Brand "You"

Some years ago, Tom Peters popularized the concept of personal branding -- the notion of "Brand You" as a way to differentiate yourself from other jobseekers, business developers, vendors, and people in general. It bears repeating here because so much of what branding is all about relates to reputations and personalities: of people, products, organizations and services. In the book Instinct : Tapping Your Entrepreneurial DNA to Achieve Your Business Goals, Thomas L. Harrison puts it this way: " Your personal brand -- your reputation -- is a capital asset, and should be treated that way. If you invest in equipment, you have to take are of it, maintain it. Your brand is like your personal equipment, your hardware. You need to upgrade it every so often based not only on what you need it to do now but also on what you're going to need it to do in the next three to five years...Your personal brand is a salesman on your behalf -- often when you don't even realize it." The literature on "brands" and "branding" is rich and diverse. Branding is an academic subject in graduate schools of business. There is a simple way to think about what a brand is, however: it's nothing more or less than a reputation. It's the shortcut to thinking about a product, a company, or a person, and -- for better or worse, almost everyone likes to take shortcuts.