Executive discusses personal branding strategies
Posted by Elena del Valle on February 8, 2013
Branding Pays
Photos: BrandingPays LLC
Karen Kang, founder of a personal branding company, believes a person’s brand is possibly his or her most important asset and that today’s global reach makes personal branding essential. According to her, where competition used to be local in the past, today competitors can be found across international boundaries and making an impression is more important than ever. In BrandingPays: The Five-Step System to Reinvent Your Personal Brand (BrandingPays LLC, $24.95), a 207-page hardcover book published this year, she defines a personal brand as a person’s image and reputation and explains her reasons for prioritizing branding.
Adapting to a changing environment, understanding who you are and the value you bring are basic steps in reinventing your personal brand, she says in the book. She wrote the book for professionals seeking new employment opportunities, recent graduates looking for their first job, and entrepreneurs needing to develop personal and company identities.
The book is divided into a short Introduction, a Conclusion and eight chapters: Take Charge of Your Personal Brand; Positioning; Messaging; Brand Strategy, Ecosystem; Action Plan; 360-Degree Branding: Vision, Symbols, Words and Deeds; and Portable Branding and Social Media: Getting Started. In the book, Kang uses case studies to illustrate her points. In the Conclusion, she points to results from one of her personal branding seminars at a Fortune 100 company where all the participants in the program for women executives accomplished their goals of promotion or a different job within one year of the seminar.
Karen Kang, author, Branding Pays
Kang, a brand strategist with twenty years of experience, is chief executive officer of BrandingPays LLC. A former partner with Regis McKenna Inc. she has trained thousands of professionals on the BrandingPays System for personal branding, and has consulted for 150 organizations, according to her biography. She is a former journalist turned advertising and public relations practitioner.
