5 Reasons You Need to Get Serious About Your Personal Brand

Fifteen years ago nobody talked about your personal brand.

What a ridiculous concept! Your personal brand? Are you kidding me?

I’ve pretty much heard every insult on the topic…

“Personal branding???! These airheads who think they can conjure up something from zip need to get their heads out of their pretentious backsides.”

“These personal brand experts need to go out and get a real job” (as opposed to hanging out online slinging insults around, presumably)

And then there’s my personal favourite which isn’t so much an insult but more massively irresponsible advice for involved in online marketing…

  Seriously??? You want to check out how I look, feel and sound when I get up in the morning??? It’s 100% authentically me, and that is not going to help any entrepreneur any time soon, I assure you.

It’s also worth mentioning that the ‘airhead’ who first floated the idea of personal branding was the business management writer Tom Peters in the 1997 Forbes article The Brand Called You.

Tom Peters’ In Search of Excellence was one of the first books I read when I embarked on my sales career, and it’s still one of the best I’ve read because no matter how technology makes us think we’re so much cleverer now… classics never go out of style.

There’s nothing like referencing James Bond to prove a point, is there?

Now whilst I would not and could not even feature on the same platform as Mr Peters, I’ve added a couple of points to consider now that we’re in the grip of social media.

  Here are five reasons why, whether we like it or not, our personal brand is more important than we probably realise:

So it may be that you prefer to think of personal branding as ‘reputation’, or ‘image’, or ‘public perception’…  If the terminology is what you struggle with then use something else. It really doesn’t matter. If I’m honest I’m not completely sold on ‘personal branding’; it suggests to me something that’s manufactured and potentially false which it absolutely isn’t. Maybe it needs to be rebranded… [drifts off in another direction]

But whatever you do, always bear this in mind: the day we no longer need to worry about the impression we’re making will be the day we’re so successful we don’t need to care anymore. At which point we can retire our personal brand… with a slap on the back for a job well done.