PERSONAL BRANDING

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MERVE SWAIS
VCD370
FALL2021
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In recent years, personal branding has become a huge part of our lives. Almost every day, we

see examples of it. Personal branding can be explained as marketing ourselves and our careers

as brands. In other words, personal branding is using some strategic marketing tools on your

personal brand to be requested and well known in the market you targeted, and your powerful

aspects and your specialties come into view. Thanks to personal branding, we can create an

unexcelled image of ourselves as we demonstrate our skills, experiences, features, and our

personality. While we are doing this, we should find who we are and what we can do with it to

make real promises for the audience we intend to address. The reason for that, a personal brand

is our commitment. That is to say, it is our mission. As befits the name, personal brands come

into existence by determining our unique or personal features to create our mission and make

our promise. The important part here is that our personality and our promise should comply with

each other in order not to introduce ourselves to our target audience wrongly by being

inconsistent.

In a world people prefer to follow, listen, and work with people who they believe and rely on, a

personal brand extensively used for a person to show his worth, tell his stories, stand out among

his rivals and reach the audience by the appropriate channels. People tend to trust a person

instead of trusting a brand so that personal brand has a huge impact on marketing. Moreover,

personal branding is a way to thrust people forward compared to others. One of the aims of

personal branding comes from the desire of being known and identified by others very quickly

and what makes them known are their happenings, their sharing, and the way they represent

themselves. People want to see their names on the internet when they google it, they need to

get noticed and remembered. So that personal branding is important for making a reputation.
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Secondly, personal branding is a way to popularize their ideas and their products via getting

themselves popularized. As a result of being known by others, people can establish more deep,

strong, and meaningful relationships and have an impact on people. Put differently, personal

brands give people power. When you have influence on people, they will know your story just

because it is related to your name. To illustrate, when you think about Mark Zuckerberg, the first

thing that comes to mind is Facebook. Also, if significant characters come to your mind before

the subject of any TV series that means personal branding is doing its job properly. Starting from

this point of view, we can say that personal branding makes things remarkable. Furthermore,

personal branding usually includes using someone’s name on several products for example Ali

Agaoglu uses his last name on his buildings, for example: Agaoglu Skytowers. To exemplify

more, when we heard about Karl Benz, we can easily say that he is the creator of Mercedes

Benz and like this we can adduce Abdullah Kigili, Kemal Tanca, Giorgio Armani and Faruk

Gulluoglu.

Many people frequently ask how to become a personal brand. The answer is quite simple:

building your brand concept. The brand concept is the main idea behind a brand that keeps the

brand as a whole. In other words, your brand concept includes all your feelings, ideas and your

aims. If you don’t have a good brand concept, then you cannot hold on to the market. To

illustrate, IKEA has an effective brand concept; when you think about IKEA the meatballs and

the colors of it comes to your mind rapidly. First of all, as we mentioned before, people should

ask themselves ‘’ Who am I?’’. Being and finding themselves at this point is very important

because if they recognize themselves, they can take firm steps towards becoming a personal

brand. The reason for that, the personal brand represents people. Therefore, asking the ‘’Who

am I?’’ question helps them to define themselves as a brand.

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Secondly, people who want to become a personal brand should share their knowledge and

their experiences with other people via writing a blog etc. The content they created should rely

on their values, visions, and missions. Also, they must stay consistent. Building a platform or

utilizing social media may be a good choice for creating your personal brand. While utilizing

social media being original, unique, and authentic is very important because it helps to create

your persona; the work you are doing and why should people follow you may form your bio in

social media. You must have heard the famous quote of Oscar Wilde, which is very suitable with

this subject: ‘’Be yourself, everyone else is already taken’’. To explain, people trust you and

intend to buy your products if you are sincere and real. Other than that, it is important to convey

your feelings to people. To explain, if you define yourself as an enthusiastic person you should

make people feel your enthusiasm in your sharings ; your Instagram posts or writings in your

blog etc.

Thirdly, positioning yourself is also important because this is an undeniable fact that you will

have lots of competitors and you must perform research in order to understand their vision and

aims. Thus, you can find a gap in the market, what will make you different from others, that is not

taken by anyone yet. After you have identified the gap, you should identify your target audience.

Creating a profile of your target customers may be a good choice to accelerate the process.

Creating the brand concept has several elements such as mission, name of your brand, your

voice, choice of slogan and visual style of your personal brand. Your mission is basically your

aim for the brand. For instance, the Oatly’s mission statement is unique and easy to understand:

‘’To make it easy for people to turn what they eat and drink into personal moments of healthy joy

without recklessly taxing the planet's resources in the process’’.

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Choosing the name of your personal brand is obviously very important. It should be

memorable and dissimilar to other brand names because as we said this is a competition.

Your slogan should be short and understandable. Also, it should correspond to your voice. For

example, if your voice is cheerful and entertaining, your slogan should convey enthusiasm to

people.

The last step of creating your brand concept is to get visual. You should recall your ideas

visually with creating a style and using colors as we exemplified IKEA earlier. Pinterest is a good

choice to form an opinion about visual designs such as color, style, and logo.

Some social media tools can be utilized for both visualization and getting information about

the market, e.g., ‘’Mention, Buzzsumo, Canva…’’ To briefly describe, ‘’Mention’’ is a social media

platform that provides people with the opportunity to see and listen to what has been said about

themselves on websites and social media. Moreover, Buzzsumo is a good platform where

people can find the most popular content.

When it comes to getting visual, it is safe to say that successful personal branding relies on

graphic design. Without great and compatible colors, logos you can create a clear brand.

Graphic designs provide your brand with recognizability. That means people recognize your

brand and they are encouraged to follow you.

Besides, I would like to give details about dimensions of personal branding. There are three

dimensions: Roles, standards, and style. To explain, roles are our relationship with others, style

is how we relate to others and the standards are how we do it. For example, your style can be
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energetic, enthusiastic and professional, your role can be writer or speaker and your standards

can be consistent and highly flexible.

To sum up, personal branding is the creation of your career as a strategic brand along with

you in business life. In other words, marketing people and careers as brands. Personal brands

consist of a person's skills, experiences and what makes them different from other competitors.

The way to become a personal brand is to create a brand concept and brand concept can be

explained as the main ideas that support the brand. To exemplify more, being and finding

yourself, choosing your audience and creating your brand concept using your mission, name,

slogan and visual design. Visual design is very important because thanks to graphic design and

colors, brands can be remembered and recognized by customers. In addition, social media has

a huge effect on personal branding. Using social media provides people with the ability to reach

millions of people for their brand to be known. Understanding the secrets of building a brand and

keeping it steady is very significant for your personal brand and if applied properly, successful

business can be achieved.

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