Read an Excerpt
INTRODUCTION: WHAT BRANDING
CAN DO FOR YOU
“If you want to predict the future, create it.”
—PETER F. DRUCKER
WHAT DO SUCCESSFUL CONSUMER-GOODS companies know that could help transform your life? And how can you use this knowledge to become a more fulfilled person? The answers to these questions lie in the discipline of building strong brands.
What if you could take a page right out of the corporate book of business development and use it to craft and implement dramatic a important changes in yourself that are focused on development of your own life? Successful brands convey a consistent message and create an emotional bond with consumers. Don’t we all want to convey a consistent message and create a similar emotional bond with those important people around us? Absolutely!
The process of building such brands is widely used in the commercial world, and now you, too, can use these techniques to build a brand-new you—a Brand YOU!
W H AT I F YO U T H O U G H T O F
YO U R S E L F A S A B R A N D?
Who am I? What do I stand for? What do I want to stand for?
These are questions that have been asked by people for ages. In our fast-paced, highly competitive, stressful, often chaotic world, it is even more difficult to know what you stand for—
what uniqueness you have to offer. Don’t stress about this any longer. There is an answer to these deep questions, and the answer comes in the form of the threshold question, What if you thought of yourself as a brand?
What if you not only think of yourself as a brand but also actively analyze your personal brand assets and deficits, and you dedicate yourself to changing or refining Brand YOU? Yes, as strange as it seems, you can dramatically change and grow your life by studying the time-tested precepts, postulates, discipline, and processes of corporate and product branding, and applying them to your personal life. This step can lead to your living the life you’ve always imagined for yourself.
In the wonderful Christmas movie Miracle on 34th Street, Kris
Kringle tells a disbelieving child that dreaming of magical holiday moments and a better tomorrow is important. He says, “To me a the imagination is a place all by itself . . . a separate country. Now you’ve heard of the French nation, the British nation . . . well, this is the Imagi-nation. It’s a wonderful place.” It’s time for you to now book passage on a trip to the magical, mystical “land of imagination.”
Building a Brand YOU requires that you dig deep into your imagination and visualize what you want to stand for and what spaces in life and business you want to occupy.
So, what if you thought of yourself as a brand? Just imagine a for a moment, that you are, in fact, a brand. Step outside yourself and look at you, your background, your lifestyle, your philosophy of life, and your views on right and wrong, as well as the expressions you use, the stores you frequent, the foods you eat, the clothes you wear. Think of your educational background, your experiences, your special areas of expertise. Consider the features that others respect about you, the features of people you respect and why. These are your personal brand attributes. And now you’ve made the first move toward establishing your Brand
YOU.
B U I L D I N G A N E W B R A N D YO U
Yes, you can create your future. It’s in your hands. If you commit to the Brand YOU process, you can and will succeed. It will take work. It will take focus. It will take time. And in the end, it will all be worth it. In the words of the poet Spirella, “There’s no thrill in easy sailing . . . but there is satisfaction that’s mighty sweet to take, when you reach a destination that you thought you’d never make.”
Why is personal branding so important to you? You may be someone who doesn’t believe in “tooting your own horn”—or drawing attention to the things you’ve done, or do, or plan on doing.
You may also believe that if you just do the best you can, good things will automatically come to you. Well, this may be the case for a few lucky individuals, but the majority of people are confused about how they can, in fact, stand out in a crowd, how they can succeed, how they can clearly stand for something, and how they can gain the respect of others. After all, there are times in all of our lives when we’d like to be noticed, to be appreciated for our personal strengths, competencies, good nature, and insight. Everybody wants to be special and receive respect, acknowledgment, and even admiration from others. The reality is that each of us, regardless of our position in life, wants to be special, hopes to be noticed a craves attention from others, desires respect, and regularly wants to feel important. Who doesn’t want to feel (and be) important?
And who doesn’t want to make a mark on the world we live in, to truly make a difference to the people around us? It’s human nature to want to make a difference, whether it’s to your family, your significant other, your children, your friends, your business, your community, your house of worship.
Who doesn’t want to feel (and be) important? And who doesn’t want to leave a mark on the world we live in and truly make a difference to those around us?
Personal branding is relevant to anyone who wants to unleash his or her inner passions and proactively build a fulfilling future a as well as grow in importance, relevance, and reputation. Too many people are just floating down the river of life, expecting that everything will work out in the long run. But why settle for the possibility of life’s taking care of itself when you can draw the roadmap that captures the kind of life you envision for yourself?
Why not create your own future? It’s cute, it’s funny, and certainly it’s an example that reinforces what we’ve all known throughout our lives. Too many times in our lives we seem to be waiting for something to just pour into our mouths or fall into our hands—or for challenges to just work themselves out in the nick of time. But life isn’t like that. When changes and challenges confront us, doing nothing will result in—nothing. Business guru and author
Price Pritchett wrote, “More of the same gives you one thing . . .
more of the same!”
We have to become more proactive, more energetic, more spirited a and more focused on making positive changes in our lives. After all, there are only three things a person can do when confronted with change. Ignore it. React to it. Make other changes. Now, ignoring it will lead to disaster. Did you ever have a toothache? What happens if you ignore that biological change in your mouth? It doesn’t get better; it gets worse. The second strategy, reacting to change, will keep a person at status quo and he or she will survive.
But is just surviving enough? Of course not. You want to thrive.
You want to succeed, to achieve.
Then there’s the final strategy in dealing with change: making other changes. Yes, you want to be a catalyst for change—a change agent, as business consultant Peter Drucker has said—to create your future. One theme throughout this book is simply stated as
“If it’s to be, it’s up to me!” Being proactive, being committed to building your personal brand, will allow you to:
Identify your inner passions and core essence.
Stand up for what is important to you and stand out in the crowd.
Focus your energy on meeting your top priorities.
Stop spending time doing things that do not excite you.
Execute your own personal Brand YOU plan.
Achieve fulfillment, personal success, and, ultimately a happiness.
There are only three things you can do when confronted with change.You can ignore it.
You can react to it.You can make other changes.
