Be Your Own Brand

Description

In this second edition of their classic book on personal brand, David McNally and Karl Speak show that developing a personal brand is not about constructing a contrived image. Rather, it is a process of discovering who you really are and what you aspire to be. The hallmark insight of this new edition is that the best way to establish a strong and memorable brand is to make a positive difference in the lives of others through making lasting impressions that build trusting relationships.

McNally and Speak take you through the process of identifying the key components of your brand, conveying that brand to the world, checking how closely your brand aligns with important relationships in your life—particularly the one with your employer—and assessing your progress along the way. This thoroughly revised and updated edition features new material on how to use social media to build a powerful personal brand and case studies of individuals whose personal brands have changed the world.Acknowledgments
Introduction – Being More of Who You Are
Chapter One Personal Brand: The Perception That You Made a Difference
Chapter Two A Strong Personal Brand Delivers on Three Important Expectations
Chapter Three Your Personal Brand is Perceived From Three Different Dimensions
Chapter Four Authenticity: The Cornerstone to Building a Strong Brand
Chapter Five Creating Your Brand Platform: Dimensions and Ethos
Chapter Six A Promise to Be More of Who You Are
Chapter Seven How Strong is Your Personal Brand Today?
Chapter Eight Aligning to Become a Stronger Brand
Chapter Nine Personal Brand Building Has Gone Social
Chapter Ten The Courage to Live Your Brand
Works Cited
Index
About the Authors“Squarely delivers where other books have left off by creating a genuine self-understanding and a strong picture of the person you are and want to become to create real, sustainable personal change.”
—Stephen Weiss, former President, EDMC Online Higher Education, and former President and COO, Capella Education Company

“A strong personal brand is paramount for effective leadership. Be Your Own Brand is a powerful and practical guide for building deep and meaningful relationships.”
—Perry Cantarutti, Senior Vice President, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, Delta Air Lines

“Be Your Own Brand, when applied within a business organization, has the power to accelerate the pace of organizational brand development tremendously.”
—Taras K. Rebet, President, Western Europe, Otto Bock HealthCare GmbH

“From this book you’ll experience deep introspection and discover your own brand, which will surely ignite personal and professional growth.”
—Heather Backstrom, Employee Development Manager, Moog, Inc.–Aircraft Group

“Be Your Own Brand explores the notion of a personal brand not as some kind of scripted performance but as the most genuine and natural affirmation of individual strengths and distinctiveness.”
—Matthew Damon, President, Nilan Johnson Lewis

“The explicit and implicit connection between one’s personal brand and the brand of the company or organization for whom one works is convincingly presented in this book. Its message—that our brands allow us to become more of who we are, reflecting what we stand for and how we convey that to others—is as true for individuals as it is for organizations.”
—Katrinka Smith Sloan, COO, LeadingAge

“After reading Be Your Own Brand, I only wish that I would have read this book when I started my career as a brand professional sixteen years ago. It’s a must-read book for people who wish to achieve their highest level in life. I am currently lecturing in an international university, and this book is mandatory for all my students.”
—Dino Martin, Brand Consultant and Associate Faculty Member, Binus University, Jakarta, Indonesia

“The one sales effectiveness book every sales and marketing executive should have on the bookshelf, Be Your Own Brand speaks to today’s most urgent business issue: your people are your brand. I found every page to be full of great ideas and powerful insights.”
—E. Patrick Gallagher, Director, Learning and Development, FindLaw, a Thomson Reuters Company

“Virtually everyone in business can become a more effective leader by putting into practice the ‘power of positive perceptions’ presented in this book. In addition, the authors’ take on authenticity and making a difference can add a new, powerful perspective to any coach’s leadership development activities.”
—Karen Gifford, President, Gifford Management and Leadership Coaching

“Everyone has a brand. This book will teach you how to translate your purpose, vision, and values into a strong personal and professional brand. The book leads you on a journey that will help you understand the power of your personal brand and nurture its evolution throughout your career.”
—Agnes Ring, Vice President, Bonestroo

“In the financial services industry, a strong personal brand is essential for career success and personal fulfillment. McNally and Speak have written an invaluable guide for helping financial advisors craft such a brand for themselves and their enterprise.”
—Michael J. Haglin, Division Vice President, Thrivent Financial for Lutherans

“Be Your Own Brand demonstrates how the principles of marketing can also serve as the foundation of authentic leadership. The authors’ ability to draw upon the common understanding of branding to create a parable about self-awareness and effective leadership makes Be Your Own Brand essential reading for every manager looking to make a difference.”
—Durwin A. Long, PhD, Assistant Dean, Executive and Professional Development, Opus College of Business, University of St. Thomas

“As a senior executive in a growing company, I saw firsthand how the personal brand concepts in Be Your Own Brand were instrumental in helping employees find a strong connection between their work and the value we provided to our customers. The focus on making a difference in the revised version of Be Your Own Brand will undoubtedly make these proven concepts of personal brand an even more powerful customer-centric employee engagement tool.”
—John Super, President, Advance Path

“In the financial services business, the personal brand of each advisor has a big impact on client loyalty. When the personal brand of an advisor is aligned with the company’s brand, both become stronger together. The innovative personal brand concepts in Be Your Own Brand will help advisors build a stronger personal brand.”
—Wick Manley, Senior Vice President, AgStar Financial Services

“As this book says, the brand on the outside is only as good as the brand on the inside. Based on the personal brand concepts in Be Your Own Brand, the brand training program we created with Karl helps our associates align their personal brands with our enterprise brand.”
—Mark Berryman Hier, Second Vice President, Communications and Research, Securian Financial Group, Inc.
David McNally is a best selling author, an internationally acclaimed speaker, and an award-winning film producer. He is the author of the bestselling Even Eagles Need a Push: Learning to Soar in a Changing World and The Eagle’s Secret: Success Strategies for Thriving at Work and in Life. He has spoken before such organizations as Merrill Lynch, The Washington Post, Unisys, Dun & Bradstreet, Honeywell, American Express Financial, State Farm Insurance, and Amway.
Karl D. Speak is president of Beyond Marketing Thought, a global brand management consulting firm. In addition to his many consulting assignments, his Executive Branding Workshops™, seminars, and keynotes help take the mystique out of brand management issues for audiences representing every size, scale, and type of business. He writes regularly for magazines ranging from Design Management Journal to the Journal of Health Care Marketing. He has taught in MBA programs from the University of Minnesota to London’s renowned University of Westminster. His client list includes industry leaders like Target Corporation, Wall Street Journal, Stanley Tool Works, Skandia, Pillsbury, FedEx, US Bancorp Piper Jaffray, Sony, American Express, Cargill, Sara Lee, 3M, Honeywell.INTRODUCTION
Being More of Who You Are

Everyone has a brand, and anyone can be a strong brand. It doesn’t involve changing your personality—you can be an introvert or extrovert. And it’s definitely not about trying to be something you’re not. The difference between one personal brand and another is that the person with a strong brand utilizes his or her special qualities to make a difference in the lives of others. Read that last sentence again, because it is the foundation upon which a strong personal brand is built. Using one’s values and distinctive qualities to make a difference for others is the core ethos of strong, thriving personal brands.

Using marketing techniques merely to create a high profile for oneself is not the point and won’t make you a stronger brand. When you make a discernable difference in the life of another, you make a lasting impression and your brand receives credit—a deposit in the “trust bank.” Every meaningful impression adds more “credits” that build toward the establishment of a trusting relationship. Since the ability to build trusting relationships is a key component of professional and personal success, people with strong personal brands are able to achieve more of what they want by being more of who they are.

One cannot underestimate the importance of authenticity, nor can one overestimate the power of alignment in striving to become a stronger brand. The challenge to building a stronger brand is to have the courage to operate authentically, to strive to find alignment with others, and to be creative in applying one’s special qualities to make a difference as often as possible. Passing along these and other “lessons learned” is our motivation for revising Be Your Own Brand.

In the first edition of Be Your Own Brand we successfully provided the first book that lays out a pragmatic framework for an individual to implement the principles of personal brand. Since writing the first edition, we observed two important trends that have made a big impact on personal brand: The first was the rapid growth and acceptance of personal brand as a professional development framework. The many books written about personal brand that followed Be Your Own Brand—some in substance and others in title only—have helped expand its use. The second trend is social media. The introduction and omnipresence of social media has created a tool that enables individuals to build a stronger personal brand in a way hardly imagined when we published the first edition.

After the book was published in 2002, we set out on our separate paths to apply the concepts of personal brand in our different businesses.

Karl, as the principal of Brand Tool Box, Ltd., applied the concepts of personal brand in his capacity as a corporate brand strategist. The pragmatic framework of personal brand allowed Karl to create a useful and powerful foundation for internal brand building. At the core of this corporate brand-building innovation is a framework to align the personal brands of employees with the brand of their corporate employer.

David, as a renowned business speaker and executive coach, employed the framework of personal brand in his business, which is built on inspiring others to thrive through living a purposeful life. David’s work in encouraging and coaching individuals to create powerful alignment of their personal brand with the contribution expected of them by their employers resulted in significantly higher employee engagement and commitment to key corporate strategies.

After traveling in our separate circles for years, we got together and compared notes. We observed that people with strong personal brands had a rich network of resources—functional and emotional—that powered the achievement of their goals. Our belief was reinforced that the “formula” for creating a strong personal brand is not complex, however, and that it is clearly a myth that personal brand building involves or requires shameless self-promotion.

Since writing the original edition of Be Your Own Brand, we have watched with interest the evolution of the concept of personal brand. In some ways its evolution has mimicked the advancement of the concept of business brand. Slowly (far too slowly in our opinion), companies are realizing that consumers trust a brand (the relationship they have with a product or company) because it consistently provides value and makes a difference for them. Another way of saying that is, Trust exists because the company or brand delivers on its promises.

We are even clearer today that this construct also holds true for personal brand. Our practice of adding value and consistently making a difference in the lives of others as the pathway to a strong personal brand is what separates our approach. This stance is the basis for this revision of Be Your Own Brand.

In this revised and expanded edition, Be Your Own Brand provides you with a contemporary perspective, including the effect of social media on personal brand and a set of tools to help you build a stronger one. We have structured the book in a modular fashion, enabling you to navigate the content in a way that best fits your style. First of all there are three logical sections: “Personal Brand Basics”; “Designing Your Personal Brand of Making a Difference”; and “Using the Power of Alignment to Build a Stronger Personal Brand.” Within each of these sections is a set of stand-alone chapters all designed to be a quick read focused on a key element of personal brand building.

Along the way, we will introduce you to a number of interesting individuals who demonstrate how people who dedicate the distinctive qualities of their strong personal brand to making a difference for others build a successful life. You will meet Chip Bell, a great guy who brings a smile to the face of even the grumpiest person. You will also meet Terry Fox, a Canadian hero, who will inspire you with his dedication to making a difference. An introduction to Dr. David Dunn, a prominent world-class surgeon and medical researcher, will demonstrate how a strong personal brand is making a fundamental difference in the global health-care system.

We will introduce you to Temple Grandin—a woman with severe autism since she was a child, who has invented some of the most important improvements in the humane treatment of cattle and was the recent subject of a highly acclaimed HBO film. And you will meet Norman Borlaug, who single-handedly started the Green Revolution and did more than anyone else in the twentieth century to teach the world to feed itself, reducing world hunger on a large scale. And then there’s Willem Kolff, a humble Dutch physician who was the pioneer inventor of two important medical devices that have saved millions of lives.

After eight years of helping others understand and embrace the concepts of personal brand, we think we have learned a few things and firmly believe that by sharing them with others the world will benefit from having more strong personal brands. We are hopeful that this is one way we can make a difference, by being more of who we are.US

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