Tips For Being Head Marketer For The Brand Called You

Let’s face it: Today’s workplace is more virtual and less hierarchical than ever. That means a lot of things for career builders. For one, personal branding is no longer just “nice to have.” It’s a must.

Taking a strategic approach to personal branding can help you in a wide range of situations. You’re seeking a dramatic career change? Check. You want to stand out from the crowd in our newly remote world? Check. Looking to attract a higher caliber of clients? Check.

Your positioning, Catherine Kaputa says, sets up everything: Your value proposition, your brand “personality,” your elevator pitch, the way you dress and present yourself visually, the way you talk, and the way you market yourself.

Who’s Catherine Kaputa? She’s an award-winning author and a personal branding expert whose clients include the likes of Google, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Intel, and Merck. Her latest book is The New Brand You: How to Wow in the New World of Work.

She writes about ten Positioning Strategies:

• Innovator – Forward thinkers attracted to the creativity of innovation
• Leader – Goal-oriented, strong motivators of the people around them
• Maverick – Ambitious rebels always up for the challenge and defying convention
• Attribute – Possess the skill, strength, or characteristic that sets them apart from the crowd
• Engineer – Problem solvers who reimagine the status quo to make something better
• Target Market – Community builders who are great at creating connections, inspiring loyalty, and meeting an audience’s needs
• Elite – Connected, experienced, in-demand industry influencers
• Heritage – Special backgrounds in education, training, experience, or culture
• Cause – Crusaders for a greater good

Each branding strategy is designed to help leverage personality, preferences, and abilities. This, in turn, reveals the best ways to market yourself both in person and online.

Rodger Dean Duncan: A lot of people think of “branding” as little more than the logo on a bottle of shampoo or the tagline in a TV commercial. What exactly is branding when it comes to individual humans who want to be differentiated in the marketplace?

Catherine Kaputa: Personal branding is about applying principles and strategies from the commercial world of brands to the most important brand challenge of all…branding yourself. Begin by finding your differentiator, the unique value you bring to a business situation and why it matters. Your brand positioning must be a focused idea. The mistake many people make is trying to appeal to everyone and end up appealing to no one. You’re looking for a different idea. You need to be able to fill in the blank: Unlike others who do what I do, I ______. And finally, your brand idea must be relevant in the current marketplace, not yesterday’s news. For example, a professional in a dynamic industry beset by mergers positioned herself as “an innovative leader in the converging worlds of technology, media and communications.” Once you have your brand idea, personal branding entails everything you do to build visibility for Brand You in the minds of your target audience.

Duncan: Early in your advertising career you, learned to think “Outside-In.” What does that mean in the advertising world, and how does it apply to building a personal brand?

Kaputa: Outside-In is a brand strategy that puts customers first and foremost in brand development. To brand yourself well, you need to begin with your “customers” first too. Your customers are everyone you need to influence to achieve your goals. If you work at a company, your customers are likely to be your boss, colleagues, and senior managers. If you’re an entrepreneur, it’s the buyers of your products and services. One way of looking at Outside-In is to put together a “customer persona,” a detailed description or visualization of your customers. What needs do your customers have (Outside), and how can you satisfy them (In)? By beginning with customers first, a business advisor saw an overlooked opportunity and focused his practice solely on family-owned businesses and their unique issues.

Duncan: What are the first steps a person should take in defining—and then building on—his or her personal brand?

Kaputa: When you start your self-branding journey, don’t get muddled with the “facts” in the beginning. Start with creative brainstorming. The best ideas often come through intuition and hypothesizing before you do any analysis. Deep down we know how best to position and market ourselves. The next step is to do a personal brand audit. Marketers often use a handy analysis called the SWOT analysis, a snapshot look at a brand’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. You should too. You must define your target audience and your competitors. You need to know your key competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. You’re looking for the “white space,” a differentiating idea that no one else owns and that meets a need in the marketplace. For example, a physical therapist calls her practice “Slow Motions for Seniors” to convey her unique exercise program.

Duncan: You write about ten specific positioning strategies for self-branding (you offer a free online assessment) to help people identify their positioning advantage. But what about people who plausibly have multiple strengths—like a Leader who’s also a proven Expert?

Kaputa: It may be counterintuitive, but you are stronger when you narrow your focus. The Law of Singularity in branding says you have to be ruthless as you edit your brand story. You don’t want to be a “I can do everything brand.” Complexity will doom you, but two different strengths can be united in a bigger, focused concept. For example, a colleague in financial services wanted to move to a dynamic digital marketing agency. He branded himself as a rare bird, a “creative business person,” with the tagline, “Mind of a business man and the soul of a creative.” Another colleague who was a popular leader at her company built her brand around the idea of the “empathetic leader.” When you have a singular brand idea, something unexpected happens. You eventually become known for your one positioning idea.

Duncan: Which of the ten positioning strategies seem to have the strongest appeal in today’s marketplace?

Kaputa: We are in a time of rapid change driven by new technologies and a global marketplace, and a shift in leadership from Boomers to Millennials and Gen Z. Here are 4 positioning strategies that should thrive in the new world of work:

• Innovators: Forward-thinking individuals who see unique opportunities for innovation in a global marketplace. (Think: Dietrich Mateschitz and Red Bull)
• Leaders: Inspirational leaders who quickly adapt to changing marketing conditions and new technologies (Think Tim Cook and Apple)
• Mavericks: Game changers with a contrary mindset who are hard-wired for challenge. (Think: Elon Musk and SpaceX and Tesla)
• Cause Crusaders: Millennials and Gen Z who are crusaders for solving important global issues. (Think: Greta Thunberg and climate change)

Duncan: In today’s marketplace, what are some of the new realities that people must navigate as they clarify and promote their personal brands?

Kaputa: Futurists are predicting the rise of “new work” and the demise of old work, and that can get you worried as a colleague discovered. A traditional marketer, she had no experience in social media marketing and digital analysis. Rather than join the dinosaurs, she build her digital credentials by taking courses and attending digital conferences. Another new reality is the threat of invisibility if you choose to work remotely and your boss and colleagues are in-office. Don’t assume your work will speak for itself. It’s your job to get your work in front of the right people, as a colleague discovered when his boss started asking questions like: “How long did this project take?” He realized that he not only needed to do more frequent project updates, he also needed to do more one-to-one, real-time contact with his teammates to be more visible and connected to the culture.

Duncan: What role does storytelling play in building a personal brand?

Kaputa: Storytelling is a lesson from the Madison Avenue playbook. Marketers are master storytellers who wrap their brands in imaginative stories. You need to be a storyteller too. Story is powerful because logic and analysis doesn’t persuade as well as emotions do. So in meetings, don’t have a rote description of a project, tell the story of how you and your team made it happen, and the unexpected obstacles that you had to overcome. If you start using a relevant, interesting story (a minute or two in length) to bring a project to life, chances are the one thing that people will remember about your presentation is the story.

Duncan: Some people, even if they have great credentials, are simply uncomfortable with self-promotion. What’s your advice for helping them get past their reluctance?

Kaputa: Branding can be subtle or grating, up-to-date or out-of-date, engaging or self-centered, but if you don’t participate you will be left behind. Your choice is not whether you’ll participate in personal branding, you are participating! You’re choice is whether you will take control of your brand or not. Personal branding is especially important in the new world of work with hybrid, remote and in-person working. It’s easy to be invisible and that’s never good. People are going to google you and their going to find a strong brand, a weak one or nothing. Remember, if you don’t brand yourself, other people will. And I guarantee you, they won’t brand you in the way you want to be branded.

Duncan: How can clarifying their personal brands help people who are already in the jobs they want and who have no desire for change?

Kaputa: You may have no desire for change, but the world is changing around you, like it or not. Last year the tech sector was thriving, now many tech firms are laying off thousands of employees. No one knows what will happen next. There will be one constant, though: We all need to be active producers of our own brand narrative in-person and online. You may think you have job security in a government job, but your never know. A colleague who faced unexpected upheaval at his government agency, positioned himself as “a government relations expert with a unique heritage in local, regional and national government” and built a strong profile on social media like LinkedIn and other activities to take charge of his brand.

Duncan: As people gain experience and “career maturity,” how can they ensure that their branding strategies remain relevant?

Kaputa: To be successful and stay in the game, you always need to be perceived as relevant. We spend too much time simply plodding ahead that we don’t see opportunities or threats to our livelihood. Make some time to ruminate about what’s happening in your company and industry, and how it affects you. It’s important to know how others perceive you. What does your boss complement you on, and criticize you for? Are you involved in important new projects and meetings? Ask colleagues for feedback after a presentation. Set up a Zoom call or coffee with a trusted colleague. Tell them you are exploring personal branding and wanted to get their feedback. Ask open-ended questions like, “What words or strengths come to mind when you think of me in a career setting?” You might be surprised what you learn.