PERSONAL BRANDING In recent years, personal branding has become a huge part of our lives. Almost every day, we see examples of it. Personal branding can be explained as marketing ourselves and our careers as brands. In other words, personal branding is using some strategic marketing tools on your personal brand to be requested and well known in the market you targeted and your powerful aspects and your specialties come into view. Thanks to personal branding, we can create an unexcelled image of ourselves as we demonstrate our skills, experiences, features, and our personality. While we are doing this, we should find who we are and what we can do with it to make real promises for the audience we intend to address. The reason for that, a personal brand is our commitment. That is to say, it is our mission. As befits the name, personal brands come into existence by determining our unique or personal features to create our mission and make our promise. The important part here is that our personality and our promise should comply with each other in order not to introduce ourselves to our target audience wrongly by being inconsistent. In a world people prefer to follow, listen and work with people who they believe and rely on, a personal brand extensively used for a person to show his worth, tell his stories, stand out among his rivals and reach the audience by the appropriate channels. People tend to trust a person instead of trusting a brand so that personal brand has a huge impact on marketing. Moreover, personal branding is a way to thrust people forward compared to others. One of the aims of personal branding comes from the desire of being known and identified by others very quickly and what makes them known are their happenings, their sharing, and the way they represent themselves. People want to see their names on the internet when they google it, they need to get noticed and remembered. So that personal branding is really important for making a reputation. Secondly, personal branding is a way to popularise their ideas and also their products via getting themselves popularised. As a result of being known by others, people can establish more deep, strong, and meaningful relationships and have an impact on people. Put differently, personal brands give people power. When you influence people, they will know your story just because it is related to your name. To illustrate, when you think about Mark Zuckerberg, the first thing that comes to mind is Facebook. Also, if significant characters come to your mind before the subject of any TV series that means personal branding is doing its job properly. Starting from this point of view, we can say that personal branding makes things remarkable. Furthermore, personal branding usually includes using someone’s name on several products for example Ali Agaoglu uses his last name on his buildings, for example, Agaoglu Skytowers. To exemplify more, when we heard about Karl Benz we can easily say that he is the creator of Mercedes Benz, and similar to this we can adduce Abdullah Kigili, Kemal Tanca, Giorgio Armani, and Faruk Gulluoglu. Many people frequently ask how to become a personal brand. The answer is quite simple: building your brand concept. The brand concept is the main idea behind a brand that keeps the brand as a whole. In other words, your brand concept includes all of your feelings, ideas, and your aims. If you don’t have a good brand concept then you cannot hold on to the market. To illustrate, IKEA has an effective brand concept; when you think about IKEA the meatballs and the colors of it come to your mind rapidly. First of all, as we mentioned before, people should ask themselves ‘’ Who am I ?’’. Being and finding themselves at this point is very important because if they recognize themselves they can take firm steps towards becoming a personal brand. The reason for that, the personal brand represents people. Therefore, asking the ‘’Who am I?’’ question helps them to define themselves as a brand. Secondly, people who want to become a personal brand should share their knowledge and their experiences with other people via writing a blog, etc. The content they created should rely on their values, visions, and missions, and also they have to stay consistent. Building a platform or utilizing social media may be a good choice for creating your personal brand. While utilizing social media being original, unique, and authentic is very important because it helps to create your persona; the work you are doing and why should people follow you may form your bio in social media. You must have heard the famous quote of Oscar Wilde, which is very suitable with this subject: ‘’Be yourself, everyone else is already taken’’. To explain, people trust you and intend to buy your products if you are sincere and real. Other than that, it is important to convey your feelings to people. To explain, if you define yourself as an enthusiastic person you should make people feel your enthusiasm in your sharings; your Instagram posts or writings in your blog etc. Thirdly, positioning yourself is also important because this is an undeniable fact that you will have lots of competitors and you must perform research to understand their vision and aims. Thus, you can find a gap in the market, what will make you different from others, that is not taken by anyone yet. After you have identified the gap, you should identify your target audience. Creating a profile of your target customers may be a good choice to accelerate the process. Creating the brand concept has several elements such as mission, name of your brand, your voice, choice of slogan, and visual style of your personal brand. Your mission is your aim for the brand. For instance, Oatly’s mission statement is unique and easy to understand: ‘’To make it easy for people to turn what they eat and drink into personal moments of healthy joy without recklessly taxing the planet's resources in the process’’. Choosing the name of your personal brand is very important. It should be memorable and dissimilar to other brand names because as we said this is a competition. Your slogan should be short and understandable. Also, it should correspond to your voice. For example, if your voice is cheerful and entertaining, your slogan should convey enthusiasm to people. The last step of creating your brand concept is to get visual. You should recall your ideas visually by creating a style and using colors as we exemplified IKEA earlier. Pinterest is a good choice to form an opinion about visual designs such as color, style, and logo. Some social media tools can be utilized for both visualization and getting information about the market, e.g. ‘’Mention, Buzzsumo, Canva…’’ To briefly describe, ‘’Mention’’ is a social media platform that provides people with the opportunity to see and listen to what has been said about themselves on websites and social media. Moreover, Buzzsumo is a really good platform where people can find the most popular content. When it comes to getting visual, it is safe to say that successful personal branding relies on graphic design. Without great and compatible colors, logos you can create a clear brand. Graphic designs provide your brand with recognizability. That means people recognize your brand and they are encouraged to follow you. Besides, I would like to give details about the dimensions of personal branding. There are three dimensions: Roles, standards, and style. To explain, roles are our relationship with others, style is how we relate to others and the standards are how we do it. For example, your style can be energetic, enthusiastic, and professional, your role can be a writer or speaker and your standards can be consistent and highly flexible. To sum up, personal branding is the creation of your career as a strategic brand along with you in business life. In other words, marketing people and careers as brands. Personal brands consist of a person's skills, experiences, and what makes them different from other competitors. The way to become a personal brand is to create a brand concept and the brand concept can be explained as the main idea that supports the brand. To exemplify more, being and finding yourself, choosing your audience, and creating your brand concept using your mission, name, slogan, and visual design. Visual design is very important because thanks to graphic design and colors, brands can be remembered and recognized by customers. In addition, social media has a huge effect on personal branding. Using social media provides people with the ability to reach millions of people for their brand to be known. Understanding the secrets of building a brand and keeping it steady is very significant for your personal brand and if applied properly, successful business can be achieved. BIBLIOGRAPHY https://www.delightfulcommunications.com/blog/personal-branding-tools/ https://www.digitalzonein.com/branding-concepts-to-implement-in-marketing/ http://yourbrandmanager.in/concept-of-branding/ https://medium.com/howandhow/what-is-a-brand-concept-baf925b3fe3d https://www.right.com/thoughtwire/categories/career-work/5-ways-to-make-your-personalbranding-more-visual https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/be-your-own/1576752720/1576752720_ap-ii.html https://creatitive.com/whats-the-difference-between-graphic-design-branding/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/role-social-media-personal-branding-mary-henderson PERSONAL BRANDING Merve Svais Department of Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation, University of Yeditepe VCD 370 : CREATIVE BRAND DESIGN
