There is a lot of content on the web about personal branding – some of it good, most of it a waste of time for high level business professionals. That being said, personal branding is still essential for success in the corporate field, especially when reach towards the upper rungs.

There are three key considerations for business professionals when exploring their corporate personal brand and its application to their success.

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1. Effective management and leadership
2. Effective corporate networking
3. Effective positioning and visibility

Lets explore there three areas separately.

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1. Effective Management and Leadership

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To be an effective manager or leader in your industry you need to have a value proposition that is both clear and consistent, one that people can buy into. For more on this click here.

This clear and consistent message is your corporate personal brand and in order to lead and manage effectively you need people to trust and follow your corporate personal brand.

People will not trust or follow you if your message of who you are and how you operate is unclear or constantly changing. It is only though a clear and consistent message built on a solid foundation of principles that you can create a package that people can buy into and align themselves with.

All great leaders, from Branson to Churchill have had a clear and consistent brand what people have been able to align themselves with. Corporate personal branding is essential to get right so that people trust and align themselves with you, allowing you to then effectively lead and manage them.

Without the trust and buy in of your employees and your team, you will never be able to effectively and successfully lead and manage.

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2. Effective Corporate Networking

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Networking is fundamentally an interaction among people with a strategic goal in mind.

Corporate Personal Branding is an interaction between people and your brand with a strategic goal in mind.

Effective networking and effective personal branding both start with a strategic goal in mind, both involve people and both are based on interaction.

In the corporate field, image and perception is everything. This image and perception is shaped by others and it is your responsibility to hone and project the image you want to be reflected.

Like with management and leadership, effective networkers have clear and consistent messages that people can align themselves with. This message, or their corporate personal brand, is a clear definition of who they are and what they do – it is their value proposition.

In more detail, your corporate personal brand on a professional level is how you package and project your “unique value proposition” – what you offer to others that is of value to them.

The game is simple.

Those with the most defined, value adding and consistent “value proposition” are usually the ones that win.

Those with the the broadest, most inconsistent and unclear “value propositions” are usually the ones that lose.

Between these two extremes, the rest of the market players compete.

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3. Effective Positioning and Visibility

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At the higher rungs of the corporate world the game is filled will many talented and successful individuals. To stand out in this environment means positioning your corporate personal brand effectively and making sure that it is visible. Visibility is key.

Too many high flying executives and business professionals are not getting the promotions and responsibilities they deserve simply because they are not getting the right exposure at the top. In the end perception always wins out over talent and ability.

To position your strengths effectively requires an understanding of yourself and how those strengths can be packaged in such a way that makes you both unique and easy to define, even if you have already seen considerable success.

Effective positioning of your brand is essential to getting the right visibility and buy in from the players in your field that can help take you further and for whom you can do the same.

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Summary

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Corporate personal branding and peoples perception of you is as important to your success as ability and talent in the field. If your corporate personal brand is not positioned effectively, does not have a clear message and value proposition or is not visible then you will struggle to complete and move ahead in the corporate world.

I work with my clients not to improve their skills or talents, but to improve how they package these skills and talents into a brand that will lead them to greater success.

The Specialised Art of Corporate Personal Branding is a post from: Jonny Gibaud

Summary: To be successful business leaders, we need people to align themselves with ourselves and our brands. For people to align and “buy into” us, our brand needs to be both clear and consistent. No one can buy into or align themselves with something that is neither clear or is constantly changing.

“As executives and business leaders, the consistency of what we communicate becomes our brand and marketing campaign.”

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Without Consistency, People Cannot Make a Choice

Consistency across brands plays a large part in their ultimate long term success. It is difficult for people to “buy into” brands that are constantly changing their principles and message.

As an executive or business leader, we are responsible for gaining the trust and co-operation of those that follow us.

For people to trust and follow us, they have to be able to “buy into us” and our Personal brand.

For people to be able to “buy into us”, we have to be something that is consistent, something that people CAN “buy into” without fear that everything will suddenly change from day to day.

No one can “buy into” something that is constantly changing.

As individual brands, we should have a foundation of core principles that we can benchmark our decisions against. This principle-based foundation helps us keep our personal brand consistent to the core of who we are as individuals and as business leaders.

As business leaders, if our Personal Brand is consistent and at the same time clear in it’s message, then people can easily choose to align themselves with us or not, and we begin to build trust.

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If People Cannot Make A Choice, Their Default Is No

If the core of who we are, what we do and how we operate as business leaders is packaged and projected well, and this package is consistent over time, people are then in a position to make a choice and choose to “buy into” us, or not.

If the core of who we are, what we do and how we operate, is packaged and projected poorly, and this package is constantly changing, then people are in no position to make a choice.

If a clear choice to “buy into” us and our brand is unavailable then the default choice is to “not buy into us” – the reason so few employees currently trust their management, the managements brand is neither clear nor consistent.

This combination of core and consistency is our Personal Brand and it is vital to our success as business leaders.

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You Need People To Make A Choice

As executives and business leaders, we need people to trust and buy into us so that we can lead effectively. Therefore, we need to make sure that people have a clearly defined choice. This clearly defined choice that we give people is our Personal Brand, and it is only a choice if it is consistent.

Brand consistency is fundamental to our success as a business leader so we can build trust, and so those we lead have opportunity to align themselves with our Personal brand.

I will follow this article with a look at the fundamentals of keeping a Personal Brand consistent so that people can choose to “align themselves” with our brands or not.

Why Personal Brand Consistency Is Fundamental In Successful Business Leaders is a post from: Jonny Gibaud

Summary

Your avatar is becoming your logo and is the forefront of your online brand, the first impression people get of your Personal Brand.

It helps to identify some of your brand values and the professional landscape that you operate in.

It helps people to identify your signal, and track your signal easily across all your networks, consistently either confirming or contradicting the quality and value proposition that you offer to the market.

“I’d think twice before engaging with a top speaker or high end consultant if the profile photo they used didn’t give me confidence.” – John Cassidy

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Your Avatar Is Becoming Your Logo

Your avatar is becoming the forefront visual branding element of your personal brand. Like a companies logo it stands to represent a promise of your value, online.

John Cassidy would be hesitant to engage with a high end consultant if his first impression of them was a low quality profile shot, and he would be right to do so. In this scenario, there is an inconsistency between the high end promise of value and what is being represented online. 

Your avatar (the image that represents you online and across your online networks), in most cases, is the first time someone will come across your Personal Brand and will be the first impression you get to impress upon them. It will come to represent your value to the online community,  long into the future.

Therefore, it should be carefully considered, and project the right image that matches your “offer of value” in your target marketplace, and should be the best you can afford – which will mean having it done professionally.

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Avatars for Executives and Business Professionals

Traditionally, the bowler hat was used to identify an individual in the corporate world. Today, it is the suit and tie.

Whatever your “value offering”, you operate in the world of business and your visual identity online needs to reflect this fact. (There are Executive Personal Brands on the fringe that can be an exception to this rule, though these are unusual.)

Because you operate in the world of business, your visual identity online needs to reflect this fact instantly, and thus you will need to have a brand image avatar where you are represented by the traditional identifier of the time – currently the suit and tie (though the need for a tie is getting more flexible these days).

In todays internet driven environment, your visual identity online is as equally important as your visual identity offline in your place of business. Just as wearing a dressing gown to work is unacceptable, so is having a holiday photo as the forefront of your online presence.

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The Power Of Brand Awareness

“The online world is both a blessing and a liability. A blessing because you have access to more information, more people and more opportunities, and a liability for the same reasons.”

The noise of the online world has increased, which in broad terms, is a good thing. What it means however, is that the high quality signals are easy to lose among the masses.

Strong and consistent visual branding online helps people to pick up on your signal in the sea of internet noise.

This starts with your avatar. Time is short on the internet, and there is a lot of information to wade through. Finding the valuable signals takes time, and so holding onto a quality signal is important to people.

If your signal is valuable to someone, they are going to want to keep track of it, though it is your job to make it easier for them. Your online avatar helps to differentiate your signal more easily online. When people can easily identify your signal, it becomes more valuable to them and your Personal Brand grows stronger.

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Designer, Entrepreneur, Adventurer and Personal Brand Management Consultant. Jonny works one on one with Executives and Business Professionals and speaks on Personal Branding, Online Marketing and Brand Management in the UK and Internationally. He is the Cofounder of two European wide companies.

Why An Un-Professional Avatar Is Causing Your Signal To Be Lost In The Sea Of Internet Noise is a post from: Jonny Gibaud