Truly Deeply/Madly

On a recent trip to NYC I came across a guy who had decided that instead of beg­ging for small change that he would be bet­ter off deliv­er­ing cus­tomer value. For an invest­ment of one dol­lar you had some one you could curse, some­one devoted to your every desire to get what ever you needed of your chest. And if you were feel­ing par­tic­u­larly angry with the world, you could invest $50 and have the priv­i­lege of kick­ing this guy in the nuts, and he promised not to kick back. It was a very inter­est­ing value propo­si­tion, but what appealed to me most was the fact hat he actu­ally had a value propo­si­tion, he had put a dol­lar fig­ure to it and he had devel­oped a com­mu­ni­ca­tion strat­egy with his signs to com­mu­ni­cate it.

So let me ask you. What is your per­sonal brand value propo­si­tion, what is it worth and how do you com­mu­ni­cate it? Per­sonal brand­ing is about tak­ing respon­si­bil­ity for under­stand­ing and devel­op­ing the things that are going to build your fame. What is that you wish to be known for in the hearts and minds of those stake­hold­ers (employers/clients/media etc) that will ulti­mately deter­mine the shape of your future from a career per­spec­tive?

Per­sonal brand­ing requires indi­vid­u­als to con­sciously make deci­sions about how they are going to dif­fer­en­ti­ate them­selves. What attrib­utes will become their sig­na­ture expres­sions of who they are, and how they offer value. What per­son­al­ity traits will define them and enhance their appeal to those they most wish to con­nect with.

One of the most pro­found changes of the last decade or so is that each per­son today is now the archi­tect of their own career. You can no longer rely on a cor­po­ra­tion to take care of you and accept respon­si­bil­ity for your long– term career success.

Hav­ing just wit­nessed the retrench­ment of one of our clients, an amaz­ingly loyal and long serv­ing employee, from a very large and suc­cess­ful organ­i­sa­tion, I was once again reminded of the fact we are all oper­at­ing in a very dynamic tal­ent mar­ket. And sur­prise sur­prise, there is only one per­son respon­si­ble for the value that you offer to that market.

‘You are the sto­ry­teller of your own life, and you can cre­ate your own leg­end or not’

Nov­el­ist Isabel Allende

If you don’t have dreams and work towards them, all you will get is some­one else’s dreams and unfor­tu­nately some of those being handed out quite frankly suck!

Define your dream and then define your per­sonal brand, as that will ulti­mately prove to be your
dream machine.

And of course you always have a fall back posi­tion – you can always become the go-to-cursing per­son in your home city. But make sure you do it bet­ter than the guy in NYC, as he told me he is think­ing of fran­chis­ing internationally!

Pete

Tags: Brand, Brand Agency, Brand Design, Brand Strategy, Brand-Loyalty, Corporate Image, Graphic Design Melbourne, personal-brand

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 5:50 pm and is filed under Brand Voice, Experiences, Small Brands Big Personalities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.