Managing Brand YOU: Seven Steps to Creating Your Most Successful Self

CHAPTER 3

WHAT DO I WANT TO STAND FOR?

STEP THREE: DETERMINE YOUR BRAND

YOU IDENTITY AND ESSENCE

“The value of identity, of course, is that so often with it comes

purpose.”

—RICHARD R. GRANT

AS BRAND IMAGE REFERS to the current perception of

your personal brand, think of brand identity as what you would like

your personal brand to stand for in the future. Visualizing your

desired Brand YOU identity requires a clear picture of your aspira-

tions, strengths, and core values. Consistent with Grant’s quote

above, your personal identity can be a key component of unlock-

ing your personal passion and inner drive. Or, in terms of per-

sonal branding, each of us can define and craft a vision of exactly

what we want to stand for. That vision is our brand identity.

This vision of your future image will lead to your personal

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Managing Brand YOU

positioning plan. Clarifying your unique identity is the starting

point to developing that brand you would like to become. While

being true to yourself, you will envision what you want to repre-

sent, based on the values and principles that are such an impor-

tant part of your life. For example, rather than try to become your

job at work, what if you tried to find the job that better matched

your inner self? In other words, you will craft a self-description

and then match it to a job description. That may seem backwards

in accordance with the way things have typically been done, but

it’s quite logical. And the likelihood of happiness and success cer-

tainly improves when you know yourself before you choose your

career path.

BUILDING YOUR OWN IDENTITY

You have great strengths that will help you grow to become all

you should and could be. After all, everyone’s a work-in-progress.

With that in mind, you can use your strengths as a conduit to

personal fulfillment. These strengths are your personal equities,

and they can be leveraged and transferred to different areas of

professional development, to community service, and to per-

sonal satisfaction. How often have you been told to eliminate

your weaknesses? While it is important to seek daily improve-

ment, what if you instead took your strong points and put them

to even greater use? In other words, why not aggressively and en-

ergetically focus on using your strong points, core competencies,

and powerful assets to develop awesome, powerful, unique abil-

ities and competencies? This type of thinking can unleash a pow-

erful force for personal growth.

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What Do I Want to Stand For?

Building your own identity is grounded on the

proposition that you have great strengths and that you

are not yet all you should and could be.

In the business world, brand equity represents the value associ-

ated with a brand and is the sum of many building blocks that con-

tribute to its strength. This equity reflects the economic evaluation

of a brand in the marketplace or, in the case of personal branding,

the recognized summation of your strengths and benefits. While

brand equity can be quantified, or given a monetary value, for a cor-

porate or product brand, that is less relevant when applied to a per-

son. However, understanding the power of personal equity is an

important step in building your brand identity. Brand equity is

made up of many intangibles; the higher the brand equity, the

more competitive advantage a brand will have in the marketplace.

As the brand image and identity grow, generally speaking the brand

equity also grows. A healthy brand identity contributes to strong

brand equity, and vice versa. So, what equities do you have that can

become an integral part of the identity you will create? Let’s look at

some examples.

The Coca-Cola Brand Identity

As a corporate example, The Coca-Cola Company has long been

recognized as an organization with significant brand equity with

over four hundred brands available in virtually every nook and

cranny of the world. The flagship brand Coca-Cola soft drink has

stood the test of time—over 120 years. In fact, Coca-Cola alone is

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