Psychology of branding
I was interviewed recently on the psychology of branding and creating personal brands. Since this question comes up a lot, I’m posting my thoughts here.
Let’s start by looking at what a brand is. At the most basic level, your brand is what people think of when you’re not there. IBM, for example, built a brand of service and dependability in the 1940s-1970s. Then their brand became overpriced and stodgy before they took control back in the 1990s and rebranded themselves.
Broadly speaking, a company’s brand is the shorthand for what they do and what’s exciting about them. A given brand won’t interest everyone; the goal is to create a brand that appeals to the people to whom you want to appeal: your target market if you’re selling products/services, your potential employees if you’re hiring, and so on.
Creating brand loyalty as early as possible and reinforcing whenever possible thus does two things: it builds your potential customer base and it builds a pool of people who start to connect themselves to the brand, who start to think of themselves as representing the brand. This is one of the easiest ways to attract potential employees because they self-select: they’re already interested and at least passively loyal to the ideal of the company. Hiring people who are already bought into the ideal of the company saves a lot of effort convincing them to buy in later, and those employees are also the easiest to motivate.
Individuals, however, do not have the reach of a corporation. Corporations are also abstract entities, whereas individuals are, well, individual. Thus, individual brands need to focus more around personal attributes and what the brand means to others. For an employee, this usually means branding yourself as someone who produces results for the company. Specific details will vary according to the industry: a software engineer might build a brand as someone who writes bug-free code or who always delivers ahead of deadlines, etc. A salesman might build a brand around closing the most difficult clients, around rapid closure, around rescuing faltering deals, etc.
One of the reasons why candidates may stand out in an interview but fail to make a mark on the job is that they saw the interview and landing the job as the goal, instead of as a stepping stone. Another problem is that after a candidate lands the job, they often aren’t quite sure what to do next to stand out. If a candidate wants to establish their brand during the interview and then hit the ground running, I advise asking the interviewer(s) the following question: “If you hired me and in six months thought I’d done an excellent job, what would I have done to make you feel that way?”
Take notes when the interviewer answers! Not only does this question help the interviewer convince himself to hire you, you are also identifying your initial most critical goals. Hitting those goals establishes you as someone who produces results. Once you’ve established that brand, not only do better assignments come your way, you are also more likely to be forgiven if something does go wrong (and the fact is, sooner or later something always goes wrong).
