When it Comes to Brand, it Gets Personal

This column originally published on November 12, 2007 in The Appleton Post-Crescent.

In this day and age where multi-media has a whole new meaning, personal interactions and face-to-face customer experiences have heightened greatly in terms of their impact and importance.
Essentially, establishing your brand is more important than ever because your opportunities to impress now have shorter and smaller timeframes behind them – a digital image here and an online banner ad or email there, etc.

Unfortunately, this appears to be true of most interactions, both in business and in our lives away from work. They’ve clearly changed because of the Internet. In effect, there’s your face-to-face brand and your online brand that you need to consider. Of course, the two should parallel each other to make your best overall presentation.

The key point here is that we’re talking not just about your organization’s brand, but also about YOUR brand or best overall presentation. That’s because your personal brand not only makes a powerful statement every day in your life outside of work, but in support of your organization as well (for-profits and non-profits alike).

For those of us in the workforce, it’s important to understand that our individual brands – how we present and conduct ourselves and are subsequently perceived by others – can play a key role one way or the other for our employers.

To some degree, of course, this isn’t a revelation. All of us know that, as employees, our significantly positive or negative actions can get us promoted or fired – and mostly because of their potential impact on our employer’s bottom line. But here we’re talking about that very large gap in between the dramatic pluses and minuses. We’re talking about our everyday brand, not the occasional highs and lows.

So I ask you, is your personal brand where you want it to be? Is it a positive factor in your life? Is it helping your organization? Is your brand adding value to your organization’s brand?
It kind of seems like heavy stuff, but it’s actually pretty simple to comprehend and to gauge. I’ll bet you already have a good feel for your personal brand running through your mind, even after having browsed only this far through the column.

When it comes to personal brand and its influence in the workplace, brand characteristics like attitude, integrity, and reliability come quickly to mind. There are many more, but these are critical examples. As a loose comparison, Nike has a clear brand image, and so do you. Figuratively speaking, is your brand as strong as Nike’s, is it in need of freshening, or is it time for a complete overhaul?

Though it’s usually not hard to determine your personal brand score, you should check with a valued colleague or supervisor if you’re not real sure. It might become a reality check, but it’s a helpful thing to know. For employers, understanding the personal brands of employees can be an effective way of driving your organization’s overall brand.

And a healthy thing to remember is that all great brands need a little fine-tuning from time to time. Why should you be any different?