Thanks for joining the debate. Judging from your book title, I guess you’re the man who’s bringing sexy back into personal branding. Good for you – and good luck with the book.

Persephone

I knew I knew your name from somewhere – thanks for reminding me. I never did get a response from the group but maybe my topic was a little tricky. I’m finding sourcebottle.com a great way to find case-studies these days.

Hope all’s well with you.

Persephone

Great post. Re. personal branding, I have literally just written a book on the topic.

My definition of it is;

Self expression amplified to influence and command attention.

It is based on integrity and honesty and the ability to expose one’s self to the market place to truly connect.

Personal branding will see individuals become more of themselves than some contrived image. Personal branding has always been around. To a large degree only musicians and actors have truly utilised it successfully. Until now at least.

Thanks for creating debate on the topic.

Cheers

Ben
Author of ‘Sleeping Your Way to The Top in Business – The Ultimate Guide to Attracting & Seducing More Customers.’

Quite agree – so much PB (can’t even bear to write it in full now) is just noise.

Your post made me laugh – tried googling you so that I could check out your blog but am not sure which RW is you. Can you let us know….

P

But that IS who I am (ask my poor partner!) – I am a contrarian cage rattler … and I was one long before I was in business …

Thanks for your comments.

Personal branding seemed to me to becoming just another marketing platitude. The original concept certainly has value but since the idea has become common currency, the term has been bandied around indiscriminately and that’s really what I’m having a dig at. I also think that some qualities, for example integrity and authenticity are best demonstrated by action rather than words.

Shalini – Enjoyed reading your blog @ http://mindfulmarketers.blogspot.com

Persephone (yes, it is my real name)

As you said personal branding should make us more accountable because it starts with self awareness but a lot of the discussion is about external projections and management. I give an example in my post about a post in Dan’s blog about being your “real” self but the author’s suggestion is to write controversial posts even if we do not agree with them, which will drive more traffic. When it comes to statements like that and there are so many examples of other posts by prominent people speaking about personal branding, with contradictions.

So there is nothing inconsistent about personal branding and mindfulness but it is what is not being said and sometimes when said the inconsistencies inherent in the statements.

Thank you for following up. Did you read my Blog posting?

If anything, personal branding when correclty understood should make us more accountable to ourselves and to others.

And I so agree with you Leela too that too much of the discussion on personal branding is pertaining to the external and often superficial management of appearances.

I just wrote about what is missing in our discussions on personal branding. Would love to hear your comments to that…http://mindfulmarketers.blogspot.com/

Enjoy!!

When I think of personal branding, I don’t think of an orchestrated attempt to look a certain way … rather I think of being who you are (full sleeve tattoos and all and playing on that – using it to propel further your larger vision and mission.

Of course, not everyone will agree with that definition so once again the whole thing comes down to semantics, I suppose!

But I agree – there should be less of a focus on the outside and more of a focus on the inside – it’s something that drives me mad with “branding” generally (see forthcoming blog post!).