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Excerpt from Chapter 1
Take Charge of Your Self Brand
Branding is about soft power. For companies today, it’s not the hard things—tangibles like bricks and mortar, equipment and inventories—that contribute the most to a company’s value. It’s soft things – the brands and company reputation, the ideas and intellectual capital, the consumer relationships and business alliances – that have the most value.
Like it or not, branding and soft power affect us every day because they influence how we feel about things. Few of us make the decision to buy something after carefully testing and considering the merits of the different brands on the market. No one goes out and does a blind taste test of colas and then selects the one that objectively tastes best. Even if it’s a more expensive (and consequently more considered) purchase, like a car or a laptop, we will compare hard things like product features and performance criteria, but we will decide based on soft ideas such as what the brand represents to us.
It’s the same with people. It isn’t the hard, quantifiable things, like educational credentials, experience, and job titles, that contribute the most to success. The real power lies in soft things, which include your visual identity (such as image, executive presence), verbal identity (name, association with words or sound bites), personality (likeability, personal attributes), and other branding ideas.
This book is about how you can tap into soft power—your self-branding power—and harness it for career and life success.
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