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Mentorship July 7, 2018
Here's how I learned to love personal branding.
In the past, ‘branding’ was a term used to talk about how to best sell cereal. Nowadays it’s used not only in a corporate capacity but also to describe how individuals need to brand themselves to employers and the world. Branding is the child of “appearances” and “making a good impression,” and is oh so important to how the world perceives you, on and offline.
At ENTITY we dedicated at least three sessions to marketing and branding. One was centered around corporate marketing, and we spent a whole week building marketing strategies based on the ENTITY brand, as well as our target demographic.
We also spent a lot of time discussing how to cultivate your own personal brand, from a formal lesson about the perks of personal branding to a talk about the intricacies of social media. All of this culminated in us designing our own personal style sheets, mission statements and objectives.
Branding is everywhere—from what you soap you decide to use to when employers look through you social media before hiring you. All of it matters. And while it may seem easy to create a “brand” for yourself, it’s not. We’re not perfectly packaged objects that always convey one clear message, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t need one.
At ENTITY, the lessons on branding, specifically personal branding, were incredibly valuable to me. They gave me clear steps and a checklist of things to do to create and cultivate a personal brand based on my authentic self.
Before the sessions on branding, I was quite skeptical about the concept. I believed that only business people, or ultra-hyper social media influencers, created “personal brands.” But as the week went on, I learned more about what personal branding actually is: a packaged representation of your real self and a way to exude your values and passions. After all, with anything in life, you want to be around people who share your values, passions and interests. How better to find them than letting them come to you?
