Brand Yourself. Protect The Brand.

Sit through any sales/marketing seminar and you hear the same exercise over and over. "What do these brands convey?" They show you slides of different blue chip brands, and people shout out what the brand stands for and speaks to. 

Apple: Trendy, Well-Designed, Just works

Southwest: Inexpensive, fun, friendly

Chick-fil-A: Quick, amazing customer service, hates the gays (kidding... sort of) 

We all know that our company's brand has to be memorable and stick to the core messaging, but what about personal branding? Why do we not put a larger emphasis on each of our own personal brands? 

Personal Branding excites the shit out of me for a couple of reasons:

A. It forces you to look inward and seek out who you really are, and what you want to be.

B. You get to be yourself. Not anyone else's version of you.

In the past year, I have focused on doing just that; splitting my personal brand into two different categories: Visual Branding and Attribute Branding. 

Visual should be the easy part. Think about famous/notable people and what their visual branding is. 

Neil DeGrasse Tyson almost always wears a nerdy galaxy themed tie or vest.

Richard Petty almost always wears his cowboy hat with feathers in the front. 

Ellen Degeneres is almost always rocking a pair of hip sneakers regardless of the outfit. 

What is your personal visual brand? For me, it boils down to the beard, a trendy blazer with a flower on the lapel, over a t-shirt. If you see me at a trade show or at the airport, even if you can't remember my name, you remember who I am. 

Attribute Branding gets more complicated. You will need to know what *you* are trying to convey to your peers/customers/etc. Once you know this, you can define the attributes and leverage the hell out of them. 

First, I laid out a brief mission statement of sorts:

"Using my subject matter expertise to build, then lead, teams and organizations, without fear of making the tough and sometimes unpopular decisions for the betterment of the team, willing to go against the status quo and break the mold of how things are usually done, often times being the first one in and the last one out, but never without fun and a (sometimes crude) sense of humor."

What Attributes have I leveraged to achieve this? 

Grit. Tenacity. Passion. Positivity. Pride. 

Kind of morbid, but think about the words that people will use to give your eulogy. Those are the attributes that make you, you. 

Finally. Protect your brand at all cost. This is the best part, because it boils down to BEING YOUR TRUE SELF. Discipline yourself to not change for any individual or organization. Stay true to your core attributes and only change when you determine it is the best option for you. Always. Protect. The. Brand.

What about you? What are your Visual and Attribute branding traits? I challenge each of you to really focus on the importance of branding yourself, first.