You Have More Than One Personal Brand

You Have More Than One Personal Brand â€" Take Advantage Of This Flexibility Much has been written already about how to maximize your personal brand, and a lot of the main target is on consistency. With companies, you see it of their advertising: Apple is about design; Walmart is about low prices.; Fedex is about dependable supply. With individuals, those with a powerful personal model are identified for something particular â€" Martha Stewart for domesticity, Oprah Winfrey for authenticity. While it's true that consistency helps branding, the fact is that people (and companies) are extra complicated than a single tag line or marketing campaign. You have a number of pursuits in life so you could have multiple personal model. You may be a advertising supervisor AND a spouse AND a father or mother AND a marathoner. You will know totally different individuals in each sphere, and they're going to brand you based mostly on what they know in that area. Even if you're not consciously branding as Jane’s mother, the mother and father of Jane’s classmates most like ly consider you this manner. On the opposite hand, your running group might not even know you’re a mom. How many times have we met somebody in an informal context and are surprised after we be taught what they do for a dwelling (or vice versa)! Given the fact that we have already got multiple, not just one personal model, we should always take advantage of that flexibility and never be afraid to current ourselves on multiple fronts. Here are some considerations in choosing the private model you want to put ahead: Focus on the world that positions you in one of the best mild. I coached a stay-at-residence mom who didn’t suppose potential employers would worth her contributions because of her lengthy hole in conventional employment. But she also headed a number of community packages and was a record-breaking fundraiser. I guarantee that individuals in her applications noticed dollar signs earlier than they noticed her mother expertise. Yet she all the time branded herself as retur ning to the workforce (the “mother” as personal brand) as a substitute of specializing in ways she never actually left (the “program leader” model). When she finally repositioned herself to steer together with her accomplishments, she discovered herself in demand from several companies for sales and business development roles. Focus on the place you want to go, not what you’ve been doing. An skilled financial companies government is excited about leaving that space for non-earnings in girls’s leadership. She volunteers in key positions in a number of women’s management packages and is already nicely-regarded in that area. Yet her professional bio makes little mention of this and instead focuses on her lengthy record of monetary companies-related bonafides. While her track report in FS is spectacular and longer in actual period, her new monitor document in ladies’s causes is equally substantial. If she wants to begin being seen as a leader in the ladies’s leadership area, she must focus her story there, regardless of whether there is extra time spent within the other areas. Expand your network to broaden your brand. Sometimes individuals who have identified you for a very long time have bother seeing you in a new means. You had been all the time the finance individual, so they can’t see you in non-revenue. This is understandable â€" you might be altering, and they aren't. Get some new friends! Seriously, you don’t should drop the old ones, but if you’re critical about rebranding your self in a particular way, broaden your network to new people who never knew the old you and don’t have to be satisfied. (As you e mail people to network, don’t neglect to customize your e mail signature as a part of your personal brand!) You don’t have just one personal model. It evolves over time. It is totally different depending on what you prioritize presently. It is totally different day-by-day in the sense that all of us have multidimensional liv es. Use this to your benefit. Proactively select how you convey your personal model. You already have lots to work with, so don’t feel like you have to do one thing drastic â€" like spend six-figures on a graduate diploma â€" to reinvent your personal model! A version of this submit originally seems in my management column for Forbes.com. Our FREE job search mini-course is available now! Register HERE to get the course delivered proper to your inbox.