Rosser Reeves is accredited by many for the acronym USP, which stands for Unique Selling Point. From a marketing perspective, USP says that in order for a brand to be successful, it needs to know it’s brand differentiation from it’s other competitive brands. The stronger that USP is, the more likely that brand is to be successful. Finding out your brand could help you empower your strengths which in turn can benefit your career as well as your personal growth.
Now, this is a big question and it can cause us to pause. We might even find ourselves feeling a little paralysed, unable to see how we could even discover such a complex set of qualities.
We can break this down into steps to help us digest the concept – as they say, you can only eat an elephant one bite at a time.
1st Step: Identify your Personal Branding
This is the step that probably involves the most work and time, and it requires some intentional awareness and evaluation as our tools. There are three points of evaluation we can consider:
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What are your natural strengths?
Start off by looking at the little things in personal branding, such as the way you dress, how we talk, certain practices we do and what we naturally do when we’re with a group of people. All of these things are clues along with identifying our places of ease and confidence, for example making people laugh easily, leading people, taking on the team project and so on. - What are people saying about you? If you are able to practice awareness, you’ll be able to notice repeated compliments you may receive. Perhaps it is how well you speak in public, how good you are at planning or how easily you seem to bring peace to a conflict. Listening out to what others are saying about you will give important and definitive clues.
- Can you identify some ‘Passport Factors? 'Passport Factors' are attributes that are always positive, but are also generally expected of us. Things like honesty, respectfulness and equality are all passport factors. Still, this is a good drawing board to use because once we’ve identified some of our most important passport factors, we can then dig deeper into them to find the unique trait granting us this passport factor. We'd do this by asking: how is it that you demonstrate that attribute, what are the definitive factors of how you present it? I might say that I strongly feel my brand is connecting with people. But this is a passport factor for Café Life; I want to add a descriptive of how I do this to find out some of my personal branding by saying, I’m connecting with people through a main tool of ease and gentleness, not forcefulness.
2nd Step: Make it intentional
The more intentional, passionate and excited you become about your newly found personal branding, the deeper you’ll be able to dig and as a result, the more grounded in your identity you become. This is the fun part because it ranges from the discovery of how you do your hair and dress, to how you interact with others, to how you work and show up in every area of your life.
A great way to conceptualise it is by saying, “I am the type of person that…” and then be sure to implement these actions, returning to your brand-unique qualities to guide you as much as you need to.
3rd Step: Keep it Consistent
If you ask marketers what to do once you’ve identified your brand, they’d say you would need to strengthen your brand by marketing it, walking the talk and being consistent in displaying it. People will only really notice it when they’ve seen it displayed consistently. Same thing would go for our personal branding if we want it to be authentic and true to ourselves. The best part about this all? You can stop living in the shadow of that other persons brand uniqueness that you so wish to become and start living in your own beautiful, authentic, un-copied, un-filtered uniqueness. .
Through all of this it’s a good idea to remember there’s nothing wrong in having a little guidance here. This question can be as complex as asking yourself what your purpose in life is. It takes time, effort, and if we are lost, the help of a friend or coach can be really beneficial. Having others join you on this journey can be eye opening and might just blow a little wind in your sails when you need it.
Perhaps you’ve read through this blog and decided you don’t feel you need to develop a sense of your personal branding. But here’s the deal. Either you brand yourself, or others will brand you. Whether you like it or not, you’re going to be branded.. When we brand ourselves and know who we are, it helps us to live lives that are wholesome, intentional, resilient, and enthusiastic, both in life and in our work too.
Don’t get paralysed by this question. It is daunting to most until we discover these simple yet hidden truths, after which we might be able to experience just how empowering they can be.