Personal Brand Statement: 7 Winning Steps to Creating One

by Bethany Stringer • September 16, 2009 • View Comments

After polling several well-educated young professionals about their personal brand statement, I realized that there are still many individuals who don’t understand how to use personal branding. Your statement is not a mission statement or job title, but rather your “catchphrase” if you will about your specific expertise. If you don’t have much experience at something, then it can be about an area that you want to become an expert in so long as you don’t exaggerate. Limit yourself to only one sentence for your personal branding statement. Since there are still many people who are unaware of the need to create a personal brand regardless of the industry, then having a great one may just be the edge needed to win out over the competition.

Here are seven tips to write a winning personal brand statement.

List your attributes. This may seem a little bit too simple, but when you are trying to find some quality or skill that only you and a few other people have it really helps a lot. The goal here is to find the one or two things that separate you from your competition and make you unique.
Choose an audience. Creating a statement that is too broad and undirected at any particular group will most likely alienate many of your potential employers. Since the purpose of a personal brand statement is to briefly list your primary skills, it is necessary to target the industry where those skills are most useful.
Be honest. It is tempting to exaggerate about your abilities, but this is not the place to do that. Don’t say you’re “the best” or a “leader in the field of…” unless you actually are. Keep in mind that the brand statement is only supposed to get people interested, and not say everything about your professional career. Hopefully, with a good sentence an employer will want to know about you.
Make it memorable. Even though you want it to stand out, remember that using excessively large or technical words may alienate your audience. The statement of your brand should be something that others can remember easily since you need to be able to use it whenever a networking opportunity arises (baseball game, elevator, social function, etc). Try telling it to a friend or significant other one time and see if he or she can easily recall the entire sentence. If so, you’re off to a good start.
Make your self-impression = other’s impression. If you have trouble brainstorming personal skills, ask close friends or co-workers what they think your strengths are. Even after you’ve decided on a statement, it is a good idea to check with a friend to make sure that your idea of yourself matches what others think of you.
Market yourself. I cannot emphasize this fact enough, when looking for a job you have to be willing to be your own advocate. A personal brand statement will not help you much if you are not telling people what it is. Have a personal website, or at the very least use social networking sites like facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, etc to reach potential employers and use your professional statement. Make sure to keep it consistent across platforms, however, because using the same sentence every time will help others remember it and associate it with you. Having a short brand statement means that you will be able to market yourself quickly whenever a chance for networking arises (on the subway, for instance).
Be flexible. Even though it’s time consuming, your personal branding statement should be revised at least once a year to reflect changes and advancements in your professional career. In order to be effective, it needs to stay current.

Don’t procrastinate creating your statement. Since it is such a powerful marketing tool, you are going to want to spend enough time on it to make it fantastic and ensure that it projects exactly the image of you that you want. Eventually, personal branding statements will be as common as a resume or reference list, but for now, it’s a sure way to get you noticed as a competitive applicant who is capable of keeping up with current self-marketing trends and using them to advantage.

For more articles about personal branding and personal brand statements check out these posts:

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Bethany Stringer is a graduate of Texas A&M University (class of ‘08) and has her B.A. in English Literature with minors in History and Psychology. Writing her first story at the age of 5 (with help from Mom), Bethany still enjoys writing and researching about everything from business and history to travel and fiction. Enamored with languages, she plans to teach English in Russia in 2010 as a CELTA certified teacher. She owned her own business working horses when she was 17, and still loves riding her horse Romeo. Always appreciating a challenge, she loves sea kayaking and prefers Rachmaninov to Bach.

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Suz - CFO/COO IXiiV Records

Bethany, great article! I already have my own company, so I'm not looking to impress employers, but my business partner and I are always looking to stand out amongst competing labels. This article has helped us focus in on how we can best stand out in the crowd. Thanks!

Trace Cohen

That's a very interesting way to use it! Most of our content while focused on the individual job applicant trying to get a job can definitely be used at the corporate level as well. This is something that we need to make more clear moving forwards, thank you!

Hope this helped you stand out from your competitors!

Barry Deutsch

Bethany, great ideas and suggestions for personal branding. We did something very similar to this - but focused around job search personal branding. Slightly different methodology and name - but same direction.

We call our defining process creating a "Personal Success Profile". It's a document that paves the way for the creation of a strong personal brand. In fact, it's the first step of our 5-step Career Success Methodology and guides personal branding, networking strategies, interviewing, and company targeting.

Thanks for posting this list. I'm a little more surprised that most individuals don't go through this process of defining who they are and what they want. For most professionals, personal branding and networking just happens - willy-nilly - without a lot of thought and introspection.

We've discovered that when candidates prepare a "Personal Success Profile" the time it takes to find a great job is cut in half or more.

Barry Deutsch
Partner
IMPACT Hiring Solutions
http://www.impacthiringsolutions.com

Trace Cohen

Personal branding is a very important step in the job search process. Your Personal Success Profile seems very interesting and something I would ask that you expend upon if have time. How did you come up with this methodology?

Glad that you enjoyed the list and we're just as surprised as you are that most job applicants don't go through this process as well. That is an amazing stat though, that the job search time is cut in half after using your Personal Success Profile.

Barry Deutsch

Trace,

The statistic of candidates reducing their job search time by 50% is not surprising when you consider that most candidates conduct a dysfunctional, haphazard, and ineffective job search. What we've attempted to do in our Career Success Methodology is give a job search structure and organization. We've also taken a soup-to-nuts approach in building a job search system that incorporates all the best practices of job searching into one simple methodology that candidates can easily implement.

We provide a number of services to help candidates in their job search. When we conduct an initial assessment of most managerial and executive candidates that have already been searching for a job for 90 days to 6 months, we usually discover poor direction, no job search plan, little personal branding, poor resume writing, inadequate interview preparation, no networking plan, the wrong contacts in the network, and no structured approach to fix it and improve it.

The vast majority of candidates at a managerial/executive level do a little bit of light networking and respond to job boards. No wonder job search can take 3 months, 6 months, sometimes a year.

There are really only about 5-6 major best practice areas to conduct an effective job search. Most candidates understand the top level strategies in most job searches. The trouble most candidates have is that they don't know what to do at an execution level on a day-to-day basis to be effective in leveraging the most common job search best practices. That's where our Career Success Methodology comes into play - detailing the step-by-step approach to incorporate the 5-6 best practices into their job search.

Barry Deutsch
Partner
IMPACT Hiring Solutions
http://www.impacthiringsolutions.com

Peggy McKee

Bethany--
Great post! I have a few more suggestions to offer for ideas on what to do to build your personal brand: http://www.phcconsulting.com/WordPress/2008/04/...