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.

Branding, leadership consultants discuss personal brands

Posted by Elena del Valle on March 18, 2011

Be Your Own Brand book cover

Photos: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

David McNally, a film producer and author, and Karl D. Speak, a brand building consultant and author believe everyone has a personal brand. They think of it as the way that other people perceive who a person is and what he or she stands for. Building a personal brand, they say, is about understanding who someone is and wants to be, and identifying the right way to share that impression with others in a genuine way.

The best way to do that, according to them, is to “make a positive difference in the lives of others.” In 2002 they published the first edition of Be Your Own Brand, a book about personal branding. In Be Your Own Brand Achieve More of What You Want by Being More of Who You Are Second Edition (Berret-Koehler Publishers, $19.95) published this year, they share their original ideas on personal brand building and expand on the changes that have taken place since they published the first edition.

They are convinced that the concept of a personal brand has become more accepted in the business environment; and that social media is playing a role in facilitating the development of personal brands. The idea behind a personal brand is to create a brand that is distinctive, of interest to others and “consistent in the way it is perceived and presented,” they say.

Karl Speak

According to the authors, someone with a strong personal brand uses his or her qualities to make a difference in other people’s lives. The 143-page softcover book is divided into ten chapters and three main sections: Personal Brand Basics, Designing Your Personal Brand of Making a Difference, and Using the Power of Alignment to Build a Strong Personal Brand.

McNally’s books and films have been translated to twelve languages and been available in twenty countries. Speak founded Brand Tool Box Ltd., an internal branding company, in 1984.

Click to buy Be Your Own Brand