Introductory Blog

As I sit down and start writing down my first blog, I ponder for a few moments what the road ahead will bring. It was only two years ago that I finally acknowledged my infatuation for personal branding. It was only then, one year ago, that I decided I had to do something with that passion. It is there and then that I decided to embark on new academic journey.

Starting a doctorate while raising a family and running a full-time corporate gig is not for the faint at heart. But like anything new and challenging, it only takes a few weeks a couple of small wins to generate the needed momentum to carry on forward. I will share a separate blog on how this is going.

So, although this first blog won’t necessarily dive very deeply into personal branding as a theme, I did want to start introducing my thoughts on the concept of personal branding. You see, everything you read about personal branding seems to guide us in a single direction: take control of your brand and make it work for you. Which in nature is not absurd but applied to real life lacks immense context.

The problem that plagues the topic of personal branding is two-fold and, in my humble opinion, correlated. On the one hand, academic research is scarce and fragmented. Furthermore, it is hard to find some sort of universal alignment in what has been academically written. So, what we end up with is a set of dispersed theories which ultimately invite additional research to be performed.

This in turn leaves some significant white space for non-academics to step in and fill it with Guru-like theories. It is that void that has allowed personal branding coaching to flourish in the same ways that fitness coaching has exploded over the past couple of decades.

What we find now under the banner of personal branding is either fancy title that reveals basic career advisory practice or in more elaborate schemes, an image-fitness get-well program that promises its members all sorts of career upsides. But in both cases, there is a universally accepted fact: there is a sorely lacking method of measuring personal branding for its value, impact or maintenance needs. You see at least when it comes to fitness coaches, they can be held accountable by either the weight scale or the diameter of your biceps after a few weeks of training. A similar accepted framework when it comes to personal branding does not exist. To quote a reference in the field: in addition, since proposing a model implies pragmatism, structure and universality, personal branding faces a paradox is that a generalizable model has to be applied to something that is completely unique, namely human beings (Scheidt et al. 2020).

Some will argue that there are ways to measure the impact of a properly constructed personal brand. Though career advancements, monetary compensation or notoriety. But once these are subjective at best and may also be irrelevant for some folks. So how about changing or shifting the paradigm slightly. How about shifting the lens from being inward facing (on the individual) to an outward looking lens. One where we focus on value creation rather than self-promotion. As most professionals are engaged in some form of business-to-business context value creation in that context is an interesting dimension as it somehow always contains some form of win-win outcome.  

I will double-click further on this value creation in subsequent posts. So keep checking back. Thank you for reading!

C.

Reference: Scheidt, S., Gelhard, C., & Henseler, J. (2020). Old Practice, but Young Research Field: A Systematic Bibliographic Review of Personal Branding. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1809. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01809