Reflection on Personal Branding

When it comes to personal brand, in the past, I only connected this concept with celebrities and entrepreneurs, who are well known and enjoy a high reputation. Thanks to the development of communication technology, today, everyone can get a “superstar” treatment on the Internet by establishing his or her own personal brand through social media network. This is a tremendous transformation for it not only shows the charming of social media platforms, but also makes personal brand a topic concerns everyone.

Personal branding is the process by which individuals differentiate themselves and stand out from a crowd by identifying and articulating their unique value proposition, whether professional or personal, and then leveraging it across platforms with a consistent message and image to achieve a specific goal. In this way, individuals can enhance their recognition as experts in their field, establish reputation and credibility, advance their careers, and build self-confidence. To put it simply, personal branding is basically the way we market ourselves to the world. Personal brand is what other people think of us.

When marveling are the significant power of personal brand, some negative critiques and argument of this concept also raised, which made personal brand a controversial topic. Some people, including Seth Godin turned a negative perspective towards this term just because of the world “brand”, since this word regards people as products, which make personal branding a tactic of product-promotion. Other critiques lie in that in those online platforms, everyone can contribute to establish your personal brand, even if you don’t agree on other people’s description of you.

Facing with these two challenges, I think that firstly, the word doesn’t matter. Brand is just a vivid description of personal image and characteristic. Actually, personal branding is unavoidable. When we interact with other, people will automatically form mental associations that connect us with certain labels, often within the first few seconds. I can’t avoid being labeled, and other people can’t avoid labeling me. Secondly, it is true that everyone can participate in establishing our personal brand whether we like it or not, so it is important to hold the initiative in our own hands. Although on the Internet, personal branding is sometimes outside our control, we obviously have some influence over it. Always keeping an eye on how others talking about us on social media platforms, and on how we are tagged in other individual or organization’s profile can help us improve and correct some negative information immediately. I “Baidu” (Chinese Google) myself every month to see any update of myself. Fortunately, all the information is just about me (because I have a really special Chinese name and I believe this is the only one in China), among them, some information is edited by myself, others are posted by my formal schools, companies, and the event I have been involved in.

Since all the challenges and negative factors of personal brand can be appropriately explained and solved, I absolutely embrace personal brand and will spare no effort to build a unique brand for myself. As Brogan proposed, “A personal brand gives you the ability to stand out in a sea of similar products. In essence, you’re marketing yourself as something different than the rest of the pack”. Although just like “there are no two identical leaves in the world”, every individual is unique and irreplaceable in the world, to figure out what exactly differentiate me from others is not an easy thing. But this is the essence of personal branding. So, knowing myself, discovering myself and exploring myself is what personal branding urges me to reflect on. To this extent, personal branding is not only a strategy of self-promotion, but also valuable spiritual experience.