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January 03, 2006
New Year's Resolutions and Your Personal Brand
Back from the holidays feeling more rested than I have any right to feel and I've been thinking about a topic I've seen quite often lately: the personal brand.
Brand's a funny thing. If Scott Bedbury's more or less correct that "brand is everything"--and I think he is--I don't see any reason to confine the concept to the corporate corpus. If brand is everything you know, believe, don't know, etc. about an organization, this is a result of the way our brains work, not of the way organizations are organized.
Simply put, our minds appear to work by aggregating information in search of recognizable patterns, recognizing those patterns, cataloging them, and recalling them when they're useful. Seen through this lens, your corporate brand is nothing more or less than the aggregate of individual perceptions (or impressions) of rational and emotional features associated with your corporation. And so defined, it's safe to say that the concept of brands would extend beyond corporations: every individual must have one.
Question is, what, if anything, should you do with the brand you have? Is it similar to a vestigal tail--something we all have, but are wise to ignore? Is it more similar to a corporate brand--something to actively cultivate and publicize? Or is the truth somewhere in between--or somewhere else entirely?
I don't have an answer, but that doesn't much matter because the value of a question like this has more to do with the other interesting quetions it raises and issues it illuminates than with whatever the final claim to truth might be. For example...
What's the real impact of New Year's Resolutions on your personal brand? In the consumer brandscape we're taught that "nothing is brand-neutral," but does it really affect one's perceived personal brand value if one make New Year's resolutions one fails to keep?
At what point does the "narrowing effect"--the impact of focused advertising of particular functions and features (brand attributes) to create brand awareness begin to create dissonance with the anticipated richness of the whole, well-rounded person we insist on doing business with?
Do "brand-defending" gestures--like sending seasonal cards and gifts--on behalf of one's personal brand have meaningful impact when everyone else does, too? And more importantly, given the emotional and physical clutter of the holidays, would the absence of seasonal incentives be noticed or have impact?
Posted by davidkippen at January 3, 2006 09:18 PM