History of Personal/Professional Branding

Personal/Professional Branding Is a New Field

First of all we need to understand that personal/professional branding is not the same as corporate branding or product branding. Corporate branding is used to create a corporation's or company's brand name or brand image. Product branding is carried out by the corporations to create the brand presence of their products or services. However when we talk about personal or professional branding, it signifies the personal brand image of a specific person whether he is employed by an organization or whether he is self-employed. If he is employed by an organization he does not necessarily carry the same image as that of his employer.

In vast majority of cases, the personal branding is used for professional purposes or professional gains by an individual. When we use the term personal branding it really largely connotes the professional aspects of a person and therefore it is a good idea to replace the nomenclature personal branding with professional branding. Or we can as well use both these terms to mean the same thing.

What professional or personal branding in essence does is:

• It creates and establishes a carefully worked out presence and status of a person in his professional arena at the local or global levels. 

• It proclaims person's/professional's distinctiveness and authenticity to differentiate him from other professionals/persons.

• It facilitates easy recall of him by those who wish to seek out the best professionals in the particular domain where he has established himself as a professional brand.

Personal/professional branding is comparatively new subject when compared to corporate branding and product branding. We will now trace the history of professional branding and it is quite young.

History of Personal/Professional Branding

• 1937: Napoleon Hill introduced personal branding in his book "Think and Grow Rich".

• 1970s: USA experienced massive layoffs in early 1970s. Big name companies laid off thousands in one go. That's when individual workers learned to take care of their own professional destinies by introspecting their own capabilities, craftsmanship and looking out for work that they would be interested in. It was the start of people honing up their own skills and creating a professional space for themselves without helplessly depending on just one odd corporate employer.

• 1981:  Concept of personal branding was refreshed by Al Ries and Jack Trout in their book "Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind". Authors talked about the positioning strategy for advancing the careers.

• 1997: Tom Peters wrote about personal branding in an article titled "The Brand Called You". He popularized an already existing idea.

• 2001: William Arruda made personal branding reachable to everybody, thanks to the Web.

• 2002: Peter Montoya wrote books "The Brand Called You" and "The Personal Branding Phenomenon" and spelled out a concrete method.

• Professional and Social networks facilitated the personal/professional branding process- 2003: LinkedIn, Myspace, 2004: Facebook, 2005: YouTube, 2006: Twitter.

• Current situation: Integration of professional/social networks facilitating the personal/professional branding process.          

Related Articles on Professional Branding

1. Professional Branding: Start Your Branding Journey Now http://professional-branding.blogspot.com/2013/08/professional-branding-start-your.html

2. What Is a Brand? http://professional-branding.blogspot.com/2013/08/what-is-brand.html

3. Definition of "Brand" and "Branding" in the Context of a Professional or a Person" http://professional-branding.blogspot.com/2013/08/definition-of-brand-and-branding.html

4. Premises of Professional Branding http://professional-branding.blogspot.com/2013/09/premises-of-professional-branding.html

5. History of Personal/Professional Branding: http://professional-branding.blogspot.com/2013/09/history-of-personalprofessional-branding.html

Premises of Professional Branding

Following are the premises for taking recourse to professional branding:

• All of us can have plenty of professional opportunities.
• All of us can own a good share of market.
• Each of us therefore can earn quite decently.
• But to earn decently we need to attract people who will be willing to use our professional acumen and pay for it.
• But for becoming capable of being sought after by our potential clients we need to stand out in this world of sameness. 
• For becoming the preferred professional of our potential clients, we need to differentiate ourselves from others by developing and projecting our expertise in a superior and appealing manner.
• Application of our expertise (our master craftsmanship) should be designed to be capable of resulting in a unique proposition or set of unique propositions reflecting what we believe in or what we stand for and which is different and superior in the perceptions of the potential clients/users. And it should definitely fulfill their needs in a high value-adding manner.
• Only superior expertise and its superior projection in terms of what we can do for them better than the other professionals (the promises we make to our clients) is not enough. What more is required is the superior delivery (of those promises) by using the superior expertise- not just once or twice but again and again.
• We can then use these initial successes in consolidating our image of being superiorly different and appealing from others in terms of our knowledge, expertise and delivery.
• We can take constant steps to create, recreate, maintain and continually boost this image in the minds of our existing clients and potential clients and create/invent systems of easy recall of us by the clients.
• All of this will result in an  ever increasing positive spiral and we can expand our circle of influence.
• Conversely if we do not take steps for building our professional brand, we will sail through as millions of others who do not use professional branding- the also ran types. 

Related Articles on Professional Branding

1. Professional Branding: Start Your Branding Journey Now http://professional-branding.blogspot.com/2013/08/professional-branding-start-your.html

2. What Is a Brand? http://professional-branding.blogspot.com/2013/08/what-is-brand.html

3. Definition of "Brand" and "Branding" in the Context of a Professional or a Person" http://professional-branding.blogspot.com/2013/08/definition-of-brand-and-branding.html

4. Premises of Professional Branding http://professional-branding.blogspot.com/2013/09/premises-of-professional-branding.html