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Build Your Brand

Just like any succesful product, defining your personal brand is essential to highlighting your strengths as a professional

Who makes your favorite shoes or outfits? What beverage calls your name when you need a pick-me-up? Whose movies won’t you miss? Whose help do you seek when you want a project done right, at home or at work?

All of these questions involve your reactions to a particular brand — a collection of assumptions about quality, appeal and reliability that you’ve made in response to repeated experience with a variety of possible products, people or services. Here’s the important thing: Whether you like to think about it or not, right now there are people thinking about your very own brand of whatever you are and do, and they’re deciding if they want to make it one of their favorites.

International branding strategist Robin Fisher Roffer, author of Make a Name for Yourself, suggests eight steps to help women develop and project their own brands.

Eight Essential Steps

1. Identify the primary “product” (service, resource, special ability, etc.) you have to offer others.

2. Identify your core values. What really matters to you?

3. Identify your passions. What things or ideas do you love?

4. Identify your talents. What have you always been recognized for (particularly as a kid)? What do you do better than most other people? What skills do people seem to notice in you?

5. From your hopefully long list of talents and qualities, choose the top five, the ones you do best and enjoy doing the most.

6. Weave the items on all your lists into a statement of your specialty. What are you particularly gifted at delivering?

7. Write a paragraph emphasizing your specialty and your five key talents, weaving in your most important values, passions and skills.

8. Now add a tag line to your brand.