The Five-Step System to Reinvent Your Personal Brand
30th May 2013 Event of SIPA
Karen Kang, author of book “Branding Pays” and leading brand strategy expert conducted a workshop on steps to re-invent your personal brand for SIPA members. In today’s world, being good is not good enough. It is important to differentiate oneself as an expert in 1-2 categories to get ahead in our careers. Karen shared with the audience the same strategies she uses when working with executives to improve their brand at workplace and further their careers.
The three steps for identifying your brand position is
Find out the corporate needs and goals
Identify your strengths and weaknesses and how these fit with the corporate goals
Triangulate until you find a category that you can lead and become an expert in it
Karen then took the group through a sample brand positioning exercise for helping us identify some brand positions.
Goal:
Target Audience:
Problem Statement: < Who needs or wants…>
Category: < I am a …>
Value Proposition: < Who can do something..>
Differentiation: < What others don’t have..>
Some key pointers in building personal brand is
Focus on 1-2 categories in which you can be an expert in and put 80% of your effort into it. Most people make the mistake of focusing on too many categories and hence up diluting their key value proposition
Build evidence of your area of expertise, have examples of work or project of what you have done and build soft evidence
Always have a few talking points, 15 sec, 30 sec on what you are doing and tailor it to the people you are meeting
Linkedin profile tips – Improve title to include 1-2 key skills instead of just the title
Create an emotional connection with the people you meet, beyond exchanging business cards
Karen closed the session with the advice that building personal brand is an on-going process involving practice and periodic re-evaluation.
