Getting in touch with the anecdotes that only you can tell will help you do effective executive personal branding.
When people ask me how to build a personal brand, I often encourage them to get in touch with the stories they like to tell about their brand. These stories are unique to them. They can’t be authentically told by any competitor.
Consider the yellow stadium chair in the image for this post. It stands out. The obvious reason is that its color is different from the chairs around it. But allow me to suggest that the yellow stadium chair also has a backstory that drives its uniqueness.
The yellow chair could be green like the rest of the seats in the stadium. But it is yellow. Why? Was there a mix-up at the manufacturing plant, causing the production of a single yellow chair—that the installers loved so much they put it right into place? Is there a VIP who sponsored the stadium whose favorite color is yellow who always sits in that seat? Knowing these details helps make that one yellow chair stand out even more.
Identifying your unique brand stories is a key part of the “Excavate” step in the Revealing Genius time-proven ETA™ process. In this step, you take time to dig into your brand and uncover its uniqueness. Doing so sets you up for the second two steps of the process in how to build your personal brand, in which you learn how to “Tell” others about it and “Affirm” it in your own mind and heart so you can talk about it with conviction.
Let’s talk now about how signature brand stories provide evidence about your brand and how your stories can support the development of your two-word purpose statement. Plus, I’ll provide some bonus examples of real peoples’ signature stories.
How to Build a Personal Brand Using the Evidence of Your Stories
So how do brand stories provide evidence about your brand? Think about these three well-known car makers: Volvo, Mercedes and BMW. They all sell essentially the same product. But I bet you can predict what brand story a commercial for each of these brands will emphasize.
You are right if you said that Volvo will advertise that it makes transportation safe. While Mercedes and BMW certainly care about safety, Mercedes would show in its ads just how much luxury its cars provide. And BMW ads would emphasize its cars’ incredible performance. These stories help the products of each of these car makers stand out in the market.
To bring this home for how to build a personal brand, let’s consider journalist Robin Roberts. There are a lot of journalists out there. What makes Roberts unique?
An anchor on Good Morning America since 2005, Roberts has brought her viewers firsthand reports on breaking news stories as well as feature reports on everything from the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina to First Lady Laura Bush’s breast cancer mission in the Middle East. She has also covered numerous special events ranging from the homecoming of soldiers aboard the USS Roosevelt to the Golden Jubilee at Buckingham Palace to the 25th anniversary of the papacy of Pope John Paul II in Vatican City.
A key part of Roberts’ brand is that she covers news related to being a good citizen of the world. The stories she can tell about her coverage fit under the overarching story of good citizenship. No other journalist can tell the very same brand stories as Roberts.
Your Brand Stories Help Support Your Two-Word Purpose Statement
During the Revealing Genius 7-Day Summit, participants take the two-minute survey at onpurpose.me and receive their two-word “purpose statement.” This amazing tool helps people reflect on why they do what they do, a key stepping stone in how to build a personal brand.
These two-word statements don’t arrive in a vacuum. Onpurpose.me delivers a dozen follow-up emails to help you reflect on your purpose and refine it. Reflecting on your personal brand stories is a great way to refine your two-word purpose statement and make it uniquely your own.
For example, if your two-word purpose statement were “igniting joy,” how might that connect to your work in selling technology products that support leaders in their work to serve their customers?
Bonus: Brand Stories
I encourage my clients to write out their signature brand stories, even give them headlines. A writer/editor I know came up with these headlines for her stories: “What Kind of Tractor Is It?” “You Told Me to Write the Next Paragraph and Now I Have 90,000 Words” and “You Wrote What I Meant.”
Here’s how the tractor story goes. As a child of 10 or 12, this writer spent several weeks in the summer on her grandmother’s farm. During the visit, she launched a “newspaper.” The front-page story was about her grandfather and the hired men fixing a tractor in the barn. The writer’s grandmother asked her, “What brand of tractor is it?” So, the writer went out to the barn to find out. (It was a Farmall.) When the writer tells this story about her brand, she explains that it illustrates how she learned about the importance of including detail to make her writing shine.
Here are some other headlines that have cropped up among my clients: “You Should Sell Information!” “It’s Better to Ask for Forgiveness Than Permission” and “It’s All About Character Study.” I bet each of those makes you want to know more about those people and their brands!
What are the headlines of your signature brand stories? What are the stories themselves that only you can tell? Reflecting on these and writing them down will help you stop swimming in a sea of sameness and stand out in your market. This exercise will put you well on your way through the time-proven ETA™ process for how to build your personal brand that we use at Revealing Genius.
Fortunately, when it comes to building your personal brand, you don’t have to go it alone. Right now, you can download a complimentary resource and sign up for our monthly e-newsletter on the Revealing Genius home page. We look forward to being part of your efforts to create your brand.
