Self Branding

4 min readDec 15, 2019

What is a personal brand?

Have you ever been in a group of people and they are talking about someone who you don’t know? People will referred to any person base in your personality, skills, and experiences that describes you the most. Like whatJeff Bezos the founder or Amazon says about self branding“Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”

Everybody has a personal narrative. Even though normally, “branding” is used for businesses, personal branding has become essential. Self brand is “the unique combination of skills and experiences that make you who you are”. It is how you present yourself to the world. Effective personal branding will differentiate you from the competition and allow you to build trust with prospective clients and employers.

Imagine if your self branding foundations are well established how could you influence people’s thinking?This can include customers; vendors; shareholders, stakeholders, and partners. If you are a business owner, or you have a management position your personal brand serves as a huge asset that can grow your company both publicly and internally, it is an incredible way to scale culture. It’s the best opportunity to communicate your employees.

But, how do I know what is my personal brand?

Below I will show 4 main values that are part of your personal branding:

Image: Fortunate or unfortunate, the way you look is how people will treat you and in business matters it will have a HUGE impact whether it’s positive or negative. You are the living embodiment of your brand and if who you are is not consistent with how you want your customers to perceive your company, it will be impacted in your business. Give the image that it’s align to your company and the way you would like to see your suppliers.

2. Mission: Going a little further than the surface, your mission, your philosophy is what (to me at least) is one of the most important values in your self branding. Mission defines the core value of a person or an organization. Why it exists and the reason for being. Your mission statement should define who your primary customers are and identify the products and services.

3. Vision: describes where you want to go as a company. What are the goals and desires to achieve in the long-run. It depicts a vision of what your company will look like in the future and sets a defined direction for the planning and execution of corporate-level strategies. This step is very important because it will create trust and loyalty from your customers to stay with you in long term.

4. Values: are the fundamental beliefs upon which your business and its behavior are based. They are the principles that will guide your business in order to to manage its internal affairs and relationship with customers. Your values are a key factor in the philosophy of your organization but it will define the way they operate, they affect every aspect your business, such as your employees, workplace, culture, marketing strategies and customers service.

As you can tell based in my statements above, your personal branding is a MUST step in working towards your goals. Regardless what you do for living, our your professional status, your personal brand has the power to make or break all kinds of opportunities for advancement.

When you find yourself in the process of building your brand, you can feel that it’s a little bit overwhelming. It’s normal, trust me. But once you’ve established a strong foundation, you’ll have a roadmap to follow and a story to tell. However, in order to have a good story to tell, it is important to always keep in mind that it is necessary to keep cultivating your career and strengthen your relationships and network on a timely manner.

As you start the process think that is an ongoing process that can be broken down into the several phases. I don’t think that I could provide specific steps like a recipe, but I could tell you that there are key factors to consider in the process:

Discover Your Uniqueness: describe what defines you the most and what differentiates you from others.

Define Your Message: what do you want to tell others? what is the content of values?. Align your message and your uniqueness and this will help you to narrow down to get to your self brand.

Define the Problem You Solve: if you are a service provider, it is a most to tell people what is your value added and what are the challenges you are good at overcoming. People want creative thinkers as suppliers!

KPI’s and experiences: in order to generate trust, it is important to consider past achievements and try to quantify them so they have a reference.

Your personal brand is your biggest asset which will be reinventing itself over time to the needs of the market. I invite you to start building your personal branding and take yourself in a journey of self discovery in order to identify the tools and resources to ensure you continue to grow and develop to increase your leadership engagement, high-performance capabilities, and contributions to your organization’s mission, goals, and values.