What is a personal brand?
A Personal Brand is using the elements of neuro-marketing (making shortcuts for recognition in your brain) that make a brand recognisable and applying it to yourself:
- consistency of colours, fonts, imagery
- consistency of messaging
- consistency of values
Is a Personal Brand the clothes you wear?
How many followers you have on Insta?
Your own domain name?
Is it the font, colourway, or script you use on your logo?
Or, is it your values: the intangibles that create an emotional connection beyond aesthetics, creating a fully personal delivery and an emotional connection
A Personal Brand is all of these things and more. It’s your name, your voice, your message, the face you put out to the world – the way you deliver to your audience.
The common denominator is you and, like any human, and any brand, it’s a complex mix, but there is a way to understand it in a simple form. Spoiler – it goes around, feeding itself in a beautifully brand-y circle.
- YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE : the outward signs of you (the first, second…. ad infinitum impressions) are your BRAND:
What people see, read and hear of your personal brand are important: your colours and logo; your personal style; your website and socials, your messaging and content. They are the cornerstones that show you as thought leader, professional, expert, successful, serious, down to earth or a high flyer, before we read your content, or hear your voice.
Your Brand shows in every public touchpoint – candid or staged: meetings, presentations, your website, emails, social banners, videos, graphics, and photography. When delivered consistently ‘on brand’, you’re creating a visual shorthand that gives recognition in a crowded marketplace.
These are an entree: they help you gain entry, and they are a starter to pique the appetite.
The CocaCola red, the Golden M of a certain fast food chain and Nike’s streamlined silhouetted beautiful bodies and swooshing tick are a shorthand – a graphic representation of the solution they deliver: dark sugary liquid that gives you a kick, standardised proximal food that fills a gap, an aspirational work out habit, looking good in and out of active wear.
2. YOUR VALUES ARE YOUR BRAND
You have to know yourself to be a personal brand. To know yourself means to know what guides and informs you, what elements come into play that directs your decision. These are your values.
As a service provider, or a retail business, layering personal values into your brand is the most efficient way to reach your audience. People buy from people. In the absence of a personal transaction (while we can’t literally be everywhere,. we can be in alot of places, digitally), your Brand speaks for you. When you show your values in what you do for clients and customers, you’re building a brand that is recognisably human.
Values play a fundamental role in decision making that can help clients, customers and audience align with you. When values are clear, integral, hardwired into your brand, a deeper association with our shared, common needs is created.
When values are shared, a need is satisfied. This is a deep driver in us all. They aren’t purely transactional, nor are they just a yearning. They include the need to be of service, to do good, to make the world better, to right wrongs, as well as the fundamentals of being paid well enough to take care of our business, ourselves and our families, to go on that holiday, to buy the things that make you need or need to feel better, or invest in a brand that you trust to do good things.
Values are a rudder. They help you live a life that’s guided by your own version of what feels best for you. They steer you to operate in the most efficient way through harnessing what is innate to you. They guide clients and customers to you because they recognise a safe harbour and reflected, respected values.
3. THE PERSONAL WAY YOU USE VALUES TO DELIVER YOUR SERVICE is your BRAND
I believe that values aren’t just a ‘nice to have’. They provide a framework that, when you’re working within them, make your work, your connections, your sales more efficient and easy. My values provide a framework to my brand and business in the following way:
I provide a professional web development and marketing service to clients. Within this, and more broadly in my life as a parent (to offspring and labrador), partner and member of a broader family and community, I steer by the following values:
- Listening: showing consideration to others by making a conscious effort to hear and consider their needs and through this, the needs of the people they deal with – customers, clients, others. Additionally, Businesses are only as good as people they serve. Without listening to what is needed, you have no business.
- Curiosity: this makes listening easy, and helps me seek out new opportunities to develop and grow, keeping me challenged and energised
- Joy: Living with passion, enthusiasm and humour
- Kindness: actively practicing a kind heart and generous spirit.
- Resilience and patience: calm in times of frustration, the ability to wait for things to come to fruition
- Financial security so I can continue to deliver a mindful and purposeful service to clients and support my family and community.
- Environmental regeneration: improving the natural environment
- The hand made: I enjoy creating things of value that are specific to client needs. This is fed through values of Listening and curiosity, listed above. While it’s ‘hand made’ it’s built through my signature system so that while the solution may look different for each client, it’s tailored to them, and this efficiency ensures the resilience and financial security of my business.
HOW MY BRAND IS THE FRAMEWORK FOR MY IP, my system and processes that help my clients: my INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY:
I bundle my values of listening, creating, kindness into the way I run my business. This is the Jude Love shaped piece of my clients’ and customers’ puzzle – the key they need that will solve their problems.
In listening with curiosity to the problems my clients share, I’ve developed a solution that is broad enough to cover most web build and marketing requirements, while flexible and adaptable enough to problem solve for issues i’ve not yet encountered.
These values ensure I attract aligned clients, who are further qualified to ensure they can afford my services and afford to implement them. This resilience and financial security ensure I deliver services in an efficient and cost effective way, I continue to be in business and they get continuity of service.
My Brand is the ME shaped piece of your puzzle
While a PERSONAL BRAND IS ABOUT YOU, its also about your audience, your clients and your customers and how you solve problems – the solution, processes, systems, checklists, products and product story that only you can deliver, because it is the way you operate in the world. This is what will draw an audience to your thought leadership, clients to your services and customers to your products.
To try to force that shape into another form, that isn’t you, that doesn’t fit, creates chaos or, at the very least, inefficiency and a waste of time effort and energy.
4. CLOSING THE LOOP: YOUR IP IS THE FRAMEWORK FOR YOUR LOOK and FEEL:
A public face that show your values implicitly makes easier it is for people to read and understand you. This then makes conversion to your message, to a sale, to signing on as a client, faster and easier.
The more time you give to drawing out and understanding what drives you – your values, the more confident you will be in creating your own palette and tone of voice for the service or products you are providing.
Serious, efficient and pragmatic: The transition you deliver is fast and efficient.
- A limited colour palette (gold and navy may work well)
- A direct gaze in your portrait photography.
- The tone of voice is to the point
- Adjectives are limited and there’s not an exclamation mark in sight.
Fiction writer, purveyor of joy, spinner of a narrative:
- Lighter nature colours may work well.
- Smiling, laughing, candid portrait photography.
- A tone of voice that is softer, personalised with stories and peppered with adjectives
HOW TO GET STARTED:
- Look at your public persona: your website, socials, your headshot, your bio
Is there consistency in look and feel?
Is there consistency in messaging?
If not, consider settling on a consistent element that can weave you through your socials and messaging: your colour, your logo, your photo, your bio - Your values: think about what is important to you, what motivates you, what do you want to attract in others. Think of these in terms of attracting your ideal customer, client, audience
Write down the top 10 values you hold most dear.
Choose your favourite 3 and write:
1. Why are they important to you
2.Recall a time when you really lived this value. What behaviours did you exhibit that support this value? How did that feel? If others were present, or the experience involved others, how did they respond?
3. How do you feel when your values aren’t respected? Describe these and consider a time when this happened with a customer or client. Can this be turned into a positive experience: eg, there was a miscommunication, but I learnt to ask a different question earlier. - Think of 3 values you’d like to work harder to bring into your life – repeat the questions above with these
- Think of your products or services. How are your values supporting the way you deliver these
How are your values being messaged both literally, and visually, in the public face of your Brand?
Whether you’re a retailer, a course builder, consultant, mentor, author, a creative, a solo-preneur, job seeker or building a portfolio career, the way you show up in the world, the way you solve problems, the You-shaped signature system that you implement to deliver your solution, to galvanise support for your message, to attract clients, to sell product or services is your Personal Individual Brand.
Want some help identifying the values that will supercharge your Personal Brand? Book a call below. I can help you articulate it and deliver the brand I know you want to have, in the most beautiful and efficient way, that is 100% You.
BUILD YOUR BRAND.
SHARE VALUE.
BUILD YOUR AUDIENCE.
I can help with everything you need to build a brand from your expertise.
From targeted website help to a brand visibility audit, from a new site build, to my full Personal Brand pathway, I’ll get you online and on your way.
Great explanation Jude