal Brand. We’d love to hear from you in the comments of each post as we go along — so let us know if you have any questions, or comments, or if you’re finding this series useful.