1. Identify your desired professional brand (what you want to be known for) The best personal brands provide value to others, and connect on a rational and on an emotional level Rational Value: Your job function, expertise, experience and evidence Emotional Value: Your personality, brand associations, likeability, trust factor, behaviors and image What are the [...]
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Archive for the ‘Newsletter’ Category
10 Personal Branding Tips for Professionals
Monday, April 26th, 2010How to Build a Sustainable Brand
Monday, October 5th, 2009The best way to define a sustainable brand is to explain what a non-sustainable brand is. What is not sustainable is for a company to think it can maintain a brand through advertising when it fails to deliver on its brand promise—not just through its core product but through every customer touch point. Unfortunately, too [...]
Read more »Can Video Help You in Personal Branding?
Monday, August 24th, 2009Recently while doing a Personal Branding seminar at Stanford University, I was was surprised by the overwhelmingly favorable reaction to my Karen Kang Consulting website video (http://kang.com/?page_id=2), which was shown as an example. Basically, the room full of Continuing Studies students, which included entrepreneurs, real estate brokers, job seekers, a policeman and a professional matchmaker, [...]
Read more »What Brand Visuals Say About You
Tuesday, August 11th, 2009Some of my Twitter friends have recently changed their profile pictures. It was somewhat disconcerting for me because I recognize their posts by their pictures, not their harder-to-see Twitter names. But, it got me thinking about branding—brand visuals or symbols to be exact. Here are some of my thoughts on the importance of associating symbols [...]
Read more »5 Biggest Branding Mistakes
Thursday, July 23rd, 20091) Branding without positioning. That’s like building a house without a foundation. Positioning makes clear your target audience, category, value proposition and differentiation. Without it, your brand will have no rational support—no reason for being. 2) Branding without a strategy. That’s like building a house without an idea of whether it is the Taj Mahal [...]
Read more »Marketing in a Downturn Is Key to Survival
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009I met with my financial advisor recently, and he asked me why I was doing so well in this terrible recession when other consultants were hurting for business. My answer: Marketing and Branding. I know we marketers will always say marketing works, but we are often the worst offenders. That is, we are the cobbler’s [...]
Read more »The Personal Branding Tsunami and 7/11/09 Workshop
Sunday, July 5th, 2009This is the year of Personal Branding. The perfect storm of economic crisis and social media adoption has led to a Tsunami wave of interest in personal branding for career advancement. My calendar has been very busy with Personal Branding seminars adapted from my corporate branding methodology. These events have included my recent lecture at [...]
Read more »Four Myths About Personal Branding
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009Myth #1: Social media and personal branding are synonymous. It’s true that social media can amplify your personal brand quickly. But, whether it does it effectively is dependent on your decisions about the value you want your brand to deliver. For instance, are you trying to entertain or are you trying to educate about your [...]
Read more »New Ways of Doing Business in a Recession
Thursday, June 11th, 2009We are in a global recession of huge magnitude. Businesses need to adapt their businesses in order to compete. I am no exception. Few companies have endless time and money to spend on positioning and brand strategies. For smaller companies that need help but don’t have the budget, I’ve developed a new service offering for [...]
Read more »Why Refresh a Brand?
Thursday, June 11th, 2009Once you have a brand, with your visual branding, messages and reputation, why change it? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. However, for many of us, our branding may not work as well for us over time. I’m a case in point. My consulting business has evolved over the years, but my site and [...]
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