When we believed that companies were the only ones that could create trademarks, today we are surprised by how far the meaning of this word has come. Personal branding, also known as personal brand building, is an example of this and focuses its origin on the power that digital platforms have had to promote opinion leaders who turn their communities of followers into their largest market.
The concept of personal brand comes from the term “personal branding”, it was devised by Tom Peters and saw the light of day in American business literature in 1997. Peters first used this term in an article titled “The Brand Called You” for Fast Company magazine in August of that same year. This article highlighted the importance of commercial brands on people and considers that all people must see themselves as a brand, which is in constant competition with other brands. This process was what Tom Peters called the “free agent economy.”
What is personal branding?
Although branding is understood as a discipline that is responsible for the creation and management of various types of brands, personal branding incorporates that same process but with the particularity that instead of focusing on the identity of an organization, it does so around A person. Usually, these people have knowledge, experiences and skills that make them stand out within a particular audience or market and based on this, they make the most of their potential to become a personal brand that externalizes their service and content offers.
Any type of commercial brand is born with the objective of generating a difference within a competitive market. To do this, they implement digital marketing strategies that allow them to obtain work and professional reach on various social interaction platforms. Personal branding does not escape this scenario; on the contrary, it is further strengthened in these practices but aimed at positioning a single person as the central image.
The influence of personal branding today
The concept of personal branding has had a great boom nowadays, thanks to the power that social networks and blogs have had, to provide valuable content for Internet consumers. These platforms have achieved great prominence in the construction of personal brands because they represent networks that are easy to access and reach. In recent years they have become prodigious channels to position an image, a symbol and in this case a person, as a valuable, reliable proposal that generates trust.
The power of personal branding is related to the ability to influence and not exert force in virtual communities. It is about using communication strategies that project or promote a message that, in the short or long term, is monetized. By monetization, we mean that no matter what a personal brand is, the objective will always be to generate income from the influence and impact that that person with their talent can generate.
We can see the most common examples of personal branding when it comes to best-selling writers, actors, actresses, musical and visual artists, lecturers, comedians, announcers, radio and/or television hosts, and bloggers, among others. This shows us that the artistic career that a person can have due to their talent, effort and time invested, can be transformed, thanks to social networks, into a personal brand that generates its own income.
This is why personal branding constitutes a series of techniques and elements that help people position their talent on digital platforms and strategically offer a service or product that has the footprint of that person marked on it. In this process, the ability of these personalities to connect emotionally with their audience comes into play, since they themselves, being human beings, can more strongly project their values, beliefs and principles regarding a certain topic.
Personal branding and companies
Personal branding has had such an impact that there are even companies with a B2B business model that, instead of hiring other companies to carry out the advertising work for their products and/or services, go to hire influencers, who have undoubtedly worked hard to build your personal brand. Influencers are people who are characterized by having a large number of followers on social networks and who, thanks to this, become promoters of other brands. They monetize for themselves as they help others to monetize thanks to the influence they generate on the masses. .
When a person who has developed a successful personal branding and has little by little forged a specific community, becomes a prodigious ambassador or promoter for those companies or accounts on social networks that manage the same value proposition and speak to the same target audiences. Nevertheless, The concept of personal brand does not try to turn people into material objects, on the contrary, it promotes personal empowerment that invites each human being to leave a mark on the world.
If the passive view of consumers towards commercial brands is decreasing to the point that an entire methodology ( inbound marketing ) has been positioned focused on empowering and educating customers, it is not surprising that during a simple visit through a social network, we achieve appreciate the birth of new personal brands as a result of this process, which increasingly motivates people to boost their potential and exchange their knowledge with others.
YouTubers are a great example of the influence that personal branding has had today since they are people who use this channel to communicate their ideas, They have achieved a powerful prominence in the market thanks to the visual construction of their ideas and the talent they have had to communicate and externalize their ideas. In fact, YouTube pays the channels that achieve more subscriptions and interactions with audiences, with the aim of monetizing and rewarding the effort dedicated. It’s about people becoming their own bosses and becoming increasingly dependent on them for income.
In this sense, personal brands represent an important asset for companies. While organizations enjoy the power to achieve positioning in markets, people have the ability to generate direct ties of trust with buyers, to be relevant in human contexts where companies can never enter. The combination of both identities ( personal brands and companies ), when aligned and expressed authentically, generates a relationship of shared benefit, in which people reinforce their self-esteem and professional prestige and companies increase their human credit and projection. outside the corporate spheres.
